There has been rumors floating around on the web that Vista may be the last release of Windows by Microsoft. For those that have been around a while, you know the progress that Windows has had. Can we even call it progress? I guess so.
First came MS-DOS, our favorite command prompt console. Then came Windows 3.1 … and yes, I still remember using it back on my 486 computer. The folder management was pretty similar to how it is today and the overall feel is still the same. Then evolving to Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP Pro/Home, and now Windows Vista. Here’s a complete Microsoft Windows overview of all the operating system releases.
Microsoft Corporation has an annual revenue of USD$44.28 billion and over 70,000 employees in over 100 countries as of July 2006(Wikipedia). That’s a pretty big corporation. But as a small comparison, lets take a look at Google (even though this article is about Microsoft). Google has over 7,000 employees and has generated over USD$7 billion this year (with the 4th quarter still to come out). The ratio of Microsoft’s revenue to employees it dramatically lower than Google’s. What does this say for Microsoft?
Microsoft is slowly becoming a company of the past. How can I possibly have this opinion? Microsoft has a lot of road blocks in their development process. Preston states it well, “Overall, the problems are obvious: bloated staffing, too many levels of management, and far too much bureaucracy. Microsoft has become the slow-moving, bloated company it vowed it would never be.” Microsoft is exactly that; a bloated company. Microsoft didn’t move with the technological society at a fast enough pace to stay up with it.
So why would this effect their work and their product? Microsoft essentially has one product: Windows. They do have MSN.com and MSNBC.com along with other portals, but they do not depend on this revenue as a huge factor. Windows product sales is the most important factor for the company. It’s not the actual product of Windows which is generating the most revenue, but rather the licensing for Windows. Licensing is very costly and can often cost a company in the upward millions of dollars just to be licensed for the next version of Windows.
Microsoft originally created the demand for Windows as the premiere operating system by offering it for free when it was first released. This gave them the market share and then later started charging for licensing (as talked about above). So why then would Microsoft possibly be seeing the end of their globally-awared operating system? Well, it’s not completely the end of it. Microsoft is considering changing their business model to a subscription-based system rather than a licensed-based model. Moving to a constant upgrade model rather than an upgrade model would make sense so they can have a steadier source of revenue.
We won’t see any more massive Windows upgrades as we’ve seen with Vista.
Preston Gralla (O’Reilly)
Windows might have bigger changes than just the operating system overhaul like Vista in the future ahead. We might see a completely new business model coming from Microsoft to re-organize its company and become restructured.
