Microsoft's Big Bet: Win Within the Web

section: microsoft, for your questions: KezNews forum, 15.3.2006

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Although the latest version of Microsoft Windows is more than six months from shipping, company brass already have christened Vista as the best and biggest Windows release since Windows 95.

The company is making bold predictions, claiming Vista will be preloaded on as many as 200 million new personal computers in the first 24 months that the product is available. Windows 95 shipped on a mere 67 million new PCs during its first two years. These numbers are important. The prospects of nearly every product Microsoft makes ride on maintaining the ubiquity of Windows, which has in excess of 90 percent of the PC operating system market. It's been five years since the current Windows version was released, and Windows XP now is looking rather dated.

Development of Vista has been slow, and some significant planned features have been put aside to keep the massive effort on track. The company is in a race to release Vista in time for the holiday PC-selling season, and the new operating system must stand out to entice consumers to upgrade their present computers. More importantly, Vista needs to impress the big corporations that spend so much money on software. This Windows overhaul, so long in coming, may indeed be a bigger deal than Windows 95. If Redmond-based Microsoft is overstating Vista's prospects for success, it's hard to overstate the importance of that success to the future of Microsoft.

Complicating predictions, Vista will be more than an upgraded desktop operating system. Microsoft marketers claim Vista will be more secure, more reliable, and more just plain fun than older versions of Windows. But the real action is in less-obvious functionality that will enable a growing stable of Web-based Microsoft services to seamlessly hook into Windows. The software marketplace is changing, with tools migrating from the static realm of the PC hard drive to the Internet. Microsoft helped pioneer the business of shrink-wrapped software and became dominant, but computer tools these days increasingly are services you use, not things you buy. Web-based companies like Google are offering free services online and even installed desktop tools that tread on Microsoft's turf. So Microsoft plans to use Windows Vista as base camp to begin a new assault on the Web, where rebranded and brand-new products will be popping up in the months to come. It's an ambitious plan, but the world has changed since Windows 95.

It turns out this Web integration might provide a side benefit for Microsoft by helping to tamp down the company's pesky antitrust problems. But an assessment of Vista begins on the desktop.

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