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Could People Learn to Love Microsoft Once More

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It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft was considered a dirty word. Dare to defend the company and the outpouring of scorn was enough to leave you wondering whose puppy you’d just shot. To be honest, the software giant hadn’t done itself many favours. Its response to antitrust investigations stopped marginally small of confirmable paranoia, while Vista turned out to have all the charm of a broken bottle beingwaved around at a bar fight. Office 2007 was brilliant, but conspicuously so amongst a product list that could cure insomnia.

Microsoft seemed aimless, bereft of inspiration as its empire was systematically hacked to bits by Google, Apple and Mozilla. Yet two years later and it’s once again the toast of the tech push. Windows 7 is excellent, but one product isn’t enough to rescue an enormous company’s repubtion. What on planet has happened? Is it really okay to like Microsoft again?.

The answer is yes, and the reason is that everybody’s favourite corporate bogeyman has done the one thing we never saw appearance: its changed. It had small choice.Vista bombed, Bill Gates left, and Microsoft was forced to start the tortuous administer of reinventing itself. The first step was an unexpected promise to open up, which is bearing fruit through code issued under the General Public License and interoperability agreements with Red Hat and Novell.
Then came the products. The sweeping changes made to Office 2007 had already shown that Microsoft understood it could no longer deliberate its cash cows sacred, but the fact its taking the fight to Google with an online version of Office 2010 is impressively bold.

Apple had a field day with Vista, but Windows 7 is brilliant. And the excitement isn’t only confined to the headline stuff; Photosynth, Seadragon, Silverlight, Surface, Project Tuva – all of these recommend a company brimmingwith thoughts.

Project Tuva, for example, is the title of a series of physics lectures conducted by Manhattan Project collaborator Richard Feynman in the 1940s and now posted online. Google’s been banging on for yeas about making all the world’s information searchable, but Project Tuva isn’t only about indexing historical data, it’s an object lesson in howto present complicated information (using Microsoft’s own Silverlight, let’s not forget). A timeline beneath the video is peppered with additional content, including formulas, definitions and audio commentary from noted physicists.

Its ambitious, slick and brimming with the confidence that’s been so lacking from Microsoft’s products in recent years. It seems odd to accuse Microsoft of performance anxiety, but if you want to know how a company perceives itself you need only look at its advertising – and its reaction to others’. Apple’s “I’m a PC” adverts had all the subtlety of a Geordie chat-up line, but Microsoft was dumbswuck. This cluelessness was most devastatingly summed up by Bill Gates’ response to the ads in an interview: ‘I don’t know why Apple is acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it What are they trying to say?” he whined.

The answer was indicative of the fact that Gates didn’t know the importance of presentation – everything he did was a mental pursuit, aesthetics he left to people who looked at their clothes before puttingthem on in the morning. But, Steve Ballmer has always been more commercially savvy, and heed of Gates’ presence Microsoft has ongoing throwing punches of its own. The strategy is simple. Advertise your own products with humour, and take a sledgehammer to those of your rivals-The Laptop Hunter ads highlighting the “AppleTax” have been so successful that Apple is reportedly ready to call in the lawyers. That sound you can hear isthe Jobs mob running face first into the walls of its glass house.

And it isn’t only Ballmer who’s blossomed in view of the fact that Gates’ departure. Ray Ozzie has picked up Bill Gates’ technological mantle and seems obsessed with transferring Microsoft’s desktop hegemony to the *cloud*. Perhaps its most vital general, but, is Steven Sinofsky, the man responsible for Office 2007 and Windows 7. An engaging speaker and engineer, Sinofsky also understands the importance of puttingthe user first. Sinofsky is everything Microsoft has been gone and could very well prove to be the company’s own Steve Jobs.

So, it’s all rosy in Redmond then? Not quite.The patent infringement suit aimed at TomTom is indicative of a continued touch of open source, and Internet Explorer 8 was too conservative to be fascinating. It will also take a long time to shake off the EU, which still desires its pound of flesh for alleged anticompetitive practices. Here’s no doubt Microsoft has made plenty of mistakes during its tenure as king of the hill, but the cryptogram are excellent. So excellent, in fact, that if it continues down this road we may yet leam to like this most unlovable of companies.