The Microsoft Religion
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Rapid growth and strong support requite passion. There are definitely products that fill a need and become very popular, but for the most part it really requires that your customers "believe" in your product, idea, even philosophy for you to build a loyal base.
Just look in the real world. Prius owners believe in the idea of the car for the most part. They see it as an icon for the environmentalist movement. John Deere inspires it's customers, many of whom will never buy anything but a Deere for their outside work and sport hats from the company. And of course, there's Linux, as the poster child for Open Source software.
I saw this blog that asks why Microsoft doesn't have a cult following. The entry makes a good point that Microsoft isn't really be evangelized. Even at last week's BI conference, there were plenty of people that liked the low cost of Microsoft software, but they didn't necessarily love the product suite. Or even the company. It was a question of economics.
It used to be that developers loved Microsoft products. They loved the ease of working in Visual Basis, the power of OLE. Even with all the issues with coding for Windows, it was just an exciting platform to work on and build applications for. With hardware advancing every year, but not so quickly that a computer was obsolete in months, the PC revolution was in full swing and Microsoft made it exciting enough to build tremendous support.
But now there are other choices. Linux has a huge graphical environment and a rich set of applications, Google is a strong competitor and their main product is just better. Apple brings a competitive suite of offerings and one of the premier development environments in the world today isn't built by Microsoft.
Add to that the fact that most of us are "used" to Microsoft. We expect to find it installed at work and, more importantly, we see the products from Microsoft as tools, not cool gadgets. We've gotten used to Microsoft software. The vast majority of features and functions we need have been available for many versions. All the extras are just that, extras.
SQL Server 2005 showcases a lot of this. There are many new features and it's a great product, but for many of us, SQL Server 2000 does what we need it to do. The incremental changes aren't exciting enough to drive us on.
Microsoft has us. We already like the products and we plan on using them. It seems that Microsoft is focusing more on attracting new users to its software, growing the user base into more "fringe" users, who by definition, aren't the geeks. We're the geeks and unless you can excite us, eventually there will be erosion among us to other alternatives.
PS: I have to wish my daughter, Kendall, a very Happy 6th Birthday today. She loves seeing her name in print.
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I think that for many of us, what keeps us from being excited about Microsoft's products is that they don't really seem keen to excite us. In most areas of its business, the company seems to be content to make products that are merely adequate - hardly the stuff passionate zealots are made of. Look at IE as a classic example. Firefox is far superior, but because IE comes bundled with Windows and most users will not bother to change over if IE does an OK job, Microsoft seem content to keep IE at that level. Not great, not fun, not exciting, just OK.
Actually, one of the few areas in which I think Microsoft puts out a great product is in SQL Server. Of course, it's probably not a coincidence that it's one area in which they have some serious competition - if their database offering deteriorates, Oracle or IBM will be more than happy to take up the slack. So they work hard at it and produce a great product that I personally enjoy working with. And now that the dreadful horror that was Enterprise Manager has been replaced with the infinitely more user-friendly Management Studio, it's an even better product. And I like it more.
But for the rest, if they want people like me to get excited about their products, they need to do a much better job of getting excited themselves. And I mean excited about the development of their products, not just in the marketing hype...
Michael
PS - happy birthday, Kendall...
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C8H10N4O2
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MS rules. There's no need to cult that....
Happy birthday Kendall !
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Happy Birthday Kendall !!
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In addition to agreeing with some of the other comments that in many areas, MS is merely adequate rather than noteworthy, there is the component (which is not necessarily a bad thing) that MS is also a generalist company churning out products to fit whatever market niches it it finds. The result of this is that people do not see it as having a single coherent vision (think GM vs Ferrari). People ultimately get excited over a vision rather than a product line.
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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Kendall,
Hippo Birdy !!!
Far away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.
Anon. -
Happy Birthday Kendall, a big hug for you, put a smile in that little pretty face and enjoy your day...
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Come on people; get some perspective. Nobody else has tackled getting their OS to work on 98%+ of the PC hardware in the world. MS has defacto standards in OS, word processing (DOC), presentation graphics (PPT), and spreadsheets (XLS). Their Active Directory service has become a standard. Outlook and Exchange have a vast majority of the business market. Small businesses can go to MS and never have to look at another infrastructure vendor except for peripheral things like anti-virus and PDF support (by the way, do you notice how Adobe got a clue and copied MS's IE business plan with Acrobat Reader - yet there are several other better PDF readers out there). As we all know, MS's database product is excellent. The shipped tools with their databse product are second to none. Try doing a trace with Oracle's shipped tools! If MS is "flashy", it is from the perspective of the bandwidth and interoperability of their product coverage. IT professionals care about bleeding edge. Most people just want it to work. There is more to life than the bleeding edge of technology. With MS, things just work and are intuitive. Just like you don't have to be flashy to be a good dad (Happy Birthday, Kendall! ), you don't have to be flashy to be a good software company. "Solid" is, in my book, one of the highest compliments you can apply to both a dad and a software company. Solid as a rock. Microsoft rocks!
(How's that for excitement?)
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I agree that we expect to see MS tools and work, and expect them to do the job reasonably well. It's just not often that they delight. I do think they've improved their focus in the last few years on developer tools. But you can't be the big dog and the under dog too!
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Happy birthday Kendall
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I don't know if this is the ravings of a paranoiac, but it explains quite a bit:
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This is the first time I use my brand new computer at home to visit this site. It came with Windows Vista that looks cool and reminds me when I discovered MacOS X 7 years ago...
But these are gadgets, and Microsoft, with all its "whizdom" called them simply... Gadgets. It makes life more fun and this morning I had a new challenge: How do I setup folder options with this new interface?
I think it's ok, but it does not add any adventage to my professional life as windows programs developer.
That said, I think also that we must salute Misrosoft effort with the .net framework. It is really a big step forward for vb programmers like me. Not enough to enlight MS to a religion, but enough to make me beleiving to it for a while.
Joyeux anniveraire Kendall!
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KENDALL!!!
Steve Eckhart -
Standardization is in many ways the opposite of cult. It's not about performance, not about best of breed, but about conformity.
People (and businesses) may make those choices, not out of entusiasm, but necessity ... the need to be on the same thing that everyone else is using. This is partly why MS has been so hostile to truly open file formats: customers might choose products they liked using rather than shoehorn product choices to be compatible with everyone else.
Agreed, SQL is excellent, other stuff varies widely (ever try using Project????)
And as far as 'getting their OS to work on 98% of the PC hardware' ... have you looked at the min requirments for Vista? or Office? Probably more than ANY other vendor, MS has consigned more PC hardware to the scrap heap.
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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Happy Birthday Kendall!
I don't know about the cult thing. I've been using Microsoft products to develop software since - gosh, I don't know... before Windows. I was a VB guy for the longest time and still prefer the syntax. If I wasn't getting beat up by Apple folks, I was getting beat up by C people.
I've never really had time to respond or think about it much - I've been too busy delivering solutions to satisfied clients!
:{> Andy
Andy Leonard, Chief Data Engineer, Enterprise Data & Analytics
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