I’m one of those people who believe that, on its current path absent any dramatic change in strategy, Microsoft is destined for a future as a commodity provider of business software.
Over the past decade, Microsoft has shown itself remarkably resilient to innovation, pushing forward with refinements to its 1990s vision of computing, totally oblivious to the evolution of the market beyond traditional computing as it had been conceptualized (by others, ahem) up to that point.
It’s actually been financially beneficial, on a limited time horizon, for Microsoft to have plowed ahead with blinders on toward deviations in its core strategy of preserving the 1990s era status quo of the computing indusry, and a clumsy inability to connect with people (and to connect people) in meaningful ways.
Unless it does something that would be truly out of the box by Microsoft’s standards, I see that path for them.
But what if they made the next version of Windows not a piece of software, but a whole new computer? A whole new, blazing fast, completely modern computer.
And say this computer was constantly monitored and upgraded, and designed to work exactly like the Windows you’ve come to know and love- but with far fewer problems…
The next version of Windows should be a service that you can log into through any web browser, and once you’re in, you get your Windows desktop and all of your apps, and full control of the computer they’re running on.
The whole thing would be virtualized in the cloud. The only significant limiting factor would be bandwidth, but this could be optimized to work adequately or better over broadband connections relatively easily.
And while it will be a little while before bandwidth is wide enough to use such a system for gaming, it’s not that far off, and once we get there, BAM- the benefits of moving hardware to the cloud will outweigh the negatives in a major way.
This is an area where Microsoft can uniquely compete, because unlike Google, Microsoft has a huge installed base of legacy software that people are still interested in running.
A virtualized, cloud-based Windows would be able to run those apps better than any locally installed version of Windows ever could. And it could be updated, curated, and innovated in ways that would not be possible otherwise.
I’m just saying.
My name is Jeff, and I co-founded a company called Techromatic.