Microsoft To People: Get Ready

You'll never guess who said this yesterday: "Here's a bunch of bits, go use them, three years from now we'll tell you they're not good enough any more and we want you to buy the new ones."

OK, you guessed because you'd read the title of this column. But it was in fact Bill Gates, standing on stage and saying what Microsoft-bashers have said for years about the software giant's infamous sales strategy -- "Buy our fabulous new OS and office suite," swiftly followed by "Did we say fabulous? We meant lousy, you need to buy the amazing new version."

To be fair, I should put the quote in context: Addressing the company's Convergence 2006 customer conference in Dallas, the Microsoft chairman and chief software architect was revving up the software-as-a-service bandwagon, saying, "The change ... from 'Here's a bunch of bits [etc.]' to a model where the software is always connected up, you can see what the issues are ... [and] use that to update the software on an ongoing basis, software as a service, is really a change of the relationship between us and our customers."

Even so, I'm not sure Microsoft's new pitch will produce the widespread, quick shift to Windows Vista and Office 2007 the company hopes for. Redmond is touting Windows Live and SharePoint as loudly as it once did .Net, which IT managers found as hazy and vague as they're now finding Microsoft's TV commercials promising businesses a "people-ready" platform.

Living Large

Meanwhile, though it keeps saying it's eager to serve small and midsized businesses, Microsoft keeps emphasizing the enterprise. Gates showed he's down with the hipster lingo by dropping the media-rebel buzzwords blog and Wikipedia, but in the context of corporate resources and Microsoft's new Dynamics brand of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and Fortune 500 accounting solutions.

Earlier this month, company exec Alan Yates boasted that the free, open-source OpenOffice.org suite was 10 years behind the sophistication of Microsoft Office -- a competitor to Office 97 instead of Office 2003 or 2007.

I think Yates exaggerates a tad -- OpenOffice.org 2.0 is certainly as good as Microsoft Office 2000 -- but there's another point: Almost every Office improvement since 2000 relates to enterprise workflow and back-end database access, not to improving users' (admittedly pretty well polished) word processing and spreadsheet experience.

And the microsoft.com/peopleready Web site? Click on the Small Business link, and you'll find icons for "Technology that impacts your bottom line": The first is "Break free from the constraints of basic accounting software," and the second is "Validate Windows software and access free online training." Ask Microsoft about small business concerns, and the second thing that pops into its head is to suspect workers of using pirated copies.

A Hole Big Enough To Throw an Apple Through?

Microsoft's mojo has taken some hits lately. Three weeks ago, the company proudly unveiled an all-new computing category -- the 2-pound, half-laptop-sized, 7-inch-touch-screened Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) that splits the difference between a Windows Mobile handheld and a Tablet PC.

But while Microsoft's launches of Win XP Tablet PC and Media Center Editions were major industry events starring many PC-vendor partners, UMPCs are coming from Samsung and, uh, no one else you'd recognize (TabletKiosk, PaceBlade Japan),and news articles and talk about the devices seemed to dry up after two or three days.

And last week, 23 days after its press release announcing a six-version product lineup and ending, "All versions of Windows Vista are scheduled to be broadly available in the second half of 2006," Microsoft conceded that consumers won't see Vista, just as retailers won't see Office 2007, until January 2007. That's an immense blow to PC makers anticipating Christmas-season sales, and the enterprise-takes-priority theme recurs with the promise that corporate customers will see the products in October and November.

But will it matter? I've given up thinking that John Q. Public will try the unfamiliar Linux, no matter how neat the latest distributions are, but part of me wants to daydream and giggle about him trying an alternative he has heard of -- about Apple, now running Mac OS X on Intel systems, deciding to get in the holiday spirit with a $100 boxed version for Windows PCs, with a dual-boot startup menu and a port of its iLife multimedia kit and TV tuner/personal video recorder support and the OS X version of OpenOffice.org. Can you say "Bill's worst nightmare"? Can you say "Alas, not gonna happen"?

One Way Or Another, They're Gonna Getcha

So no, I don't think the delays will seriously hurt Microsoft. Both Win Vista and Office 2007 will catch customers' eyes in a big way, if only for their eye-candy visual interfaces. (Yeah, I'll be here grumbling about desktop search being available long ago from Google and tabbed browsing ditto from Firefox and Vista bringing a ton of digital rights management and multimedia playback restrictions to the desktop, but it seems a chunk of America's heartland still doesn't read HardwareCentral.)

Small and midsized businesses that have only recently upgraded to Windows XP and Office 2003 will ignore the new versions for at least two years, but then Microsoft and PC makers will both be happy when companies deploy new PCs (with 2GB of memory). And a few hundred giant enterprises will indeed deploy all the server and Outlook-teleconference-window and stock-exchange-on-Excel stuff Microsoft keeps envisioning, and past the speed bump of Office 2007's new interface they'll like it fine.

As long as not every scenario in Bill Gates's dreams comes true, anyway. Yesterday he depicted himself waiting for a connection in an airport lounge where the table would have a camera and log him in with his fingerprint and read a business card and some notes he put on it and turn the tabletop into his e-mail screen and Web browser. When I've got a layover in Detroit or Chicago, all I want is a beer and a pretzel.

Eric Grevstad is JupiterWeb's executive editor for personal technology. A former editor in chief of Home Office Computing and editor of Computer Shopper, he's been covering PCs and peripherals since leaving the liberal arts for TRS-80 and Apple II magazines in the early '80s.