Lost in LoC

Recently Guy Kelsey of VendAsta fame and fortune posted a brief, but thought provoking article about how our company is going through an iPhone Epidemic. At least I found it to be fairly thought provoking considering I’m one of the people that shelled out the cashola to buy one. I’ve always been a fan of smart phones, and for the most part I’ve been a Microsoft faithful (there was that brief moment back around 2000 though when I bought a HandSpring). I was loyal to Microsoft’s form factor because those devices supported Microsoft’s Compact Framework (a mobile version of their full-on .NET Framework) which allowed me to have programmatic fun-time if I ever wanted, in an environment that I was already familiar with.

However, there are 2 things that have changed for me over the past couple years.

1. As I grow as a software developer I am becoming more and more interested in non-MS technologies, especially open source technologies. .NET isn’t satisfying me anymore and I want to grow, and as I grow I want to be challenged to apply the software engineering techniques that I’ve learned.
2. It has become unbearably obvious that Microsoft couldn’t innovate itself out of a wet paper bag.

At the risk of sounding cliche, it was Apple that woke me up and gave me the motivation to try out some new things.

In 2003 I purchased my first Apple product – an iPod. It was the 3rd generation, 30GB, and I was smitten. It was beautiful. It felt like I had picked it off a tree. It reaked of techno-hipster, and it glowed when I touched it. The iPod quickly became an integral part of my life. I was a walking iPod commercial, never leaving the house without the 2 long, white plugs in my ears denoting that I was part of the exclusive club (with about a billion other people), and I frequently played air drums while iPodding.

About a year later my computer was hit 3 times with some pretty severe worms (the first time because I was unprotected, the subsequent two times occured immediately after the first post-install boot of my computer, while Windows was downloading the latest service packs). In a string for 4 letter words I vowed I would never boot XP again, and within 24 hours I had dropped 1,600$ on an Apple iBook G4. Again, I was smitten. The sleak design, the ease of use, the physical sense of touch.  Again, the whole thing felt organic, it felt natural, it felt like an extension of my life. And it integrated seamlessly with my first love, the iPod. After that I went on a multi-year binge that consisted of me selling off old iPods, buying the new ones, purchasing the smaller iPods so I could exercise with something light weight, etc.

I upgraded my iBook G4′s Panther OS to Tiger, and was again falling in love with what Apple was doing. Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator. Awesome tools that improved how users interact with the file system on their computer. Tools which extended the computer’s processing from localized files and information to a fully internet-integrated device on which you could quickly and easily look up words in a dictionary, check the weather in any city you wanted, check movie times, etc. – all without opening a browser.

During this time Microsoft was busy busy busy, designing and developing their new operating system Windows Vista.  Vista promised to have a lot of interesting features, including a new 3D rendered user interface (which ended up being horrible to use), something called “WinFS” (essentially a database layered overtop of NTFS technology that’s going on 1,000 years old and was eventually stripped), PC-to-PC Synchronization (also stripped before release) and more security (which was implemented by constantly nagging you to deny or confirm any action that happens on your computer, ever – unfortunately not stripped).  6 years later, when it was finally released, so many of Vista’s “killer” features had been stripped that Vista was essentially just a new user interface that took serious hardware to run… and it cost 500$ for the full version.  500$.  For an operating system.  Seriously.  I’m not even making this up.

In 2007, when Microsoft finally crapped out Vista upon the masses (with a feature set still years behind what Tiger included in 2005), Apple rolled out another OS called Leopard.  Leopard sported a lot of cool innovative (and usable) new features, including easy data backup with Time Machine, and the ability to easily install Windows on your Mac (along side Leopard), and 300 other new features.  And it cost 129$.  A quarter of what Microsoft wanted for its new flagship.  Let me repeat that – better features, built on a better foundation, for a quarter of the price.

Now I don’t mean to ridicule Microsoft here, and dishing on them is not the intention of this article.  What I wanted to outline, however, was that while other companies were actually innovating, Microsoft just put a bunch of new lipstick on an old pig and called it Vista.  There was no innovation, and what little innovation that did exist within Vista was innovation that your average user could care less about.

Now this is nothing new.  Micorosoft hasn’t been known for top notch innovation – for the most part they’ve bought out some other software company, re-packaged their products and sold them as a new MS product.  This is fine from a business perspective, and it’s okay when you don’t have a whole lot of competition, but that strategy will no longer work for a number of reasons.

1. Love’em or hate’em, Apple is pumping out innovative products that are sleak, sexy, easy to use, and that people want.  The iPhone, Apple’s first shot at the “smartphone” market, is a shining example of something that absolutely destroys anything Microsoft has tried to do even with their most recent line of Pocket PC form factor and Windows Mobile 6.
2. A huge portion of the most innovative software technologies are coming out of the open source movement.  This is bad news for a company that traditinoally buys out competitors, because when it comes to open source, there’s nobody to buy out.
3. Other big players have emerged to dominate the areas that Microsoft ignored for too long.  Google has successfully organized the Internet and is now raking in billions as a result.  But Google is much more than just search, they’re huge in the web based email market with their GMail platform (and much like the iPhone destroying the Pocket PC, GMail destroyed Hotmail), their increasing acceptance with their Google Docs (a web-based competitor to Microsoft Office which is free and, dare I say, better for the majority of what most people do with a word processor)… then there’s Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Earth, Google Photos, Google Video… essentially 99% of what you used to do on your desktop can now be done online, through Google, using nothing but a Web Browser – which is OS agnostic.
4. The Open Source Software movement is being used, and uplifted, by the world’s biggest companies including IBM, Apple, and Google – where as Microsoft is still wanting to go in alone.  The name of the game in today’s technology world is co-operation, but Microsoft is stubbonrly refusing to shift its gears.
5. With the emergence of Google, Apple, and some seriously killer open source software frameworks (such as Django and Rails, to name only a couple), Microsoft is no longer alone in providing great tools to build great software, and as a result, developers are losing interest and leaving.

It’s point 5 that describes where I and several of my colleagues sit.  Microsoft is slow to adopt emerging technologies, and as such a large portion of their developers are slow to adopt those emerging technologies.  If you want to stay current with emerging technology chances are you’re going to have to walk away from Microsoft’s core suite and move towards Open Source and those companies that support Open Source.  And this spells big trouble for Microsoft.  One of the reasons why Windows remains the major operating system in the world is because there’s approximately 17 Billion programs that have been written for Windows.  There’s a lot of software, and software developers, under the Windows umbrella.  But when those developers start walking away to join Microsoft’s competition, it’s going to be bad news for the Redmond Giant.

In fact, we’ve already seen Microsoft trying to combat this by “opening up” the .NET Framework libraries (in the sense you get to see and debug their code, but you can’t make changes and re-distribute it).  Microsoft also had a huge presence at this year’s OSCON.  Microsoft is starting to feel the heat and they know they need to win over the “hearts and minds” of developers.  But giving away free shirts and keynote speeches isn’t going to cut it; Microsoft has to start revolutionizing the computing experience for the consumer market, and they’re going to have to do it themselves – something they’ve never done before.