Is Microsoft Clutching A One Way Ticket To Nowhere?

Image via CrunchBase

Microsoft isn't really as smart as people think and it probably isn't as smart as it thinks it is, either. Its fortunes were set by being in the right place at the right time with a piece of operating system software it didn't actually code - it bought it in. Seattle Computer Products' QDOS was to become PC-DOS and, in a moment of brilliance, was licensed rather than sold outright to IBM for the company's new Personal Computer.

The result was a gravy train for Microsoft, which promptly did the dirty on IBM by licensing MS-DOS to makers of PC clones. Why IBM put up with it is anyone's guess. but by the time Compaq released an 80386 based machine ahead of IBM and took effective leadership of the PC market, Microsoft had its own version of a goose in every pot and a wagon in every barn - pretty much every PC in the world had Windows and Office installed and MS was printing money.

The OS/2 body swerve was a final blow to IBM's dream of getting back dominance of the desktop and was to start the chapter in the company's history where it exited the PC market Jobs' Apple had cheekily welcomed it to in 1981. IBM eventually sold the business - saved, in the meantime, by its ThinkPad laptops - to Lenovo just in time to avoid the current spiralling decline of the PC.

Microsoft was so busy thinking it was smart, rather than being merely an accomplished rider on the PC clone gravy train, it missed the Internet. Entirely. Netscape nearly pulled off its coup - creating a platform for third party software that would disintermediate Windows. But Gates turned MS on a sixpence and brought the company's crushing market dominance to triumph in the 'browser war' that followed. They got in late, but they got in with such venom it appeared they were unstoppable. They weren't.

The win cost Microsoft a punishing - and embarrassing - trial at the hands of the US Department of Justice. Reeling from the whole bruising process, a four year trial ending in 2002, Microsoft found itself fighting a number of persistent enemies, including Sun Microsystems, Oracle and a growing horde of passionate Linux backers - a party that IBM joined with a $10 billion investment in the open source software. By the time the next big thing came, Microsoft missed it as badly as it had the Internet - the trouble was, it wasn't one big thing but several.

Google's IPO in 2004 showed an astonished world how very big the company had grown from absolutely nowhere (today, ten short years later, it's a more valuable company than Microsoft, BTW). Three years later, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and then Google bought in a piece of software that was to achieve precisely what MS-DOS had achieved almost twenty years earlier for Microsoft. Android.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was busy screwing up Windows in an attempt to rekindle the 'must have this year's version' of the WinTel heyday. The awful Windows Vista stalled adoption, many electing to stay with the stable and 'not broke' Windows XP. Windows 7 rectified the awfulness of Vista, but arguably it was already too late. People were playing with new toys: tablets. And Microsoft had no way to compete with iOS or Android - and no plan to, either.

Why didn't Microsoft turn on a sixpence again? Because it had nowhere to turn - its dominance of the desktop didn't stretch to the new wireless world of smartphones and tablets. And its eventual attempt to face the conundrum is all too clear from the schizophrenic Windows 8.

But it's bought Nokia - and it has the chance now to join the smartphone and tablet market with a better version of Windows that'll put the faults of Windows 8 (which is an absolutely fabulous mobile OS, strangely enough given Microsoft's long history of awful mobile OSs. Windows CE anyone?) behind it.

Only Microsoft hasn't got a huge and successful content-rich ecosystem like Amazon, Google or Apple. And it doesn't have the support of a wide enough base of applications developers. It's got Bing losing to Google, Azure losing to Amazon - too many fights on too many fronts. And too many innovations taking place away from the source of the majority of Microsoft's revenue - the desktop.

Is the party over? Yes. But does Microsoft have a ticket to the next party?

Bring Out Yer Dead (Or why Lenovo Middle East Rocked This Week)

Last Friday I mentioned a need for laptop computers in Sri Lanka, after we had found a medical student was working towards his exams without a computer and cleaned up then shipped out one of Spot On's collection of trusty (if dusty) T61s. The IBM, subsequently Lenovo, T61 is a classic. You can run tractors over them and they carry on working.

I found out later that the machine was being shared by our student and four others. Anandharapura, where these chaps hail from, is not wealthy. It struck me as simply wrong that medical students should be forced to resort to sharing a laptop to prepare for their examinations - although we had at least ensured there was a laptop for them to share. So I posted about it and various people, including the lovely @shelo9 and @toffeeprincess came forward with offers of old laptops they'd cleaned up.

Lenovo got in touch on Twitter and also offered to help. And help they did - two sparkling and rather sleek ex-demo S-Series machines were duly conjured up and handed over. And here's the cool bit - with absolutely no expectation of anything in return. I had been dreading the request for a photo of the students with their new machines or something and I couldn't have been more wrong. "We're really happy to help and do let us know if we can do more," the Man From Lenovo said (@mkdubai, as you ask). I was blown away to tell the truth - left there open-mouthed clutching two long boxes full of smart notebook.

So our students are now kitted out. But there are more of them out there - students from villages and families too poor to be able to afford to give them the PC they need for their studies - and we've now established a line of communication and supply through a philanthropically inclined community Doctor we know in Kandy who has been helping identify clear cases of need. There are very many of these - we appear to have uncovered a terrible lack, but be easily in possession of the solution.

Members of the Sri Lankan community here in the UAE who are travelling home are taking the machines with them one at a time so we don't have to pay customs to the awful government responsible for this whole state of affairs in the first place. And that feels rather marvellous, as it happens. There are no middle men or administrators, this is simply a community thing. It's a much more efficient form of giving that goes straight from one community to another.

