End of Era or Change of stance?

An analysis on the just announced Bill Gates' decision to step down

A worthy successor

Microsoft today (Thursday 15 June 2006) announced that Bill Gates would be stepping down from his position as Chief Software Architect gradually reports CNET. That role will be assumed by the current CTO Ray Ozzie, ironically the man who created Microsoft biggest messaging rival, Lotus Notes, though Gates would remain the Chairman of Microsoft. The move allegedly comes in the midst of falling Microsoft stock price, Vista failure and strong competition from Google.

Some people are calling this as the end of Gates' era at Microsoft. I call it as a change of stance. There's no doubg that Bill Gates is a Market Genius who recognised the power of PC and also identified that the common person would want something very simple to work on that PC and made the Windows brand a market monopoly. But it was increasingly felt that Bill Gates was sometimes too rigid when it comes to market practices and handling competition which it had virtually none for Windows and has been gaining ground rapidly on the Exchange front. Gates even refused to call Linux as a competition till recently (which was somewhat true) Microsoft's product are not platform independent and need Windows (apart from MS Office which also runs on Mac but with severe limitations) to run on whereas other competitors products are more or less platform independent.

Microsoft's one of the newer releases, Virtual PC till recently ran only various versions of Windows and did not support Linux, whereas the market leader in virtualisation, VMWare runs almost every OS. Microsoft seriously could not hope to present a meaningful competition to VMWare with that product.

Ray Ozzie has a history of working and promoting open systems that conform to standards and has been strickler for security. So what can we really hope to see from this move? Here's my wishlist:

• An Office suite that will work almost the same on Linux / Unix
• Enterprise products that work with other operating systems on non-intel platform
• Software products that are designed with the end users AND security in mind and not end users OR security.
• A better licensing programme which does not force the customers to buy Software Assurance (SA) to get patches, updates which does not makes sense to small and medium businesses
• A better patching practice: I mean showing a little more flexibility to rolling out critical security related patches outside of its montly patch cycle.

I know this might be asking too much, but that's what I hope should happen if Microsoft has to maintain its market leader position and grow. With Linux maturing superfast and absurd hardware requirements of Windows Vista, people will think about moving out of a homogeneous Windows environment to a mixed environment with Linux. Although it is not going to happen anytime soon, I think Microsoft has made the right move.