RSSVista fallout
I don't want to make too much out of the information I am about to relay, but I do want to point it out as an example of the sort of detrimental effect that the badly botched release and subsequent handling of Windows vista is actually having on Microsoft. Too many Vista stories head immediately toward either end of the spectrum, suggesting either that everything is perfectly fine ("All this same stuff came up when XP was released!") or that it's the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I don't believe either of those tropes, but, as initially outlined here, I do believe that the mistakes of Vista will come back to haunt the company in the long term.
You can see an early example of that trend in this BusinessWeek article describing how Hewlett-Packard is developing software internally to bypass Windows for some common functions on their PCs, such as playing media. It's an approach that makes a certain amount of sense regardless of the operating system; such "one-touch" approaches are ideal for non-technical users who sometimes have trouble even with applications that most of us consider fairly simple. In the past, they have primarily worked inside the framework of the operating system. But Vista's performance and complexity are sufficiently unappealing that some manufacturers are deciding the user experience would benefit by bypassing it entirely.
The article also says that some people on the HP team are itching to develop an entirely alternative operating system, which is both silly and unlikely. But it illustrates to what extent many people in the industry feel that Microsoft has flubbed badly this time, and the fact that HP is greenlighting even a portion of such a project, while other traditionally strong Microsoft partners are moving to ship alternative operating systems, demonstrates exactly the sort of incremental departure that I originally discussed.
It's hardly the end of the world for Microsoft, or for Vista. But consider the impact of this combined with the gradual movement toward SaaS on both the consumer and business fronts. Consider Google's Chrome; might not HP or other vendors decide that it's as easy to build a special-purpose, streamlined browser as well as a media player or photo application? And if more and more of what people need can be found on the Web, and the tools they are provided with to access that improve and shine in contrast to Vista, wouldn't you find a positive feedback loop inexorably sucking people away from Windows? I think that's the danger Microsoft faces currently, and a few non-sensical ads with Bill and Jerry aren't going to be enough to address it.