So if you have a dusty but functional notebook in your life that's given way to your sleek new Ultrabook, do feel free to clean it up (ie remove your personal data) and drop it off to The Archive (Gate 5, Safa Park), where the lovely Sarah and Bethany will happily take delivery of your bounty so we can get it over to Sri Lanka and help a young medical student rather than have it just gathering dust under the stairs. Don't for a second think you don't need to bother because others will take them along - it would appear we can use them all. So please do feel free to share a link to this post or just let friends know to drop off those old machines at The Archive.

Oh - and we could use some laptop bags, too.

And thank you, Lenovo. You rocked this week.

Wakeboarding On Cranberries

Now here's a thing you don't often see me sharing on the blog - a piece of video. I happen to like this video very much for a number of reasons and consequently thought it was worth sharing.

Have a watch. It's a little over 8 minutes of HD fun. Come on back when you're done.

Wasn't that fun? I've long been a fan of Red Bull's communications: they must stand as one of the first brands - perhaps the first brand - to understand the world's changed and it's no longer all about them. Red Bull creates great events, great content, great stories about people and their achievements and takes a back seat as it does so.

Sure there's branding in there, but it's not about Red Bull helps wakeboarders perform better or indeed all about them at all, the branding's usually pretty subtle. From the now famous 'Flugtags' through music events like the Red Bull Music Academy (reported on here extensively by Hind Mezaina) taking place this week in Dubai to sponsoring extreme sports, Red Bull has worked to foster and build communities and take its place in those communities as a welcome participant - a respectful participant in the conversation.

That's an amazing thing to do. IBM did it by spending $10bn on supporting Linux, transforming itself from being the 'Blue Meanies' in developers' eyes to being a respected member of the Linux community. Red Bull has done it by working with communities, creating great events and building streams of cool content out of that work.

The video's voice over, you'll note, is the cranberry farmer explaining how cranberries are grown and talking about his business. We focus on a guy who makes boarding ramps. Nowhere in the video is a shot of Red Bull cans or cheesy shots of young people snarfing Red Bull and having a great time. A logo on the wakeboard, one on the ramp and the titles. That's it. Nobody says how much they love Red Bull, nobody points at or drinks from a can. They didn't even brand the damn cranberries.

And I love it...

BlackBerry Down

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As anyone who has heard me chatting on the radio (*ahem* Every Thursday from 12.45 on 103.8FM's 'Lunchtime Live') will attest, I have long been fascinated by the precipitous dynamics of the smartphone market. In the past five years, we have seen shifts in technology and corporate fortunes on an unprecedented scale - no other industry in history has impelled such meteoric change at such speed and with such scope.

Five years ago, Nokia was the world's biggest mobile maker and a dominant force. They invented the smartphone. They had over 49% of the global smartphone market, represented 4% of Finland's GDP and boasted a market capitalisation of over 110 billion Euro. Something like 25,000 lost jobs later, Nokia's stock was rated junk, its market share stood  at something like 3% and Microsoft snapped it up for a tad over 5 billion Euro. Remarkably, the man who presided over what must stand as one of the biggest, fastest falls in corporate history, Stephen Elop, looks set to make $25 million from that sale. He came from Microsoft, spent three years destroying Nokia and now he's going back to a $25 million bonus and a stab at Ballmer's job. No wonder people call him the 'Trojan Horse'.

Over the same period, 'troubled' BlackBerry has also managed to transition from global dominance to failure - although its decline and fall has been more recent, its position protected by its strength in the conservative corporate market. It hasn't finished falling by any means, either. BlackBerry's market capitalisation has plummeted from a high of over $70 billion to under $5 billion, while its user base has actually increased, from 8 million-odd in 2007 to almost 80 million in 2013. That hasn't been enough to stem a whopping billion dollar Q2 loss - or the haemorrhage of 4,500 jobs - 40% of the company's global workforce. This is clearly a company in terrible trouble.

It's the speed of these falls that is so stunning. And the speed of the rises, too. Of course, when Steve Jobs took to the stage back in 2007 in his polo-neck and announced the future of the mobile, many in the industry had a good old laugh. Steve Ballmer, brilliantly, led the giggling. You can still enjoy the Great Visionary's laughter today thanks to YouTube. Nokia and BlackBerry weren't far behind in the hooning. But it wasn't actually Jobs banging the nails into coffins - that took Google and Android.

Google mimicked the rise of the PC by providing an 'open top' standard for multiple manufacturers with Android. Once again, it's Mac vs PC, only Microsoft and IBM are no longer players. IBM had the sense to get out, because it could. Microsoft didn't even see it coming - not as remarkable as it may seem: those with long memories will recall the company's 'visionary' leadership missed the Internet, albeit performing a remarkable pirouette on a sixpence to recover the existentially threatening situation its arrogance and lack of awareness created. This time around, the dynamics are different and Microsoft can't depend on market dominance to bludgeon its way out of trouble. And it is in an awful lot of trouble.

But Microsoft's headlines are yet to come. Today belongs to BlackBerry, the company that's had to write off almost a billion dollars against its unsold inventory of unwanted smartphones, having missed its sales targets by over 50%. Now the company itself is for sale and it's a cheaper buy than Nokia. The question is, who wants 80 million users who are, undoubtedly almost without exception, wondering whether they'll go for the iPhone or a Samsung.

Fascinatingly, BlackBerry was to have rolled out BB Messenger apps for Android and iPhone this weekend just past, but they appear to have totally blown the rollout and have withdrawn the apps after getting hit by over a million downloads, despite only short availability on small regional platforms. Screwing this one up was a real Barbarians at the Gate 'light the smokeless cigarette with a match' moment for BlackBerry.

By the way, following that Mac vs PC history repeats itself analogy, I'd guess that makes Samsung Compaq which famously led the charge against IBM by having the sheer balls to release an 80386 machine before Big Blue and rip the PC market rug from under IBM's feet...