Microsoft Banks On Its Inherent Advantages

As Greg Sullivan, the company's group product manager for Windows, told Tom's Hardware Guide last Thursday, Microsoft is sharpening, and to some degree, even trimming its focus to become a "platform company." That's far from a new term; what's new is the way Microsoft is implementing its platform strategy for Vista: Rather than develop a single, convoluted semi-standard (such as ActiveX) and ramming it through the default pipeline of the Web browser, Microsoft is embracing many of the alternative standards that have emerged in the development communities outside of its Redmond campus. But unlike those communities, Microsoft is stitching all these standards together - XML, XSLT, XAML, RSS, SOAP, LINQ, AJAX, and the list continues. By making all these standards come to life on the Microsoft platform in a way that no single vendor can make happen on the Linux platform, Microsoft is not only generating new and practical value that consumers can perceive - not just programmers - but also spotlighting the Linux communities' key weakness: their lack of cohesion among one another.

By reorienting its applications around XML - a much lighter-weight construct than COM for inter-application communication - Microsoft is making Windows and its applications more efficient (theoretically). Technically, greater efficiency should yield higher performance, especially with reduced overhead. But up to now, the key market driver for consumers and businesses upgrading systems has not been so much increasing perceived performance, as it has been keeping up with the performance levels with which users were already familiar. One check of the \SYSTEM32 folder will tell you, Windows is long overdue for a diet. As Windows' bloat has grown, Office and other Windows apps have gotten slower; faster processors through the years have merely masked the problem.

But if Windows' bloat can no longer be relied upon to drive adoption of higher performance systems, we wondered, what will take its place? Last week, we found out: With the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) integrating 3D rendering into every graphical operation, and replacing the old two-dimensional GDI, the same factors that drive gamers to upgrade and modify their systems - oftentimes competing with one another - will be relied upon to compel businesses and home applications users to do the same. Clear and well-distinguished performance tiers are generally much appreciated by retailers, as well as some OEMs. So here again, Microsoft is leveraging against its advantages as a complete platform company, not only by giving retailers a good/better/best differentiator to create a reliable economy of scale, but also by defining the PC in ways Linux cannot .

If the open source community has any chance against Vista in the next five years, it will need to do more than just be "open" to new ideas. It will need to fuse them into a single competitive platform that consumers, retailers, developers, and manufacturers alike will accept as an alternative platform. Then, and only then, will Microsoft have a real challenger on its hands. Microsoft has a history of using its prominence to its advantage. But this time, its tactics are different. It's making a shrewd play inside the new sandbox that compliance with the DOJ and the EU have created for it. If you thought the Microsoft that wasn't afraid to bend or break the rules was a threat to the market, wait until you see the Microsoft that isn't afraid to write some new rules. The new Microsoft - this time around - is using tactics that are legal, clever, and perhaps -dare we even say - even admirable. Of course, only time will tell.

Read our other stories from PDC that we posted last week: