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March 20, 2006
Microsoft: empowering itself
Pardon our scepticism, but is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer really serious when he suggests that Microsoft's a better bet for the corporation than IBM, because its software allows employees to be more innovative?
Ballmer is about to launch a $500 million marketing campaign to try to win a bigger share of the $US1 trillion business-computing market. The phrase du jour, it seems, is that Microsoft is the champion of the "people-ready" business.
"Fuelling our vision is a series of software solutions resulting from a $20 billion R&D investment over the past three years that is producing new [SIC] innovation in a range of categories," Ballmer proclaimed. "From business intelligence to the mobile work force, from collaboration to communications, and from CRM to enterprise search, the opportunity for software to deliver even greater customer value is limitless."
It seems to us that the reason there's such limitless opportunity to deliver even great customer value is that Microsoft has been woefully inert for so long. Can there be another company that's been less innovative than the slow giant of Seattle? There's something about the Redmond culture that seems so focused on exploiting its standards, locking users in, and strategising to defeat the Open Source software movement that it ignores any significant progress until it's forced to react to its competition.
In our opinion, companies that want to foster innovation, and at the same time trim their costs, would do far better by ignoring Microsoft - and Oracle and Computer Associates etc - and exploring the opportunities for Open Source alternatives to proprietary solutions. IBM pushes its own proprietary barrows, but its does seem to have caught on more than others to the commoditisation of software applications, and is better placed to assist its customers to implement them than Microsoft, which is implacably posed to anything that it doesn't own outright.
While Microsoft is trying to re-invent itself - yet again - having once more arrived late at somebody else's party, and it will gain tremendous leverage from its marketing clout, it's scarcely the nimble-minded partner that modern business should be looking for. The odds are that customers will find the best candidates elsewhere than at Microsoft OR IBM. In fact, we'd go so far as to say that businesses that choose to embrace Microsoft will probably fare worse than those of their counterparts who are prepared to look beyond this sort of empty rhetoric.
Or are we being to kind too IBM? And characteristically mean to Bill Gates?
Posted by cw at March 20, 2006 02:37 PM