Microsoft comes to town

The London Olympics provide a rare opportunity to see for ourselves the reality of the 60% profit margin on Microsoft Office. The "Octopus" - a "yacht" owned by Microsoft co founder Paul Allen steamed into the London Docks this week. It is worth seeing - get off the DLR at South Quay - to see what looks like a cross channel ferry with a launch  in attendance which is bigger than most yachts. Octopus is far larger than the Royal Yacht of the Queen of Denmark, anchored close by. 

Also interesting, this week to read of the fury of Computer game platform maker Valve - a company valued at $3bn - announce that it is to port its Steam gaming and distribution platform to Linux in a move intended to protect the company from the impending "catastrophe" of Windows 8. Why? because the locked down version of Windows RT, with its software downloads via the Zume platform which will let Microsoft take a 30% cut of any software downloaded to the new Windows tablets. This is either going to add 30% to the sale price for end users, or it is going to deprive software developers of one third of their income. Either way, a disaster, and definitely the thin end of the wedge. Even if Windows PCs (and Apple Macs) never go down the same route (which I doubt), it is likely that the lower cost and higher mobility of Tablets will give them a better future than fixed PCs. The distinction between the Tablets and PCs is becoming ever more blurred. Have you noticed there is a new breed of super-slim, super-light PCs and Macs with Flash Memory instead of hard drives, and the new "Windows Surface" Tablet will have a keyboard in the flap. Windows RT will at least be compatible with the PC version of Windows, so the two technologies are about to converge, very much to the financial gain of Microsoft.