Back in the 1970s, cigarettes were everywhere. Even Tube trains suffocated you with the stink of tobacco. The memory came back to me while I was talking to Dave, a sales guy in the mobile phone section of HMV in Watford.
The conversation worked its way round to Windows 7. I’d been to the launch the week before, and it was still hot news. Dave wanted to know what I thought of it, and I said it was great, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. And that’s when he said, ‘Yeah, but Windows is everywhere. It’ll never go away.’ And that’s what reminded me of the ubiquitous fug of fags back in the day. Could any one of us then have imagined life without it?
I’d set off for that launch in a good mood. I’d been using Windows 7 on and off for months, and it looked as if Microsoft might finally have got something right. Not the price, perhaps (officially the full retail top-featured version costs about as much as an entry-level laptop), not the baffling array of different packages and certainly not the retention of legacy features from long defunct minicomputers, like the need to know that applications reside on the C: drive. But it’s smooth, does a good job and seems to fix most of the infelicities of Vista.
But something very wrong became clear at that launch. I don’t mean the way Griff Parry, BSkyB’s Director of Video-On-Demand, couldn’t get Windows 7 to connect to the internet to demonstrate his Windows Sky Player – even after three tries over a period of half an hour in a room stuffed to the gunnels with tech-savvy Microsoft staff. That was just a minor technical hitch. No, the problem with Microsoft is bigger than that. It’s a vision thing.
Microsoft’s UK MD, Ashley Highfield, talked a lot about listening to customers, and I see Windows 7 adverts everywhere taking much the same line. “Windows 7 was my idea,” says some actor, posing as a customer. But in listening to what people say, rather than exploring the real subtext, Microsoft has proved itself to be (forgive the mixed metaphor) catastrophically deaf to the big picture.
When customers ask for faster startup and fewer clicks, what they’re really saying is, ‘We’d like the operating system to go away’. Today we probably divide our screen time equally between a computer, a TV set and our mobile phone. My main computer happens to run Snow Leopard, my TV set is fed from networked multimedia boxes powered by Linux and my phone is a BlackBerry. Various flavours of Windows are in that mix somewhere (my second phone is Windows Mobile, and the back-end server for one multimedia box is Windows XP), and Windows may loom even larger in your own life. But who cares? We just want to be able to shift our stuff around between these various devices with the minimum hassle.
‘We know,’ says Microsoft. ‘That’s why we’ve devised the Three Screens and a Cloud strategy.’ Oh, really? ‘Oh, yes, really,’ says Ashley Highfield. And while the engineers are fiddling about backstage trying to get poor old Griff Parry’s Sky app working, Highfield explains how these three screens and a cloud – PC, TV, mobile and the internet – will all meld seamlessly together. Because as a necessary condition of that seamless melding, they’ll all be running various versions of Windows.
Suddenly I feel like I’m travelling back in time to the 1980s, when operating systems were important. It was a time that culminated in operating-system wars; a time when Microsoft took all by locking in its customers to a Windows environment from which they’d never escape.
Except that we did escape. Today, with our phones, multimedia boxes and games consoles, we’re certainly not stuck with Windows everywhere. And the way to join them all up isn’t by banishing this operating system democracy and turning it into a one-party state. Microsoft, are you listening to that?
Google is. Doubtless Google would quite like me to own an Android phone and run the Chrome operating system on my notebook. But it’s not saying, ‘Unless you do this, if you want to sync – you’re sunk’.
I’m no apologist for Google. Or for Apple. These are both big companies that, I strongly suspect, would very much like to own us the way Microsoft thought it owned us a decade ago. But these are also companies with a clue. Google apps run across multiple platforms, and Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest operating system, migrates elegantly to generic Intel hardware with a little help from the open-source community. Apple is showing no sign of discouraging this. It’s a plural world, and Apple gets that.
But Microsoft’s vision is three screens and a cloud – of old cigarette smoke. Unless it catches up, it may find itself edged out of the game in a way it simply can’t imagine.
