Microsoft used to be evil. Then it was irrelevant. Now it looks like a winner.
How did this happen?
I have competed against Microsoft for most of my career, battling Windows with Linux in the mobile, desktop and server markets, but also taking on SharePoint while at Alfresco and SQL Server in my work now for MongoDB. For much of that time I raged against the Redmond machine for its stranglehold on computing, only to discover in the past few years that its grip is gone; that enterprises aren’t building the future on Microsoft.
See also: The New “One Microsoft” Is—Finally—Poised For The Future
They’re building it with open source.
And yet. Over the past few years Microsoft has established itself as a real competitor again. Though much of Microsoft’s playbook remains the same, it has made key changes that make it a much more formidable competitor, while being a more likable one, too.
The Ghosts Of Microsoft’s Past
No one needs me to rehearse the “evil years” of Microsoft’s dominance. Years of illegally wielding monopoly power made Microsoft the company everyone loved to hate. (That distinction now goes to Oracle.) Consumers and enterprises, however, kept buying into Microsoft’s vision, in large part because Microsoft did more than any other company to lower the bar to productively using complex technology.
See also: News Flash: Oracle Still Hates Open-Source Software
Microsoft’s evil years, however, gave way to a long period of senile, if profitable, dotage. The Redmond giant was dead but didn’t realize it, so awash it was in profits from yesterday’s businesses fueled by yesterday’s business model.
Sure, the company dabbled in open source. It sprinkled cloud across its offerings, too. But the heart of the business was still fixated on old businesses done the old way.
In addition, the company neglected its core principles, the things that make Microsoft great. That is changing, as new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Vanity Fair:
But the thing … what is scarce in all of this abundance is human attention. And whoever does the best job of building the right software experiences to give both organizations and individuals time back so that they can get more out of their time, that’s the core of this company—that’s the soul.
This, more than anything else, made Microsoft great. And it’s the ingredient, more than any other, that Microsoft has been missing. Microsoft has been so fixated on its old way of doing — For more information read the original article here.
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