WideOpenNews: Will the Internet Break Windows?

” Suppose, however, that the Internet poses a strategic
challenge unlike any Microsoft has encountered before. The threat
doesn’t issue from the question of which browser occupies the
desktop. Nor does it involve a single competitor. It takes the form
of millions of de facto challengers, some in the form of Web sites
that increase the number of hours you and I spend within browsers
and simultaneously reduce the number of hours we spend working with
desktop applications tied to an operating system.

The lessons drawn from the past, when Microsoft bested IBM,
Novell, Apple, Lotus, WordPerfect and Netscape, are irrelevant.
Indeed, Apple’s recent resurgence owes much to all that time we are
spending within browsers, which renders moot the comparative lack
of Macintosh applications software.

Microsoft has shown no sign of understanding that the answer
to the problem posed by the Web and by the just-beginning explosion
of small computing devices is not to serve up more Windows, in new
shapes and sizes. First, the company tried with dismal results
to cram a version of Windows called CE into devices that would
compete with Palm Pilots, which are equipped with a fast, elegantly
thin operating system with no kinship to Windows. Tomorrow, the
company promises us, it will insert new Windows-related “services”
(read: proprietary code) as a new software layer in the heart of
Internet services. Why? Because we do Windows, that’s why!”

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