How Google will end Microsoft desktop dominance

Title like that will surely bring in at least a dozen Microsoft emails, which is the norm anytime I bring up something that negatively impacts Microsoft. This time folks its not me — it's Google. The remainder of this article is written from a standpoint of an MCSE, Microsoft Partner, Microsoft Certified Small Business Specialist and an ISV making some money off the Microsoft platform. Google's Aussie engineer Glen Murphy posted an insightful piece on his journey to Google and the atmosphere and people he works with today. If you read the article carefully you'll notice that there is a team of people at Google dedicated to working on a free web browser. In just five weeks upon his arrival the team he works on has immersed him in Firefox source and they managed to develop, approve, document and publish a stable extension to Firefox that allows for automatic blog comment retrieval of the page you are looking at. Similar to what Technorati search does, and similar to TheWorkingNetwork.com Stefan and Bob are working on at Microsoft. Find something interesting online, look at the status bar and see all the other bloggers comments on it. How is that for instant reputation and popularity indication? Quite similar to the project TheWorkingNetwork.com is up to but I have only met one human being that has heard of TheWorkingNetwork.com, while I had 16 messages in my inbox regarding this Google-Firefox plugin less than eight hours after its release. It's all about support, and doing as little of it as humanly possible. And therein lies the key to the end of Microsoft desktop dominance. No single vendor is capable of defeating Microsoft. No single body of standards, no government or continent can stop Microsoft from competing aggressively and pushing their agenda. I think they have realized that. Sorry IBM, cute commercials but I am not basing my applications on bloated middleware. Sorry Sun, here is your $2 billion, go die. Sorry Real Networks, even adult entertainment sites do not use your format anymore, and we all know that the adult entertainment industry only uses the best technology out there. Sorry Google, your search is nice but most of your traffic is still done on a Microsoft platform. I'm just handing out condolences today, I could go forever. But I'll stop here: Sorry Microsoft, but I think they've got it! I think that companies have finally realized that they alone cannot defeat Microsoft. So what they have started doing is putting their R&D resources behind popular open-source projects to bring them to the same feature level as Microsoft. Consumers love them, system administrators jump at the opportunity to use them, they are priced just right (free) and have huge networks of support. And support is key. By donating the code to the open and popular projects these companies drop off the liability, support and all the other hassle that gooes along with publishing software. IBM has lead the way in this, contributing both to Linux and to Apache in a very big way. There was a little bump in the road with SCO that many believe had a very nice backing by someone mentioned over and over in this article but the outcome was far from what they expected, I'm sure. It has lead to more corporate contributions into free software – operating systems, CRM, web browsers, web servers, office productivity software. Developers are creative creatures, every now and then they work on fun projects – so if company cannot make money by selling it, why not give it to some other popular project and gain a ton of goodwill? Well, it’s been going on for a while and lately in a very big way. IBM and Google are on the front lines of contributing code to projects that people are absolutely in love with. They are not stuck supporting them for 10+ years like Microsoft and I as an ISV know that my ability to compete with Microsoft in a software world is limited to Microsofts ignorance of my niche. Once Microsoft decides to move towards my audience, I'm dead. Same goes for Real, Intuit, IBM, Oracle, Google, Sony and any other company. Microsoft can outspend you, out-advertise you and even pretend to defeat you with an inferior product. So how do you fight it? So you want to kill Microsoft with a personal organizer? Killing it with a personal organizer, game console, crm or anything like that is like killing a dog by giving it a flea bath. Lets look at personal organizers, like Palm vs. Windows Mobile. These "me-too" Microsoft products have traditionally lost immense amounts of cash in hope of at least establishing presence in that sector. OVer time, they may become a dominant. Encourage third party vendors to support your software, sell devices with your productivity stuff on them while going deep into red. Now, why would a manufacturer back such an initiative with Microsoft? Because they know that there are only two Microsoft cash cows that will never go away: Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Those suites are where the Microsoft money is strongest at, and if your device plays with those you will have far better sales than if you back something that does not integrate with them well. Microsoft Pocket PC was a laughable proposition even a year ago because it required so many reboots and would require complete re-install if the battery ran down. Fast forward a few months to Windows Mobile 5 and its a dominant gadget on the market. Stable and people love it. The same way they love Firefox and Google. So if you're thinking about going up against Microsoft, using a PIM organizer approach may not be that brilliant of an idea. The key to destroying Microsoft is by attacking its cash cows (Windows, Office) and forcing it to defend its 90% market dominance without expanding into other segments. As the "desktop" becomes less and less prevalent platform and we move to the web (or web 2.0 if you like) the need for Microsoft Windows may not be that big. Can you tell a big difference between IE and Mozilla just by looking at how it renders a page? Not really. So if you do all your work on the web, who cares what is underneath it? It could be Linux. It could be OS X. If you're using only 5% of the features of your Office suite, is it worth $350 per seat to you? What if a free office suite (openoffice.org) were to provide your most used features along with the ability to view and edit Microsoft documents? Before you carve out the tombstone Now, sit back and look at your desktop. Are you running OpenOffice and Linux? According to the site stats for Vladville there is an 85% chance that you are not. Why not? Well, no reason to as of yet. So all things considered, it is up to Microsoft to shoot itself in the foot with what Vista and Office 12 bring to the table. Developers and ISV's are moving to the Web, as is Microsoft, so if Firefox and Google are more popular and moving in the same direction with free vs. Microsoft pricing, what will make you install Linux on your desktop? At this point, it’s really up to Microsoft to lose with how they roll out Vista. Just watch.