Microsoft: The Vista of the Red Sea

Across Time

I've written kind words about Microsoft of way-back-when, so it's time to explain how they ended up listed as both a Blue and Red Ocean company. I use Windows Vista. I'm not saying that to try to gain sympathy, but rather because it's relevant to this blog. As every other tech commentator in the world has pointed out, Vista has ... issues.

Vista is the poster child for technical innovation: engineering for engineering’s sake, which doesn’t add value consumers care about.

The late, great, Harry Chapin in a live recording of his song “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” summed up the basic problem when discussing why his brothers weren't impressed with his latest work. "Harry," his brother Steve famously opined. "It sucks."

Bill, Steve, Ray, or whoever is running the show at Microsoft: Vista sucks. It's not just that it's buggy and slow and has too few features to justify its price. All those things are true, but if they were done to give us greater value we’d forgive: the Wii is slower than its competitors but we don’t care. The issue is there’s no Raise or Create here, and you don’t seem to have eliminated anything. It’s a giant collection of pieces: billions of dollars of digital stuff, for no apparent purpose.

When creating Vista, Microsoft wandered, like the ancient Egyptian army, into the middle of a parted Red Sea. They were chasing down Linux and Mac-OS like Pharaoh was chasing down the ancient Israelite's. To those Egyptian soldiers, things must've seemed just fine for awhile. They were standing in the middle of the Red Sea and bearing down on their slave workforce. They thought they were making progress when the walls came crashing down.

Microsoft, Windows is the cornerstone of your might – the business equivalent to the army of ancient Egypt -- and it's standing in the middle of a temporarily suspended Red Sea. Get out of there: learn from the six-paths; figure out what to eliminate and reduce, what to raise and create.

The ugliest of the six-paths is Across Time because it’s inviolable: you’re not going to escape it. Marketers see it simply as trends. It's that, but more. To matter, in BOS terms, a trend must be 1) decisive to your business, 2) irreversible, and 3) having a clear trajectory.

We aren't going to be running software off local computers forever. We're not sure when that will go away, but it won't be long. Microsoft; you know that. You knew that when Vista was being built. You ignored the trend, like the ancient Egyptian army ignored the strange state of the parted Red Sea. It's only a matter of time -- and not that much time -- until those red waves come crashing in. Go Blue before then.