Imagine a Microsoft-Free Life

Now, IBM was preparing to do it again with its "H" series -- and it was running smack into a wall of resistance from its own customers. Silicon Valley, watching this mess unfold, forgot all about the 30 years that Big Blue had owned computing and the billions of dollars it had made -- and instead learned all of the wrong lessons about becoming a standard. It would be another quarter century until most of (non-Intel) Silicon Valley -- thanks to Steve Jobs -- finally got the lesson right.

But Bill Gates didn't make that mistake -- and by quickly driving DOS/Windows and Word/Office into global standards, Microsoft has made hundreds of billions of dollars and continues to hold off most of the competition even to this day.

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But like the old IBM, Microsoft is finally beginning to see the back end of standardization. It is now the Bismark or Yamoto of high tech: huge, menacing and still very dangerous, but lumbering, increasingly trapped and now under assault from every direction by faster and more nimble enemies. Apple is attacking from one direction, Google from another, the Linux crowd from still another, and now, irony or ironies, IBM itself -- dead and reborn as a very different company -- is bringing its guns to bear.

None of these assaults are likely to sink Microsoft. Not this time, at least.

The company's biggest burden -- the weight of all of those existing users who see Windows and Office as an intrinsic part of their lives, and who resist any change -- is also its greatest strength: those folks, like all of us fools who still stick with AOL for no other reason than inertia, will not switch to a competitive product easily. But in the end, perhaps before the end of this decade, and perhaps quite suddenly, they will -- and Microsoft will die, perhaps like IBM to be reborn as a different kind of company. And then, as with the old Big Blue, all that will be left is a legacy: in Microsoft's case, it will be having universally popularized the personal computer and, perhaps, for having funded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Oxford Union Debate

[As I noted last week, I was lucky enough to be one of the participants in a recent Oxford Union debate -- and though my speech wasn't the best of the night, it did have the advantage of being the shortest.