An ominous change of diet

Pro

1 April 2005

Remember how the preview for the film Jaws went in 1975?
‘Duhn! Duhn! – Duhn! Duhn! – Duhn! Duhn! There is a creature alive today who has survived millions of years of evolution without change, without passion and without logic. It lives to kill. A mindless eating machine, it will attack and devour anything. It is as though God created the devil and gave him jaws.’

Replace ‘years of evolution’ with the words ‘unhappy users’. Replace ‘jaws’ with ‘the ability to write and market software’. You see where I’m coming from?

Yes – It’s a big scary ocean out there. If, like Nemo’s dad Marlin, you are finding it hard to believe the toothy smiles of the biggest Great White of them all, you’re not alone. ‘PC users are not food, PC users are friends’ rings just as false when uttered by Microsoft flunkies as it did coming from Bruce. But really, I am doing a grave injustice to Ballmer, Gates, et al. for comparing them to Jaws. They are really more like a combined Spanish and Japanese fishing fleet.

Great white sharks usually munch on seals with the occasional hapless surfer or diver for variety, but size isn’t everything. The bigger a Carcharodon carcharias gets, the easier it is for fleet little fishies like Marlin or Andre and his pals to get away. There is a natural balance in the sea, even if the Great White, like Microsoft, has no natural enemies. It is obvious that Microsoft uber alles has achieved this status, having seen off the most recent challenge by the DoJ and assorted straggling states with no more than a few bruises – and certainly no teeth marks. And the current EU anti-competitive ruckus? Tres droll, ma petite poisson.

The lads in Redmond aren’t happy unless they can remove every fish in the sea like our European brethren from the Iberian Peninsula and the sushi harvesters of the Land of the Rising Yen. Nah, that’s an understatement, too, and one that Novell and countless others back to Digital Research would find scarce comfort in.

The analogy would be more apt if the Nippo-Hispanic trawler axis, seeing that there are only so many fish in the sea, set about diversifying into tableware, cooking utensils, pottery and cooking appliances so that when there were no more fish to go with chips and paella turned into a vegetarian dish, they could get a piece of silver for anything that was ever used for eating whatever was left.

Microsoft, for sure, isn’t stupid. It has cultivated a mindless money eating corporate culture that will never be sated with the ownership of merely one global market. The PC biz is growing again but, just like there are only so many fish in the sea, there are only so many third world hovels with mains electricity that have yet to be Microsoft-equipped.  With apologies to John Mellencamp, this isn’t the end of the Microsoft world, but you can see it from here.

Look at what is going on with Office. Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 is now on the streets and, indeed, on a hard drive near me. It’s very much a corporate tailored product and Microsoft has other ports that are more suited to other audiences, never fear for a moment.

In the heyday of PC software, every new release would be festooned would More! Bigger! Better! But the latest office is a rather lower key phenomenon unless you look beyond the press releases, sound bites and actuarial details. It is probably nothing less than the first real step of Microsoft’s exit from (or at least diminished reliance on) the computing market for its major revenue fix.

Rumours
Office is important to today’s Microsoft, so rumours of its demise are clearly early. Office raked in $8bn last year, a quarter of the corporate’s total sales. Office is said to be in daily use by 400 million keyboard slaves. But that’s never enough for Microsoft, one suspects. It has to keep eating and swimming, eating and swimming.

Office 2003 brings a basketful of useful improvements to all of the constituent parts (but the removal of FrontPage from the Professional bundle was negative). New toys included One Note for tablet syncing, a better Outlook at last, SharePoint Portal Services and Office Live Communications Server to enhance the collaborative nature of personal productivity apps in the new millennium workgroup.

The low-key star of the show is Microsoft’s ‘enhanced and extended’ Digital Rights Management (DRM) offering, named IRM. Microsoft, as is its wont, renames things sowing confusion among the unwashed until they think Information Rights Management was a Microsoft idea all along. IRM provides a means for business users to control how Office documents and email are copied, printed, or distributed.

Sound good and not a minute too soon? I have often fretted about the cost of loose corporate lips. And, to no one’s surprise, in order to take advantage of IRM you have to pony up for a Windows Server 2003. Yeah, I know, that old trick again. You were probably going to do that anyway as soon as the first flurry of patches and a service pack or two sorted things out.

When Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s senior vice president of Office biz denied at the Office launch in London that this was another thinly disguised black mail attempt for those who haven’t yet seen the wisdom of wall-to-wall Microsoft products, you knew he’d say that no matter what.

What wasn’t said was that the global distribution of IRM makes it possible for Microsoft to slip its fins into the wallet of every intellectual property (IP) owner in the world. While I am sure that little fishies like your scribe and his august organ are off the Microsoft sonar, big glowing dots show up where all the movie, TV, music and publishing interests are located on the Redmond scope. Ping!

That might be fair enough. Naughty pirates drive up the cost of CDs, DVDs and books and cheat creative talents of their just dues, right? I am being sarcastic here, as I know the artists are the last ones paid. If you check out iTunes’ payouts you will see how poorly the talent are rewarded and who are the real scurvy sea rats that are Jolly Rogering music lovers. Aside from the glitzy global entertainment world, who is one of the piracy-concerned pre-eminent owners of IP? Step forward, Microsoft.

Silliness
Combining Microsoft’s recent monthly security update changes with some silliness with Microsoft’s TechNote support database (a ploy that reeks of overreaching plans to deplete the ecosystem of consultants and VARs?), the appearance of IRM on every PC could be seen as a foundation for a move to let Microsoft change its support charging model to subscription and coercive updates.

You pay for your Office when you buy it and you pay every time Microsoft finds something wrong in their coding art or some clever clogs finds a new way to hack it. And you won’t get your updates unless the Microsoft database of registered Windows and Office users says you are paid up to date. And when the updates for last year’s model start to increase in cost relative to the shiny new Windows or Office edition on sale now, you pay again. What real choice do you have?

None – unless we learn to get big help like Nemo’s dad and Dory. We are likely to remain ‘dish of the day’ so long as we allow ourselves to stay on the menu. Shouldn’t we be learning to speak whale?

08/12/03

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