Microsoft’s New Problem
The problem: trying to catch up with everyone else. They’re still trying to stick to the “release when we feel like it” method, while most everyone else, such as Firefox and Apple, is following the open-source favored method of “release early, release often.” As we’ve seen with both Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Mac OS X, “release early, release often” is very profitable, and very powerful. It keeps the project active, and brings the users back for the new features.
And while these projects are competing against MS products, MS tries to catch up by mimicking the features of these new products. Take IE7, for example. The IE team recently released two blog entries (one general entry and one more complex entry) stating they were implementing tabs. They only do this to catch up to others, after the roaring success of tabs in browsers such as Opera and Firefox. Another example is Longhorn, Microsoft’s famed OS in-developement. Press release after press release shows Longhorn trying to keep up with OS X in features and usability, but with Longhorn being slated for release late this year, if that, will it even compare to whatever version of OS X Apple has out by then, or a version they can put out prior to the release of Longhorn?
This is the problem MS faces, and they’re either ignoring it because they can soak up the losses, or are just trying to remain blissfully ignorant. Either way, they need to embrace the future, and begin applying the principle of releasing early and releasing often, or else in the long run, they will sink (though that may be a very long run).
Ikkeric said...
It still seems that while all these others can soak up the praise of the computer savvy, It still doesn’t stop the fact that everyone else can’t find a way to de-graft themselves from their loving Microsoft, which holds them tight and whispers “Its ok, we dont suck. They are all evil and trying to hurt what it is you grew up on. Change is bad,” and for the average comsumer, thats more than enough to keep them in Microsoft’s pocket. What firefox, and even OSX need to show is that people can use them. Everyone seems to think they are some foreign technology not to be trusted.
June 04, 2005 @ 01:57 PM