Microsoft’s dominance (or the attempt thereof)

As this post goes on the blog thousands of people might have downloaded the recently released beta version of Windows 7, the new operating system from MS. As per the reviews on torrent sites and other articles, Windows 7 does seem to have provided a lot of relief to the Vista using community, with reduced startup times, lesser BSODs and the likes.

While going through the reviews, a few Mac fanboys (like me) also mocked at the desperation of mr.softy to release a beta of a new OS to the open public, and start bragging about it, instead of working on the current OS offering, the Vista.

Whatever be the case, this blog is essentially a walk down the memory lane and to see how mr.softy tried hard to dominate in a few areas other than Operating Systems.

 

DirectX vs. OpenGL
During the mid 90’s when MS was about to release its first iteration of Windows 95, they also needed to develop and API that would be able to help programmers make games for Windows based OS’s. OpenGL as an API was a standard and highly competitive. Even though OpenGL existed and was a successful API which was cross-platform functional, MS made sure DirectX gained grounds especially amongst game developers and graphic engine manufacturers like nVidia.

Today DirectX is on its 10^th iteration and OpenGL seems to have died in the process.

Silverlight vs. Adobe Flash
Adobe flash is an industry standard plugin to enable rich media to be played on a computer. Rich media includes music/video, animation, vector graphics, the likes…

Flash was working just fine and the industry really didn’t seem to have a problem with the plugin. However, Microsoft had to step in and make its own iteration calling it Silverlight. The first thing mr.softy did was to make its own websites enabled with Silverlight, thus prompting customers to install the plugin to gain full access to rich media on places like msn.com. And customers found it pretty irritating to install Silverlight, for merely accessing a handful of Microsoft’s sites.

Personally, the Silverlight attempt was pretty lame at the outset and although the product inherently is quite promising, its pretty much redundant, since Flash does the same thing and has a much wider acceptance.

Adobe’s Suite vs. Expressions
This one’s my favorite. One day MS got this crazy idea to diversify into the creative sphere. There are already stalwarts like Adobe and Corel which are the de-facto products for graphic applications. And MS tried to venture out with its own iteration of a grphics suite, calling it Microsoft Expressions. Personally I’ve never heard anyone using MS Expressions for graphic intensive projects. Its just plain failure. Even if you take a plain judgement statement, one can never relate Microsoft products being able to create breathtaking visuals or videos. Microsoft products are just plain nerdy, adept at charts, and tables. Graphic design isn’t just their field, and the sheer ignorance of people towards MS Expressions is the proof.

MS Office vs. Open Office/iWorks
This is one area where Mr.Softy wins hands down, and it rightly deserves to be the crown king in Office applications and the likes. Each of its products are downright sturdy, nerdy, and widely used in the industry. Its precisely what an average/high end office would want, and MS has delivered and is delivering flawlessly with every iteration of its MS Office software. True, its office automation software costs more than the OS, but its pretty much worth it.

I love Office, but I also love the Mac :)

Apart from these MS has waged software wars against ERP giants like Oracle and SAP, programming applications, etc. These are domains I’m less aware of, so cant really comment.

All in all, apart from Office productivity softwares there really isn’t much that MS has achieved. Instead of trying its hands on everything they should rather focus on making a more stable OS.