Vista. Seinfeld. Zune. Songsmith. Microsoft just seems to keep walking into the wall when it comes to public perception of the company these days.

While it is usual internet protocol to pick a side, Mac or PC, and defend it vociferously, such isn't the intent of this post. Rather, it's to point out how a company can continue to make themselves look bad in public even when they are well within their rights.

This weeks episode might be called Adding Insult to Injury, and it features Microsoft HR and 1400 former employees of Microsoft, who have recently been laid off by the company, the layoff part of the story being the injury component.

The insult component comes courtesy of Microsoft's HR department, which according to a report in TechCrunch, have sent a letter to the laid off employees informing that they owe Microsoft a sum of money for some sort of clerical error.

While MS is in the legal right here, the question of the day is about approach. As TechCrunch puts it:

While the payroll error must be irritating in and of itself to these laid off workers (severance is a sensitive subject), it appears that Microsoft HR isn’t even bothering to explain how it happened (employees are instructed to call the office, which is closed for the weekend, if they want to know the details). Given that it was Microsoft HR that screwed this up in the first place, you’d think they’d at least include the calculations they made and point out where the error took place.

Here's the actual letter, as posted on TechCrunch. IMHO this is has the potential of becoming a PR disaster. You be the judge:

msletter


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Pardon my slight deviation from discussing the immersive social web, while I vent for two minutes about that awful piece of garbage called Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer is the bane of the web design project. It's the one browser out there that just has to do unexpected things to your web pages, even when you follow all the standards. Yesterday I was making some design changes to this blog, carefully ensuring that I was following open standards, and everything was going well. Dreamweaver was showing the changes nicely, as were Safari and Firefox and Camino and the iPhone browser. This morning came time to test on Internet Explorer, and of course, it was messed up. Of course. So back to the original design for now.

Thank you Microsoft for creating a web browser that is totally ignorant of the entire web community. Thank you for creating a web browser clearly designed to make so we have to design around you. Thank you for acting like a selfish child who insists on having everything your way.

I hope someday your browser sinks to the bottom of the market space where it belongs, then maybe you guys will learn had to be good members of the community. However I'm not holding my breath.

Okay, now back to our regular programming....

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Craig Mundie of Microsoft is dismissing the potential of "synthetic virtual worlds," including Second Life. This viewpoint seems to indicate that Microsoft is going to push a completely different direction for the immersive web, which runs counter to the direction that Sun, Google, IBM, and others are moving, all of which are pursuing strategies that more closely align with the Second Life type of model.

Before jumping into what Mundie has to say, it's worth noting that the immersive web will probably not be something that is answered by any single company, at least for the foreseeable future. However Microsoft tends to view the world through a binary lens that says they must be the only answer to any technology area in which they operate. But it's also not clear that they are able to leverage their Windows monopoly in some of these emerging market spaces in the same fashion that they did with earlier web technologies.

Let's look at the specifics:

Microsoft's Craig Mundie has dismissed the potential of "synthetic virtual worlds" like Second Life, saying that the potential for immersive environments will be likely realized through 3D tools that capture and model the real world.

The problem here is that Mundie doesn't understand that the virtual world can be both real world models and models which are completely based on fantasy. As such, worlds like Second Life can do both. I don't see why this has to be an "either-or" choice. But then again, Microsoft doesn't tolerate alternatives very well.

Mundie noted that Microsoft is counting on the creation of a 3D "parallel universe" modeled with tools like Photosynth. However, he dismissed the potential of social virtual worlds that include user-modeled objects. "Many people are familiar with Second Life, which is a synthetic virtual world that people came quite enamored with," Mundie said. "Our view was that there was a fairly limited audience who was willing to deal with the construction of avatars and operating in that virtual space."

They completely miss the point or are trying their usual FUD. Second Life is a 3d development platform, and to say that there is a limited developer audience for a new 3d platform is as silly as saying that people would use command line interfaces because there is a limited audience for constructing programs for a GUI desktop OS. Additionally, where is the proof that people only want a virtual world that is only modeled on the real world? Perhaps Microsoft needs to recognize that there is something to the word imagination that they fail to understand.

The host of the conference, Technology Review Editor in Chief Jason Pontin, pointed to the impressive demos and noted that Microsoft Research has had a reputation of being a "graveyard of good ideas."

Indeed. Sorry Craig, you're wrong. Synthetic virtual worlds are here to stay and you guys missed the train.


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In May we posted a report stating that Gartner was calling Windows Vista "doomed" and we noted that the outlook sounded bleak for Microsoft. Now Forrester has issued a new report that eviscerates Vista and worse, shows signs that Windows 7 is too far away to be of much help (it's currently slated for a 2010 release).

