“Living In The Google World” – The real answer for Microsoft

An article by Garett Rogers in his “Googling Google” blog on ZDNet inspired a response that I thought fit right into this “Living In The Google World Series”.

In his blog, Garett gives the suggest to Microsoft to partner with Google on their search results while secretly building their own new search engine.

That doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t address the real issue…Microsoft’s mindset.

Having lived most of their corporate lives with the growth of desktop computing, that’s the world they live in. Add to it that the company makes most of it’s revenues from OS’s and desktop apps and you can see how easily they can be stuck in the older “desktop world”.

I see one simple answer on how they can fix this:

Microsoft needs to form a division that lives, breathes, eats and sleeps only on the web.

This group needs to eschew any sort of desktop app, use only web apps and mobile devices. 

Doing so will clearly put them into the experience of what today’s advanced users and tomorrows regular users need and want. I think it will also put them into the experience that their competition (Google) is living every day.

It’s going to be annoying to them for a while, but they can start by using Chrome and the Google App suite in order to learn it inside and out. This will help knock them even further out of their “Microsoft dominate the world with desktop software 1990’s” mindset. 

The knowledge and experience Microsoft gains from this division will make it easy for then to know what to build. From there, they can put their muscle and $ behind building it.

As I mentioned, the nature of their company right now is that their revenues come from the OS and from their apps.

That’s the revenue that makes their company work, so they are compelled to “adapt” that software to work with the new paradigm with mediocre results. 

Better to start with a new “class” of thinking and get back into the game before their boat anchor OS’s and desktop apps pull them down any further.

There’s the answer. Easy to say, harder to do. Still, I bet Microsoft could easily do it if they just get out of their own way.

You can read all of Garett’s story here.