Today Microsoft will ring the bell on Nasdaq, as just one other way of celebrating the effective launch of its newest flagship product, Windows 7. The new operating system comes to the market just 3 years after the launch of the much announced Windows Vista, which never fulfilled the expectations of the market, nor that of Microsoft. To put it in words of Times Online, Microsoft is hence trying to “reboot itself”.
But, paraphrasing the title of the often-cited article by Nicholas Carr on “Does IT matter”, one should probably ask oneself if Windows 7 actually matters. It certainly matters to Microsoft, since its success or failure will shape the future of the -still- biggest software company of the world. But does this also apply to the software market as a whole, and especially to corporate and home users?
Currently, we are in the midst of experiencing a computing paradigm shift from desktop computing to cloud computing (see “The Economists” cover story in its October 15th edition). Even though in the opinion of some it will still take years to actually mature cloud computing, it is hard to deny that change will happen. The main stakeholders of the industry are finally all aligned, and even the emperor of the old desktop computing world, Microsoft, considers this to be a “fundamental shift in the computing paradigm”, as Steve Ballmer said in an interview to Michael Arrington from Techcrunch almost a month ago.
If hence the paradigm shift is a given, any decision to upgrade to Windows 7 has to be evaluated from a cloud computing perspective. And here the road starts becoming rough for Microsoft. How is Windows 7 positioned? As the successor of Windows XP, the operating to which any user should finally upgrade (since most of us skipped the Windows Vista upgrade). Will this bring us into the cloud computing world?
Probably yes, but in the Microsoft way. Windows 7 is about evolution, not revolution. What are the key messages with which they come to the market? If you browse the “Windows 7 features” page of Microsoft, the headline message is “Engineered by us. Inspired by you – A few years ago we started asking PC owners what they wanted from Windows 7. The result?” Will a product inspired by current users be a game changer, heading us towards cloud computing? It may slowly lead us toward cloud computing, but it’s clearly engineered to cater the mainstream PC and server world. Evidence is clear: Windows 7 is designed for a world of applications run on a desktop or server. In an interview by The New York Times on March 20, 2009, Ballmer showed himself convinced of the fact that browser based access to applications is not the way to go. In his own words: “Everyone says ‘You have to run in a browser.’ That’s nonsense”. Consistent with this vision Windows 7 guarantees backward compatibility for programs written for previous platforms, back to Windows …95! Hence, Windows 7 will allow for a slow transition towards cloud computing. It does not hinder cloud computing, but it is designed to spur traditional desktop and server computing, fastening it up, boosting efficiency. But it is not a product that will drive the cloud computing market forward.
Is this a problem? It may be, depending on the speed at which the market evolves. According to a report of a recent study published yesterday by Avanade (a business technology services provider), cloud computing is showing “a 320 percent increase over the past nine months in respondents reporting that they are testing or planning to implement could computing”. Particularly interesting is that the company was founded by Accenture and Microsoft, and hence the intention of the study probably was to show that cloud computing adoption is slow (both players have dominant roles in the “old computing world”). In general, there is still little support for cloud-only models, but its a fact that companies no longer ignore the possibilities of the new paradigm. The announcement of Google that it is working hard on the development of the first genuine cloud computing operating system, Google Chrome was one of the big news highlights of the summer. It won’t be able until next Fall, but still, news are out that something different is coming. Also in summer, Forrester Research reported that according to one their studiesone out of four large companies plan to use cloud models soon. And yesterday cloud computing topped the list of the top 10 strategic directions for 2010 presented by Gartner analysts David Cearley and Carl Claunch at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. Hence, things may go much faster than Microsoft -and the ecosystem around it- desires, or at least want to make us believe.
So, what should all of this imply to a company deciding whether or not to adopt Windows 7? On one hand, according to NetApplications the worldwide market share in operating systems of Windows XP is around 70%, and XP was launched in 2001. One might think that it’s now definitely time for to upgrade. On the other hand, if we’ve been able to live 8 years with Windows XP, couldn’t we continue one more year? Wait until Google’s Chrome OS has been launched, see what’s really going on with cloud computing adoption? Especially in tough economic times, in which companies tend to delay investment decisions, the decision to upgrade to Windows 7 could be a perfect candidate to be delayed.
Microsoft knows this better than anybody, and has been working hard on preparing its partners to drive adoption. Windows 7 comes to the market with 8500 certified applications. In an article on the BBC news website Tim Weber cites Alex Gruzen, in charge of consumer produc
ts at the computer giant Dell, who things that “in the past, Microsoft looked at its operating system in i
solation, (…) Now, they collaborate, help to figure out which third party vendors are slowing down the system, help them improve their codes.”
Hence, Microsoft may well succeed with Windows 7, convincing corporate and home users to adopt its newest product. But tragically, this success will put Microsoft back on its own track. It may have created a perfect operating system for a world in which applications are executed in an operating systems. But what if this track goes nowhere? What if the time is right for a a shift to a different world, in which we execute our applications through a simple browser?