Its escalated to all out war. Seriously. Microsoft are now screaming the corporate equivalent of “MEANY BUMS!!” at criticisms or observations of their last strategic decisions. They are facing difficulty breaking into wider markets than just their traditionl bulwark: the desktop OS. Windows CE is loosing ground to other embedded OSes (like linux for the OLPC, despite MS bullying; and ubuntu on intel’s MID; the iPhone runs a cut down version of Mac OS X; the Motorazr2 runs linux), and their recent jab at Linux by publicly claiming they own patents that Linux infringes, without revealing them (which is because their old stooge and puppet SCO is dying and this was EXACTLY what SCO was doing to the Linux community, the community (lead by Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mandriva is basically telling Microsoft to fuck off.). Zune is a failure (despite misreporting its sales targets: people said it had broken 1M units, and it was actually the sales VP saying that he EXPECTED it to hit 1M units within the next three months: worse still, i cant find any current sales figures, but heres some biased ones anyway), and the 44.6G USD offer on Yahoo! (that hasnt yet gone through). They did do well with the Xbox 360: thats a neat machine (I’m still buying a Wii though), but the original Xbox was a well marketed joke.

The interesting thing about the Yahoo! offer (which despite Gate’s call for “kinder capitalism” was pretty fucking hostile) is that naturally the official Google blog raised some concerns about inter-operability and of Microsoft repeating their business strategy for the desktop market with internet services. Microsoft issued a statement basically whining that Google is close to a monopoly and that they are going to make a more fair marketplace by doing so. How? you morons: if you take the Microsoft market share and the Yahoo! market share and unify them into the Microsoft market share, you havent changed the market use, you’ve just lessened the number of large players. well ha-ha: Yahoo! might just jump in bed with that sexy young Google, rather than the Microsoft old-man-with-bling-a-tan-and-a-porsche.

The other major event is the OOXML vs. ODF war. Its turned into all out name calling. IBM voted against fast tracking OOXML through the ISO standards application. For Good Reasons. but then Microsoft got angsty, and IBM responded. When Microsoft complain that its a standard: don’t listen, its not yet controlled by a standards body of the caliber of ISO or IEEE: its an ECMA standard and you can buy those. Also, don’t believe them when they say that Sun and IBM control ODF, they handed it on to an independent standards body: OASIS. whats really funny here is that Microsoft are supporting ODF (but probably not completely) in office ‘07, partly after pressure from the Belgians and others. This means that you can now use ODF on iWorks {edit: that was a rumour, and is not true}, KOffice, Open Office and MS Office. One piece that i thought interesting is that the OOXML example files don’t even validate against MS’s own XSD, which I find personally entertaining because I have had hell with MSXML in the past (such as not accepting chunked encoding for webservices and not documenting if a read method actually advances and consumes part of the input stream or resets to the last position (some do some don’t)), and I have never had any issues with SAX/Xerces/Xalan.

All this adds up to serious fear and loathing in Redmond, WA. Its like the Halloween documents all over again: but public and more desperate on Microsoft’s part. Desperation bought out of confusion bought out of an inability to understand and so capitalise on a shifting market (much like the RIAA). And this isn’t an “o yey, microsuck gonna go away” rant. They wont. Some of the stuff they do is damn useful, some, I daresay, even good: but they are used to operating from a dominant position like they had when the computing world was all about OS’s and sovereign applications, but now the computing world is about availability and services. But for services to be available and useful, they have to present in an accepted standard fashion: which means open standards. And the Microsoft strategy has been to offer their own standards and make them dominate. We seem to be moving away from that: standard data but with your preference for interface/services/performance. After all, if there was no difference between the document formats, would you still use MS Office with its pricetag? or would you install KDE on windows and use koffice or just install open office or maybe even go mac? When you have all the water, you can charge whatever you like, until someone digs a well…

For a finisher, heres a funny quote from somewhere…

A fatal exception in THE TRUTH has occurred at 0028:C0011E36 in MS BUSSTRAT (08) + 00010E36. The current business strategy will now close.

* Press any key to terminate the current business strategy.
* Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart your business. You will lose any market value in your current business strategy.