And In Arcadia

Be Brave Buy Microsoft

• By Jason Gibbs
• 17 January, 2014
• 1 Comment

After listening to Sara Bareilles and Microsoft dare me to buy their product for the eleventy-thousandth time this week (number approximate), I imagine microsoft has to be asking themselves where it all went wrong.  If I’m to believe them, they’ve become plucky underdogs just trying to make it in the cutthroat world of personal computing. And that you can solve so many of the problems in your life if you only have the courage to give them a try. If any of this is true, if Microsoft has indeed gone from devourer of worlds to resurgent hopeful,  then their executives must be holding hands and weeping gently into each other’s finely tailored lapels while their top floor elevator ride seems to last longer with each passing day. Nightly climbing into their BMW’s and driving in circles to avoid going home and having to face their families covered in the shame of their epic collapse.  And I’m not completely sure that branding the simple act of buying a surface as courageous is the best marketing strategy either.

 In one particularly confusing commercial the Pawn Star boys tell a would be pawnee that her chromebook is worthless because it’s cheap and no one wants them.  At the end of the spot MIcrosoft then dares you to be brave and advertises a $250.00 Windows laptop… which you should totally buy, because its cheap… and, according to them… no one wants it.  C’mon, be brave people, I dare you!

 Most of this, of course, is just nonsense.  But underneath all the marketing silliness, and the implied hyperbole that comes with it, their message seems clear:  “We have the best product that no one is buying”.  By which I think they mean to say they have the best product that not everyone is buying. Which, in fairness, probably feels the same to the boys in Redmond.  Some of this is inevitable, the personal computing market is beginning to diversify and, as Arm and other mobile chipsets become more powerful, there are a lot of daily computing tasks that no longer require a full Windows experience.  Indeed cell phones and tablets are the fastest growing segment of the pc world.  Several years ago, Microsoft, realizing that they needed a larger presence in the mobile sphere, made a decision to pivot in that direction and leverage the user experience on their desktops and laptops to gain traction for mobile phones and tablets.  A pivot that may have alienated hardware vendors and left their flank exposed for Google or others to exploit.

 In 2010 Apple and Google are both making money hand over fist with ios and Android operating systems respectively.  Microsoft was caught flat footed when Apple released the iphone.  At the time its Windows mobile was powerful but not nearly as nice as the competition.  It was lacking in certain features and was optimized only for resistive touchscreens as opposed to the nicer capacitive screens that Apple and other oems were using for more modern os’s.  Microsoft needed to reinvent their mobile experience.  They did this with their Metro user interface.  An interesting take on what they thought a mobile experience should be and definitely an environment suited to a phone.  They also decided to do two other things.  They decided that the next version of desktop Windows would offer the Metro ui alongside the traditional desktop ui, and that they would create a separate tablet platform (Windows rt), that would run on Arm architecture, midway between the phone and the desktop computer, also featuring Metro ui but with no desktop paradigm.  The upshot is that Microsoft is pushing Metro ui as its future while attempting to move people away from a traditional desktop experience.

 Here’s the problem with this.  The desktop, like the desk, has been around for a very long time and it’s only because it works really damn well.  Since well before the invention of paper, people have sat down at a desk whenever they wanted to get work done.  Which is why, when the graphical user interface came into being, the desktop was chosen as the proper metaphor. It gave you a clean and open workspace upon which you could arrange Windows like sheets of paper.  You could have as many as you wanted on your “desktop”.  You had a meta filing system to go with your meta desktop.  It was literally virtually a desktop.  The paradigm worked and ultimately it’s what people want from the desktop computer.

 Mobile devices are slightly different animals.  Their screens aren’t large enough to get much real work done so they mostly serve as communication hubs.  A place where all our mail, messages of varying kinds, and calendars can be accessed at a moment’s notice.  But even so people are still looking for a desktop like paradigm. ios is a filed of static icons that launch applications, and Android looks a lot like what one would have expected Windows mobile to look like. Only it’s not Windows.

 I believe that, in attempting to use their desktop presence to leverage the mobile market they’ve gotten it exactly backwards.  People want a mobile operating system that is more like a desktop; they don’t want a desktop that is more like a mobile operating system.

And so Microsoft finds themselves fighting a battle on not one but two fronts now.  At the top they continue to face stiff competition from Apple.  Who have so far refused to embrace touchscreens (saying they are useless on a clamshell form factor) and kept their desktop experience very separate from their mobile one.  At the bottom they’re staring down the double barrel of Google, who has not one, but two dogs in the hunt. It offers Chrome OS which looks for all intents and purposes a lot more like classic Windows than the new “modern ui” does,  and Android which is threatening to mature into a full blown desktop option.  All of them are gaining market share at the expense of microsoft, and all of them have one thing in common; they look more like Windows than Windows does.