It all looked rosy back at the beginning of 2007. The long awaited Vista was hitting the shelf’s along with office 2007. Companies all over the world accepted that they would be upgrading, that was the plan. Microsoft’s dominance of the software market was truly supreme. The success of the past 15 years had brought Microsoft to the very top. Could it go wrong with so much money and design excellence? Nobody was talking about the possibility.
There were signs though. Google clearly had plans for the office market on the internet, they saw the future. They realised that there was a large market out there that just wanted to be able to use a computer without any installation problems or blue screens. Google realized the plans that they could solve these problems by hosting the applications themselves. It was totally different business model. The key to any successful product is that it does what is says on the box. Microsoft did it just about if you did not mind investing a couple days of your time and employing technician to set it up. Google went better, and not just a little bit.

It was the simple things first that I noticed. There spell checker was really poor not only did it not recognise certain words in office 2007 but the application was slow. It was so big that you needed at least gigabyte of memory to run it and even then it was bulky. If I wanted the spelling for a word I would Google it. If I wanted calculator I could Google it. If I wanted a currency exchange figures, yes I would Google it. Google worked first time.

I have been long term fan of MS outlook too, but recently I have stepped over to Gmail. Following so many of my colleagues, the product just works. Vista is much the same experience after having used it for almost 2 years, it does not impress me. Fundamentally it does not really do anything else that XP did, at least for office user. But it does use a lot more resources to do it, 4 times more processing power, memory, and hard disk space.

Kinks in Microsoft’s armoury are starting to show and big company related history is repeating its self. What do you think?