Today’s the first official day of the PDC, since the previous two days were officially “pre-conference” days. Big Bill did his speech at the opening. I watched over the Internet instead of dealing with the crowds in the hall. It was a wise decision, if I do say so myself. I could go through my morning news reading while Bill talked in the background. As usual, Bill just gave the party line, the one leading up to Longhorn, I mean Vista. Microsoft has been spamming us with so much Vista stuff over the years, that Billl’s stuff was a yawner. Yeah, it looks nice, and the Sidebar feature will probably be a nice addition. I already feel like I have way too much real estate on my desktop with 2 21 inch flat panels on my desk. Being able to put part of that desktop to better use via the Sidebar will be nice. Of course, I seriously doubt that I’ll be upgrading to Vista. There just isn’t any compelling technology there to cause my company to make the (huge) investment necessary to upgrade everybody.

The Office 12 was another story. I thought that Office 2003 was nice; better than the previous though (once again) not different enough to warrant an upgrade (heck, we’re still using Office XP at work). However, Office 12 looks very nice. I’m looking forward to test driving the real product when its out. Once again, I don’t know if I’d upgrade my current system, though. While it would be nice, it’s hard to justify the cost.

I think that this is Microsoft’s biggest problem going forward. Not Linux, and certainly not Java. Their biggest problem is market. Too much of the market is already “satisfied” with what they have. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Microsoft’s future lies in subscriptions / services. I’d pay a (reasonable) annual fee to keep my Microsoft software up to date, especially if it also included some level of tech support. I think Microsoft understands this too. What they’re groping with is how to get their existing customers to switch. I think it’s going to take cold turkey. They just have to stop offering their products any other way. Of course, for this to work, their update technology is going to have to improve dramatically. Can you imagine going from Windows XP to Windows Vista via an update? Now, wouldn’t that be cool? Or would it just be a headache for Microsoft…

9/13/2005 11:15:20 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  PDC 05