The Forrester report calls Windows Vista "the New Coke" which is a reference to the infamous 1985 marketing debacle which Coca-Cola wrought upon itself. In the case of Coca-Cola however, the mistake was reversible because Coke was able to reinstate its previous product line and continue forward. In the case of Vista, backpedaling to XP is not a viable long term strategy for Microsoft, and as users begin to defect to alternative operating systems, those users are likely to be lost to Microsoft for the long term.

Eighteen months after the release of Windows Vista, enterprise adoption is still in the single digits, and the majority of that seems to have come from upgrades of legacy Windows versions, not XP. Here’s a tip: Consider following the lead of Microsoft’s most important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case for Vista. Windows 7 is penciled for release in Q1 2010.

Here's the chart that is the foundation of the tale of Vista:




According to this Forrester chart, the situation is that XP is not going anywhere, and whatever anemic growth does exist with Vista is at the expense of Win 2k. The growth of OSX and Linux are not yet apparent, but as Gartner noted, OSX is expected to grow in the enterprise by 2011, so it's too early to determine if they are correct in that assessment. Nonetheless, Forrester notes that now is an opportune time for Apple to get some enterprise sales focus, so it remains to be seen if they actually do so.

One other key point in the report concerns browsers and Flash players. On the browser side, Firefox is gaining more acceptance in the enterprise. It is now used by nearly 20% of enterprises, and is up from 17% usage in January. In addition, Flash players are used in 97% of the enterprises. This should indicate that web developers and Enterprise 2.0 development needs to be browser independent. It also indicates that Silverlight has yet to make headway in the enterprise.




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Before you decide to take the plunge into OpenSim, be aware of a couple of facts. One, it's based on Microsoft technology. That's okay except for fact number two, which is that Microsoft wants to control the information about your avatar from grid-to-grid by using its repackaged Passport technology.

The OpenSim infrastructure is built with Microsoft's .NET framework. Ultimately this means that OpenSim will be tied to Redmond instead of truly being an open framework. That's not to say that OpenSim code isn't open source, but rather, that the framework on which it is built (.NET) is not truly open. But the more disturbing development is that Microsoft wants users to use their old Passport technology (renamed Windows Live ID) as the means to control avatar information.

While you may shrug this off, keep in mind that having one provider monitor your every move, monitor what you buy, who you talk to, even what you say, is not the ideal situation, and certainly runs counter to the idea of Open Source. While we do have a similar situation at present with Second Life and Linden Lab, the stakes are greater in the Microsoft scenario because the Windows Live ID is designed to follow you on the entire web, something which large providers such as eBay rejected some time ago:

Microsoft's technology for identity-management on the Internet in the form of Passport took another major beating today when eBay announced that they are discontinuing their support for it. Users of eBay would not be able to use their Passport Ids to login to eBay starting late January. This news comes just after a few months another major online portal in Monster.com dropped support for Passport from their online job website.

The answer to the identity problem really should be in an open, neutral standards framework, as opposed to being owned by a single corporation. To that end we support the use of OpenID and recommend it for rollout of any new grid deployment and/or new web services. In our estimation, placing ID management in the hands of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, or any other private corporation is a risk to you and your business.

as OpenSim continues to gain traction, tying Microsoft technology into OpenSim’s code increases the pool of developers allied with Redmond. And if OpenSim takes off, a Windows Live ID-based avatar identity gives Microsoft a leg up against the identity management tools offered by Google, Yahoo, and OpenID.

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Back in May we reported that Gartner had issued a report that called Windows Vista "doomed." In April we reported that IDC was showing growth in the market for Apple. And in February we reported on Gartner's Top Technology Trends which indicated that "by 2011, Apple will double its U.S. and Western Europe unit market share in Computers." We also reported that the trend for Macs is not just consumer based, but as reported by the Yankee Group is also happening in the enterprise.

Now both Gartner and IDC are reporting numbers that support their prognostications. Apple's Mac sales grew 38 percent in Q2 2008, and that's just in the US. Ironically, while Windows has slowed to a 4.2 percent growth crawl in the US, globally it is up 16 percent, while Apple only managed 3.2 percent growth outside of the US. Globally Apple now has an 8.5 percent market share, which is up from 6.4 percent in 2007.

These trends, along with the growth of the iPhone, suggest that Apple is poised to become one of the major players in the Enterprise 2.0 landscape, especially in the areas of Computing Fabric and WOA. As such, IT departments should begin to get themselves familiar with OSX, which if they are already versed in Unix shouldn't be too much of a learning curve, but the trends are clear: Apple is going to be part of the new infrastructure.




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