Money quote from John Moltz, the Jon Stewart of Mac pundits:
“[A]s someone who lived through the technology world of the 1990s I just think it’s kind of amazing that in 2012 you can write an erudite piece titled “Microsoft’s developer problem”.
I was there – hell, I still have a copy of Ken Auletta’s “World War 3.0” lying around somewhere. And looking back, now it can be said with confidence: winning the browser war was the worst thing that could have happened for Microsoft. We’ve got IE, they said, we own the Internet. We won.
And while they sat back fat and sassy on their WinXP/IE6 desktop monopoly, Google ate their lunch on search. Then Apple ate their lunch on digital music. Then Friendster created social networking, MySpace drove it mainstream, and Facebook ate Microsoft’s lunch in the social space. Then Google ate their lunch in webmail. Then Apple ate their lunch in consumer smartphones. Then Google ate everything in consumer smartphones that Apple didn’t eat. Then Amazon ate their lunch in digital publishing and bulk cloud computing. Then Apple ate everyone’s lunch in tablet computing. Then Google sailed in with the world’s new favorite default browser.
And in 2011, Microsoft woke up, looked around, and realized that while they were enjoying their overwhelming ownership of the desktop space, the world had moved on from desktop computing. And Microsoft was in exactly the position they’d reduced IBM to all those years ago: an aging public utility providing a commodity computing experience.
Look at the list: Google search, the iPod, Facebook, Gmail, the iPhone, Android, Kindle, EC2 and AWS, the iPad, Chrome. Microsoft’s last big leap was Windows XP, and it’s been a decade since they had even a partial share in the Next Big Thing. That’s why the push for Windows 8 is so overwhelming, and why it’s meant to be more or less the same OS from your phone to your tablet to your “ultrabook” to your desktop – this is Microsoft’s last chance to make Windows a necessary part of the computing experience. They need Win8 to be the bridge that carries the desktop monopoly back over to mobility computing.
Bing didn’t make a dent. Windows Phone 7 was Palm Pre-like in its impact. They ignored the iPad for two years. And they let Google steal a march on IE and Office with their own lighter, leaner, free products. Microsoft is swinging for the fences now because if they don’t, they may never take the lead in computing again.
And as a veteran of the 1990s, I’m just fine with that.