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Mirosoft, and the long-term dangers of marketing...!
It’s the summer holidays, kids are off for 6 whole weeks, and being 21st century children, mine are very computer literate even at 7 & 5 years old.
I’ve had an old PC kicking around for some time and thought that this would be a perfect toy for them to use over the summer. For the most part the kids use mine or my wife’s mac, and it must be said that even the kids can tell the difference between the Windoze/Mac experience, and would rather use a Mac. So, with nothing to lose I installed Linux (Fedora) on the machine to replace XP. And the result is a thing of beauty. The interface is professional and intuitive, kind of like a Mac (only better), without all those playschool colours of vista and XP, and the machine is lightning fast (booting-up in just 15 seconds!
So why would anyone pay £300 for Vista and MS Office, when one can get Linux and OpenOffice for free. It’s the same thing only free...and better. This is of course, the power of marketing.
But with the freedom, information, and honesty of the internet (which ironically Microsoft themselves have helped create) there’s nowhere to hide poor value and poor product, so there may be trouble ahead for Bill’s boys!
Well, my point is that this is a metaphor for all of our businesses. If we don’t offer value, quality and service then our days are numbered, because now it’s so easy for our customers to find a better/cheaper/more proactive supplier and when they do, we’re history.
I know that Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world... but the history of the IT industry is littered with stories of giants falling. IBM, Netscape, Yahoo to name a few. Microsoft are living on borrowed time, 10 years from now they’ll be a niche provider of ‘old’ technology, whilst everyone else has moved over to cloud computing and the Googlesque world of remote computing. The new world of web enabled business favours small nimble companies rather than leviathans.
Watch-out, enjoy some of the dinosaurs of today, they'll be extinct soon!
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I’ve had an old PC kicking around for some time and thought that this would be a perfect toy for them to use over the summer. For the most part the kids use mine or my wife’s mac, and it must be said that even the kids can tell the difference between the Windoze/Mac experience, and would rather use a Mac. So, with nothing to lose I installed Linux (Fedora) on the machine to replace XP. And the result is a thing of beauty. The interface is professional and intuitive, kind of like a Mac (only better), without all those playschool colours of vista and XP, and the machine is lightning fast (booting-up in just 15 seconds!
So why would anyone pay £300 for Vista and MS Office, when one can get Linux and OpenOffice for free. It’s the same thing only free...and better. This is of course, the power of marketing.
But with the freedom, information, and honesty of the internet (which ironically Microsoft themselves have helped create) there’s nowhere to hide poor value and poor product, so there may be trouble ahead for Bill’s boys!
Well, my point is that this is a metaphor for all of our businesses. If we don’t offer value, quality and service then our days are numbered, because now it’s so easy for our customers to find a better/cheaper/more proactive supplier and when they do, we’re history.
I know that Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world... but the history of the IT industry is littered with stories of giants falling. IBM, Netscape, Yahoo to name a few. Microsoft are living on borrowed time, 10 years from now they’ll be a niche provider of ‘old’ technology, whilst everyone else has moved over to cloud computing and the Googlesque world of remote computing. The new world of web enabled business favours small nimble companies rather than leviathans.
Watch-out, enjoy some of the dinosaurs of today, they'll be extinct soon!
|
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