Just so no one gets surprised in a couple years, I have one thing to say:
Microsoft is doomed. Their gig is up. Instead of innovating, they are just trying to take what everyone else is doing and make it better. But, in typical MS fashion, they are messing it up bad. There are several examples, which I will discuss in brief.
1. Anti-spyware – They took the leading anti-spyware company, and made it smell of rotten fish. It can cripple your system, and is in some cases impossible to remove. So much for trying to keep your computer intact.
2. X-Box 360 – Sony and Nintendo are working on their next-generation consoles. Microsoft, not to be outdone, pushed their console out the door first at a rather large financial loss, hoping to recoup on games (as they did with the original Xbox). Once Sony’s superior system comes out, the 360 is doomed for several reasons: the 360 is HD-capable, the PS3 (from Sony) will include an actual HD content playing device supporting Blu-Ray discs. The 360 is fast, the PS3 will make it look like a snail in January, swimming in molasses. The 360 overheats if not kept upright (which is dumb), and Sony will likely learn from that mistake and not duplicate it.
3. Longhorn (the next release of Windows) – They have pulled many features that would have been new, and have focused instead on replicating the strong points of Mac OS X (and some from Linux & UNIX systems).
4. Internet Explorer – added tabbed browsing (already exists in every other browser). Increased security (again, something everyone else already does by default).
5. Search – In Internet search, they have been playing catch-up to Google for some time. Then Google released a desktop search app (not really a new idea, but the first to gain widespread acclaim), so Microsoft tried to do one too.
6. Email – Now here they were onto something, and they led the crowd for quite some time. They may yet hold out in this arena, mainly by the sheer number of accounts they already have. However, Google decided to be brave and offer way more storage than anyone ever had (except an ISP in Israel), so MS decided they better revamp too. They are now almost 2 years behind on this front, and it will take quite an effort to catch back up.
7. Open standards – for some odd reason, MS has always been the last one to try and support things that are open to everyone (regarding mostly web-standards and document standards). They have the worst suport for things which are supposed to be ‘standards’ on the web (not that everyone else has it down very well either). Then the OpenDocument standard was proposed. I’m not so sure it’s that great of a standard, but I know there needs to be one. I can’t count how many times people come up to me at work and say, ‘How can I open this file?’ The answer is rarely ever a MS product, but usually one that is open (OpenOffice or AbiWord). However, this shouldn’t even be a problem, and the OpenDocument standard was a push to eradicate confusing file formats for office documents). Of course, MS was one of the last to support this move.
I see one thing in Microsoft’s future: doom. Anything else would come as a total shock to me.