In listening to the interview, however, I was amazed that, if you translated out the corporate business speak, Mundie's began by stating that what Microsoft sees happening is a "convergence"of traditional applications for the personal computer with the communications capability of the mobile telephone. Mundie thinks the future will bring a "merging" of "popular communications paradigms" and the "idea that people want to work together." He concludes:
“So the idea that we can support a remote collaboration as something that that supports both the work part and the communications part in a multi-party environment – that’s one of the major focuses in the next generation of Office."Mundie sounds like he is just beginning to get the implications of iPods and iPhones. social networking on the web, laptops and netbooks. Google started offering web-based versions of traditional computer based applications like word processing and spreadsheets several years ago.
If he had forecast these things in two or three years ago, when most of these developments started to occur, and Microsoft had acted then, Microsoft would be in much better position today."
Gordon then asked Mundie to comment on Google's announcement of a new operating system, Chrome OS, and what Microsoft was planning for its operating system after Windows 7. Here is Mundie's reply:
"The computer itself is going to change in quite substantive ways in the next three to five years. And with that will come a new level of capability to make it easier for people to interact with computer, to put computing in, you know, more places in peoples lives and to make in a more natural experience for how they interact with it.. In my mind, the evolution of our operating system will naturally track forward with these improved capabilities in the underlying hardware and the devices that people will use to access computing. And that will give us many new capabilities in the future, including a natural user interface, where you can speak to the computer and it can speak back, where it has machine vision though cameras, and, so, there will be many, many more components of human-like interaction in our vision of the future.”This answer really does not say much more than we are going to make a better operating system to do the things people want to do. There is not much vision here about the what people want beyond a "more natural experience" and "more components of human-like interaction." Perhaps, when he said this, Mundie was having a flashback of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Gordon presses for details, specifically, whether Microsoft embraces the approach that Google seems to be taking -- an operating system that runs one or two applications, such as a browser, with the rest of the applications being run on web-based platforms through the browser -- in the cloud of the Internet. Mundie thinks that people want something more powerful on their own computer, that Gordon's formulation will be found to be "too restrictive." He cites the evolution of Google's Android operating system for mobile phones and says that it has come to look more like Microsoft's phone based operating systems.
It is hard to have much confidence in this view of the future. Microsoft is clearly looking over its shoulder at the competition from Apple and Google and trying to replicate things they have already done. At this point, it is a safe bet that people want computing to be easier and more natural and they want it to be more mobile, for personal and business purposes. With its massive Windows OS, Microsoft has a vested interest in a future that is still based on complicated multi-tasking on individual computers. (I believe that Future Tense ran another report, however, in which there was speculation that Microsoft would abandon Windows all together after Windows 2010, because it has become too complicated.)
This brings us back to another observation that has already been made: Micosoft is still a software company. Outside of the X-Box, it has not produced a successful hardware product. Its development of the Zune illustrates that even when they can figure out what the market wants, Microsoft is slow to get it right. (In truth, Apple figured out what the market wanted, and Microsoft has been playing catch-up.)
Mundie's vision of the future is to ill-defined to provide much direction. Is Microsoft counting on people wanting more robust netbooks or Internet based "cloud" applications, or both? (As I write this, HP has just begun selling a new, more powerful netbook, the HP Mini 5101. It will be interesting to see how these improved netbooks sell.)
With the growth of activity on social networking sites on the web, it seems reasonable to believe that people (of all ages, judging from recent trend in Facebook demographics) are ready to do more with Internet based applications. Netbooks have been unspectacular so far, but have the potential --as a smaller, portable platform -- to reach such web-based functions. Mundie seems to identify this trend early in the interview when he talks about the "merging" of "video telephony, audio telephony, instant messaging ("ah, you know, the popular communications paradigms") and the "idea that people want to work together." He also cites the interest in being "green" and traveling less.
It is clear that the iPod and iPhone and social networking on the Internet have drive a large number of users into a different kind of computing, one based increasingly on mobile devices. It is also no secret that the history of computing points toward smaller devices with more power. What Mundie cannot quite figure out is where business users are going.
Because Microsoft software has become so ubiquitous in the business environment, one of Microsoft's big challenges is figuring out where business users want to go. It may be logical to conclude that iPhones and other more robust devices may not be able to satisfy the all the needs of business users, but that does lead to the conclusion that such users want or need their laptop or netbook to be as powerful as a traditional desktop. I think business too wants smaller, more agile devices and computing that, as Mundie said, reduces travel.
I have used a old Toshiba laptop on the road for work for several years now and my practice is to put as little on the laptop as possible, both in programs and stored files. I want it to work as access to the Internet when that is available and to let me work on some things when I cannot access the Internet. I started writing these comments at home on a Sunday, not on my desktop, but on the Internet using Google's blogspot. I am finishing them the same way from New Mexico. I do not have to worry about saving them on my hard-drive or a flash drive or e-mailing them to myself. I just have to get to Google online. Why is this not the next paradigm?
What Microsoft may want to do is take a look at its array of software and make it more efficient and more integrated, not big, bulkier, but lighter and better able to handle the basic functions that all users want. Word and Excel may be everywhere, but Microsoft seems to make them maddeningly difficult to use. For example, Microsoft seems intent on forcing everyone to upgrade to the latest version of Word or Excel, because the files produced by Word 2007 or Excel 2007 cannot be opened by older versions of those programs. I have clients who send me new Word 2007 or Excel 2007 files and I need a patch that converts them before I can view them. Walter Mossberg reports at All Things Digital on the difficulties all of us XP users are going to have upgrading to Windows 7.
Fully functional software would serve Microsoft far better in the long run and cleaner, leaner versions will open up new markets. I hope that is what all of Mundie's gibberish means Microsoft is going to do. Mr. Mundie should remember Satchel Paige's famous remark: "Don't look back. Something could be gaining on you."
