The last few weeks have been very interesting for Microsoft, if you follow the company in the press. The Redmond based software behemoth has in a sense become more popular with the public and investors. Call it the tide shifting or a changing of the guard, but Microsoft is slowly gaining momentum. A certain company that has a very dominant search engine seems to be going in the direction of the “Old Microsoft.”
Think about it for a minute. What is the one company most people that use computers “despise”? Microsoft through their dominance in software went through a period of time in which they were seen as using anti-competitive behaviour to bolster their pockets. Love them or hate them, most people that use a computer daily “touches” one or other Microsoft product through the day. Steve Ballmer, the CEO that has lived in the shadow of Microsoft founder Bill Gates seems to have finally turned the corner. Microsoft is making great strides with Windows Phone 7 products and the entire market is waiting for Windows 8. If media reports are correct then Microsoft 8 will be a huge new product for Microsoft.
At the moment the operating system industry contains three big players; Microsoft, Apple with Mac OS X and the open source software Ubuntu (which is founded by South African Mark Shuttleworth). The software product cycle that most of these products are found in, goes something like this: A public Alpha version of the new software is available for download for early adopters (I mean really early adopters). Then a version is launched that contains the completed product and it may contain bugs. If a very large issue is made public by the press or vulnerability is found by users, an update (Apple) or a service pack (Microsoft) is sent to the users that have authenticated their installation. The service pack can be seen as a patch (think Band-Aid) to resolve the issue. Over time, the manufacturer will then make announcements as to when the official support ends for a specific version. The correlation between these announcements and the newer version getting press is something to have a look at.
With this in mind Microsoft has announced that support for Windows Vista has ceased on 10 April 2012. Thus only one version (Windows 7) will be supported alongside Windows 8. It is the classic up sell that is done by most brands. So new notebooks and desktop computers will I suspect feature Windows 8 later on in the year.
Microsoft has also announced that there will be multiple versions of Windows 8 released (the amount of products mentioned in the press vary at the moment). I am looking forward to seeing what the impact of Windows 8 will be as well as what the average PC user thinks about it. One thing is for sure, Microsoft is continuing on their dominant path…
