Long live Microsoft

Long live Microsoft

I never thought I’d say those words. Yet with last week’s challenge to Google’s ‘anti-competitive’ behaviour and the news of the impending ‘Mobilegeddon’, my mindset is genuinely beginning to shift. Here I am, willing Bill Gates’ machine to keep plugging away at the marketplace, finding ways to innovate and perhaps even get it right sometimes.

Have I lost my mind? You might well ask…

Let’s be honest, it would have been more com
mon in the last couple of years for me to bemoan Microsoft’s browsers, laugh at its hardware, pity its attempts to break into the apps marketplace, boycott Bing …and don’t get me started on Hotmail – my boyfriend insists it’s so retro that it’s coming back in fashion. Right.

A lot of that attitude (and I know I’m not alone) has derived from a feeling of resentment that much of our digital ‘progress’ is weighed down by a legacy of Microsoft’s dominance in the marketplace – we’re all children (or you might even say victims?) of its legacy interfaces and often its mistakes and limitations in the development of these.

As a prime example, we often have expectations built around how Windows taught us to interact with computers. Its market dominance at a certain point in time has meant that in particular large companies (read: clients) with requirements for enterprise-wide infrastructure and security are challenged by limited browsers and systems that quite simply hold them back in more ways than one.

But having hoped for so long that Microsoft’s dominance be challenged, I’m now willing that they can sustain and perhaps even strengthen their market position.

In reality, new markets have monopolistic tendencies based on technology and scale (look at Facebook, or Twitter and Weibo as further cases in point) and so they need all the viable competition they can get. Given Google’s scope to become just another Microsoft, with all of the challenges and privacy issues that could create for us and generations ahead of us, I feel we almost need to welcome the established presence that Microsoft represents as a balance.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an avid admirer of Google (and indeed many of the big tech players) whose skill often resides in finding new markets simply by developing things we never knew we really wanted. But a monopoly of any sort with the power of the world wide interweb at its fingertips may well prove as dangerous to our futures as a dodgy dictatorship.

So yes, here I am, willing Microsoft (albeit not exclusively) to buck up its ideas, and start fighting back and providing some genuine counterweight to Google. Hell I may even start using Bing. Soon.