CES; the (latest) Microsoft future, and other random thoughts!

[partridge]

Just read this on the BBC news site, and sums up precisely my feelings on Microsofts latest attempt to get everyone into the Microsoft world

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technolog...volution.shtml

It also got me thinking, what in the last few years have MS done that has actually made a big impact on the world. And thinking about new innovations, etc I found myself coming up with the following short list of "things" that we all know about and many of us regularly use. The thing is, none of them have anything to do with MS...

iTunes and the iPod
MySpace
YouTube
ebay
tabbed browsing
Google Earth (though MS have their own, I bet Googles is more widely used)

All I could come up with for MS was the usual updates for Office, IE and another new operating system, Vista. This is their bread and butter, nothing new. So why, despite preaching every year that new innovations from MS are going to change the way we do things, is it always other companies that end up doing it?

Actually, correction, Xbox Live was a genuine move forward for console gaming. And now they want to enable 360 gamers to play against PC gamers with Vista Live. They keep creating new ways for your 360 to talk to your PC, but why not let the 360 do some of the stuff that the PC does?

And there's the crux of the problem for MS - they can't let the 360 stand on its own at the cost of the PC, because the bread and butter income for MS is their PC software. They can allow you to stream a limited amount of content to your 360, but they don't want you to use your 360 as a media center because - gasp - you might stop using your PC so much. And this Vista Live system is precisely that; Vista. It won't work on XP so it's going to be a long time before that system has any users in big numbers. Personally I have no reason to change to Vista, so I'm not going to.

For a company with the money and resources that they have to hand, it surprises me that all to often it is the little companies out there that take the lead. One day MS's bread and butter will dry up, they better come up with something to take its place!