It's not great secret that I haven't harbored much love for Microsoft over the last several years. In fact, I couldn't wait to switch to Mac OS X back in late 2001, so that I could start to get out from under the oppressive thumb of The Evil Empire. So it was with great interest that I read Paul Graham's latest essay, "Microsoft is Dead" (as well as its companion, "Microsoft is Dead: The Cliffs Notes").
Overall, I agree with Paul's main point - namely that Microsoft's total dominance of the industry isn't looking anywhere near as strong as it once was. But, I started to think about the situation in my current company. I have been saying that things are 60/40 Windows vs. Mac at Aggregate Knowledge. This wasn't me sitting down and counting things up -- instead, this was a gut feeling. So, today I actually counted things up.
As it turns out, I was wrong - it's really almost 50/50 Mac vs. Windows (the Mac is currently ahead slightly, in fact). More telling, however, is how OS usage breaks down among staff function. Of the folks at AK who have primarily technical roles, only two of them run Windows as their primary OS. That means that the rest of the company (sales, marketing, other support staff) is where Windows dominates. Anecdotally, this supports Paul Graham's point that "All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s".
Two points come out of this, however. It is clear to me that the last bastion of Microsoft's legacy of lock-in is the Outlook/Exchange combination. Many of our new hires have joined AK with essentially "their whole professional lives" in Outlook, which is not something that they are willing to mess with. In addition, even in this day and age, strong alternatives to the calendaring functionality offered by Outlook/Exchange are hard to come by. I think that Google is making a decent in-roads with their calendar application, and I have high hopes for the CalDav server coming in Mac OS X Leopard. But for now, we need for the market to address the final bastion of Microsoft's dominance, so that IT people such as myself can begin to convert longtime Outlook users into using something else.
The other point that occurred to me is that the above numbers that I have quoted change significantly if instead of looking at the primary OS, I instead look at total number of OS licenses. Many of the Mac users at AK have Parallels installed, and a Windows license as well, so that they can continue to use legacy Windows applications. This lends more anecdotal evidence to the meme that I first saw John Gruber coin, namely that "Windows is The New Classic". In addition, it lends credence to the theory that the golden age of the desktop operating system has passed - that in the age of web-based applications, the OS that you run is largely irrelevant.
This hurts Microsoft the most, because they still derive a large portion of their profits from Windows (and also from Office).
So, things really aren't looking to great for Microsoft. The only thing that keeps me from joining Paul Graham in saying that they are "dead" is the fact that Microsoft is at its most fearsome when it is playing from behind.
Well, that, and they have like 30 billion dollars in the bank. But for now, I'm going to enjoy the current golden age, where I can run whatever OS I like, and still have access to all of the applications that I need (read: Google).
-Andy.