Microsoft is caught in a potential pincer movement where it will have to:
1. compete in a consumer market where MP3 players, media PC’s and laptops will be sold as luxury goods with value-added hardware and software design, something that is not Microsoft’s strong point.
2. compete in a business market, where the vulnerabilities of buying into a monoculture cost time and money.
As Firefox continues to grow its market share, the difference between now and the Netscape days is that Internet Explorer is often a disease ridden product. The advantage of having it preinstalled on most machines is outweighed by genuine benefits of switching, and large corporations have IT staff that will do that for people, to save time and money. It is not hard to imagine a headline – ‘Merrill Lynch to switch to Firefox’.
A friend was recently dissing a competitors use of Apple Mac’s for their Internet cafe business, why would they use a niche product, which is more expensive.
Well, these days a Mac is less costly because it is less prone to viruses, spyware and adware.
Microsoft’s business was built on the fact that if you had the same OS and software as other people, it was easier to share information with other people and things were easier and cheaper to maintain. Monopolies were a good thing in software and users benefited.
Then came the Internet, and monopoly software was open to attack from around the word.
These days most communication is over a network that doesn’t care what plaform you use and documents based on standards that can be used by any vendor’s application.
As the proprietary standards culture has migrated to the open standards culture driven by the Internet, proprietary software has become victim to the innevitable problems of a monoculture – it is vulnerable to disease and therefore costly to insure against attack.
There is nothing new in stating that Microsoft has problems with its virtual monopoly. However businesses will still buy Microsoft’s products – or maybe not, it seems that the real threat is that the people who can save most money by switching to rival platforms are not individuals but large corporations, Microsoft’s bread and butter.