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Don't Awaken the Sleeping Beast

Posted by Daniel Shain

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Microsoft has taken great strides lately to repair its damaged reputation. Wait... Microsoft? Great strides? It's been a long time since I last felt the desire to put those phrases together. Did we awaken the sleeping beast?

A long, long time ago in the exact same spot it's in now, Microsoft was a company fighting to assert its dominance. I'm not even talking about the 80s or even the 90s here - I'm talking 21st century (barely). Apple had been safely relegated to the smalltime, Netscape had been vanquished, and Google had barely appeared on the scene. Windows XP ruled the scene with IE6, and people actually liked hotmail. The Beast was satisfied. It slumbered.

For years, competitors were peons poking the beast with sticks, taunting it, but they were ignored. Suddenly, Apple, Google and FireFox are mega-corporations worth billions, and the pokes have become hard enough to wake The Beast once more.

He looked at Apple. "Make fun of my OS, will you?," The Beast rumbled. Out swiped his great paw, and in it was a boatload of hype for Windows 7 and an ad campaign designed to illustrate how expensive Macs are. Mac sales plummet.

Then he glanced at Google. He growled, "so you want to be the Office of the web, do you?". Out swept the paw again, in it this time was a comprehensive set of online features for Office 2010. Google started yapping about Chrome OS, but the beast simply snorted about playing with fire, and back went the paw again, this time loaded with Bing. We have yet to see how hard this blow will hurt.

Then he looked at FireFox. True, FireFox had taken a lot of market share from IE, but how costly was that really to the bottom line? It certainly didn't damage sales of PCs or Office software, and besides, one paw was still reared back with Bing. After a pause the tail flashed out quietly from behind the beast - upon it was an actually competent browser in IE8, silently installed by default on millions of machines. For the first time (besides the initial release of Chrome, and here FireFox glares at Google), FireFox market share actually decreases.

Caution folks, The Beast has awoken. Personally, I think it's a good thing if it inspires innovation on both ends and stops the "well it's better than Microsoft" argument from being so easy. Although I hope this isn't just the start of another scene where Microsoft starts becoming, you know, a monopoly again. But it feels good knowing they'd at least be earning it with software that works rather than just bludgeoning the competition with economic factors.

Agree? Disagree? Got a different metaphor for Microsoft? Let me hear it.

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