Is Steve Ballmer leaving? Is Microsoft about to roll over and die? Are they already buried? Is Windows 8 an abject failure? The Surface a fiasco? Bing a joke? Are PCs and Windows obsolete?
I have no idea about the politics, pressures, or whims that made Ballmer leave. I am curious about his successor, but I guess we’ll all find out soon enough.
Death of the PC
The death of the PC is an exaggeration. Tablets and phones are popular and replace the PC for many people, but there still are content producers who want a fat keyboard and a couple of big displays. The PC market will undoubtedly continue to shrink, but it won’t disappear. One reason for the shrinkage is seldom mentioned: PC hardware is ahead of software. Except for gamers, last year’s laptop doesn’t cry out for replacement anymore. Have you noticed that W8 generally performs better than W7 on the same hardware? A new Windows release used to be Intel’s best sales rep. This round you get improved performance without a new box.
Microsoft Software
Microsoft just might have the right idea with W8 combining touchscreen with a traditional Windows style. After getting used to it, W8 is not so bad; I find it easy to overlook the clunky tiles to desktop transition, and I don’t miss the run menu. Microsoft has a long history of polishing up rough versions. Does anyone but me remember Word for DOS? Improvements in software interfaces are always painful. It is close to impossible to get everything right on the first try and true improvements look like bugs until you get used to them.
Although Microsoft has had some product failures in the last few years, they have also had some real successes. Office has improved enormously. Word documents with complex formats don’t do strange things nearly as often as they used to. I almost never edit with the format marks turned on, something I used to do by default to untangle the confused formatting. Outlook has largely quit screwing up my appointments. OneNote is a product that I initially passed on because I thought it was a toy. But after I started using it, I have it open all the time. I believe it is the best new product I have ever seen from Microsoft. These are improvements I respect.
Redmond Culture
Take this for what it is worth. Your mileage may vary. I’ve lived in and close to Redmond for many years, but I have never worked for Microsoft, though I have met with Microsoft engineers many times. I think something good has happened in the Microsoft culture. I used to avoid Microsoft people, a hard thing to do in Redmond, because they were just too full of Microsoft, but in the last decade, that has changed. Their culture has lost its arrogant edge and its professionalism has gone up. For some reason, I attribute the solid usability of the latest rounds of Microsoft software to that change.
Microsoft is in a tough spot. The PC and Windows market is changing fast and they will have to work hard to maintain their place. But I also think that with the right leadership they will be better prepared to face the head winds than they ever have been before.