Microsoft hits back

I was fascinated to read the bad tempered (The Times said "bullish") performance of Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CE) in the Web 2.0 summit this morning in which he chose to criticise the Android operating system compared to his new Windows 7 Mobile. I expect some people reading this have never even seen a Windows 7 mobile phone, which says it all. I have yet to see a single advert for a commercial product supported by a Windows 7 app, always they say "download apps for the iPhone and Android", sometimes Blackberry gets a mention.

I wonder if Steve realises how much developer good-will he threw away, when he decided to scrap Windows Mobile 6.5 and rewrite the operating system without any backward compatibility or any compatibility with the main Microsoft development language - .net. Like many - probably most - developers, HUBSolutions has abandoned the company which first abandoned us and we have gone over to writing Android apps for our customers.

Our conclusions - the Android operating system is brilliant, much better than Windows 6.5, and now we are really not interested in anything Steve might do with Windows 7. Also, if Steveis reading this, I am not interested in a phone which can only synchronise with my Outlook, via hotmail, and none of our customers would be either. More than that, there is an issue of principle, and standing up against the naked commercialism of Apple and Microsoft, who have tried to control the app market with their exclusive online stores, whereas Android is an Open System, and will always have a much more vibrant development community as a result.

Steve also praises Bing as being every bit as good as Google, and perhaps it is. Has he tried looking up almost any of the multitude of issues which users have with Office 2010, and found that Google is actually far better than the built-in Microsoft Help? I don't even bother to click the F1 button anymore, just copy and paste the error message into Google, or type in "where is xxx in Word 2010".

While I am on a roll, Steve will find numerous references on Google to the instability of Access 2010 compared to earlier versions, leading to the latest crass Microsoft error message "Microsoft Access has stopped working" which is followed by an automatic backup of an obviously corrupt file. A sort of electronic version of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted (and died).

Looking at the Microsoft Web Site (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2625046) I see this is a "known fault for which a fix is promised in October 2011 - well that leaves 9 more days. Looking at the Wikipaedia website, I see that Office 2010 was released on 15 June 2010, and as of July 2011, more than 100m copies had been sold. Elsewhere on the web, it is quoted that Microsoft earned a staggering 10.8bn dollars from sales of Office. OK Steve, so why has it taken over 12 months to come up with a fix to such a critical problem? As a software developer, I cannot imagine making my customers wait that long for a crucial fix. Of course, my customers have a choice, and because of that margins are low, and turnaround on issues is very fast. There used to be a choice for Windows PC Databases, called Foxpro, but Microsoft bought the company and closed it down, many years ago.

Finally, just a comment on the sales tactics of this US giant. Almost every PC which is sold these days, comes with a "free", but time-limited version of MS Office. With posters all over the place suggesting that Office costs only £90, no doubt some customers leave the shop thinking they have got a bargain. When their Office dies on their PC (after they have had fun creating all sorts of Powerpoints, Excel graphs and newletters), they will find that unless they are a bonafide student, the actual price is between £240 and £430, depending on the version they buy. Given that you can by a PC in TESCO for this price, I wonder how many customers realise they will be paying the same again to Microsoft within 90 days. In addition, if they buy the "unlock code" to revitalise their dead software, they only get ONE license, so cannot re-install the software on their next PC. It will only last as long as the PC, which for many laptops is about 2 years. I doubt if many customers realise that for just an extra £20, they could have bought a boxed disk which gave them THREE licenses.

All this coercion to buy a Microsoft product, when there is a completely free alternative, called Open Office, which would meet all the needs of the vast majority of customers and produces files which are completely compatible with Office. Of course, retailers are not going to tell customers about Open Office, because they make money out of selling MS Office. It is an irony, that in our so called "free" market economy, nothing can be free, because then there is then no money to pay for marketing and retailing!