Serious cracks appear in the Windows market lock

I’m not alone in recognizing that there’s a trend developing that’s got to be causing serious concerns for Microsoft and its OEM partners. People are seriously considering a switch to Apple’s computers and Mac OS X operating system. I see it at the technology conferences I attend where there is an ever-increasing number of glowing Apple logos in the audience. And I see it in the hundreds of conversations I have every month with people in the media, analyst community, and IT world. And the tipping point, I think, is Windows Vista.

Now I’m not trying to incite a flame war nor am I sprinkling troll bait. If you use Vista and are having a good experience, that’s great. I’m not trying to convince you that a switch to the Mac is a good idea. But I can tell you, based on my own personal experience and the anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered over the past six months, that the number of technically savvy people who are either rolling back to Windows XP Pro or switching to the Mac is an upward trend line. Maybe not a hockey stick, internet bubble 1.0 trend line, but significant all the same. These are influencers who have a serious and measurable impact on both consumer and business decision-making.

The simple truth for many people is that Vista has failed to deliver “the goods”. The improvements over XP with Service Pack 2 are minimal and the changes in how things work too often feel like change for change’s sake. Operations seem to take longer, familiar methods for getting things done have been modified, and a number of everyday activities require more mouse clicks than they used to. The big win features promised years ago like the WinFS file system didn’t make the cut. And too many existing PCs have proved to be inadequate when faced with Vista’s heavier hardware requirements.

The latest salvo in this barrage of unhappy tidings for the company comes from no less an authoritative business voice than the Wall St. Journal. Jason Fry, in his Real Time column this morning, reports on the flood of e-mails he’s received since first posing a question to his audience about what he should look for in a new PC. It’ll come as no surprise that many of the suggestions he received were of the “time to switch” variety. He writes (my emphasis):

Email after email came from people who had recently switched from Windows to Macs, or were planning to do so once OS X 10.5 — alias Leopard — comes out next month. (By the way, why not stick with the working names for operating systems? They’re always cooler.) And many of those emails came from people who were longtime, dedicated Windows users, including engineering types who had resisted what they saw as Apple hype. (Another theme that emerged from my correspondence: Vista was the final straw for a number of Windows users. Microsoft has a problem on its hands there.)

I believe he’s right. Although I continue to use Vista, I spend the majority of my time working on a MacBook these days. I still favor the Tablet PC (Lenovo X61t) for reading digital magazines, annotating PDFs, and doing freeform mindmapping with Mindjet MindManager. The NY Times Reader is still my favorite way to read that newspaper (and the long-promised Mac version is still nowhere in sight) with the elegant reflow of pages provided by Windows Presentation Foundation. And Microsoft Office 2007 is unparalleled by any other productivity suite on any platform for integration between it’s component applications.

Still, my use of Vista is increasingly happening on the MacBook in a virtual machine. I’m currently using VMWare Fusion although I was an early adopter of Parallels Desktop and have found both to be more than adequate for occasional Windows work. And I’m not alone in this migration. The reasons are many and mix in different ways for different people but a common denominator in virtually every person’s decision I’ve spoken to is the reduction of time spent maintaining the system.

I don’t worry about viruses. I spend far less time obsessing over security updates and the unintended consequences (otherwise known as something breaking) that had become a monthly ritual. I’ve been running my current MacBook for almost a year and have not had one system-related issue. In that time, I would have rebuilt my Windows installation at least once due to the accumulation of registry cruft and scattered code droppings that over time makes many Windows systems slow down or simply fail. While I freely admit that I’m something of an edge case because of the higher-than-average number of software install/uninstall operations I perform due to my work, the problem is well-document and discussed in many online forums and has been for years. The Registry in Windows gets arthritic over time.

Fry seems to agree. He summarizes his impending decision like this (again, my emphasis):

I’m definitely considering the iMac, but I’ll wait for Leopard, and paying $1,200 for a new PC (at least — because you know I’ll want the 24-inch iMac and the fastest processor and the most RAM) makes this a decision to be mulled over a while longer. But like so many correspondents, I sense an Apple takeover of my computing world. I haven’t tried Vista, and I’ve always been fairly happy with my Dell machines, but in (the) last few years the world has changed, and I can’t think of a compelling reason to stay on the Windows-only side of it.

There are other signs of course. The Mac, in and of itself, is not going to be the undoing of Microsoft. IBM recently announced a new strategic alignment with the OpenOffice project. If critical bits of the Notes engine get contributed to open source as has been widely theorized, another link in Microsoft’s chain is severely weakened. If Outlook’s hegemony is threatened by a free alternative offering a similar degree of integration between e-mail, calendar, contact, and tasks, another reason for MS Office’s entrenched position will come loose.

One the standards and legal fronts, there also cause for concern. The new Microsoft Office Open XML format (OOXML) used by Office 2007 applications was rejected recently by the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) which is influential in the government sector – a key market segment for Microsoft. International Standards Organization (ISO) certification is still being pursued but this decision did Microsoft no favors in that pursuit.

And finally, blognation Belgium’s Robin Wauters reported this morning, that “after 9 years of legal tussle, a European court will rule in Brussels’ biggest ever antitrust case. Today, the Court of First Instance will give its verdict on an appeal case against the EU’s decision to fine the world’s leading software company nearly half-a-billion euros.” That verdict just announced, has gone against Microsoft and will set off another seismic tremor that will rattle the company’s foundation. In a report in the Wall St. Journal immediately following the decision, Brad Smith, the company’s general counsel is quoted as saying, “We just need to think about this. It’s a serious and substantial decision and it deserves serious thought rather than an instantaneous decision,” in response to questions about how the company plans to respond.

Taken as a whole, things are not looking up for Microsoft. Sales statistics notwithstanding, market embrace of Vista – representing six years of development effort – is not particularly great. Alternatives continue to emerge that challenge the long-held notion that Windows is the only way to work compatibly in business. And nagging legal issues continue to dog the company.

What’s your experience been? Have you adopted Vista in your work and organization or are you sticking with Windows XP? If so, how has that migration worked out? If not, why not? Have you considered a switch to the Mac? Do you see the same warning signs that a change is brewing?

Update: It goes from bad to worse. According to an eWEEK report this morning, VMWare has just dealt Microsoft a blow in the virtualization space with their latest ESX hypervisor release . According to Tom Bittman, a Gartner analyst quoted in the report:

VMware has scored a significant coup by slimming down its ESX Server to 32 MB. This compares to 256 KB for XenSource’s Linux-based Dom 0 hypervisor and “between a gig and a gig and half” for Microsoft’s virtualization technology.

“It’s about time that [VMware] did it. They had to get rid of the service console… VMware has made Viridian (Microsoft’s forthcoming virtualization engine in the now-delayed Windows Server 2008) out of date in one move,” he said.