Contributed by Staff November 16, 2007 9:39 AM

Given all the hoopla surrounding the recent release of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard (perhaps Mac OS X version 5.0 makes more sense?), we feel we would be remiss if we didn't chime in with some sort of timely commentary about the occasion. However, we would like to take a different tack and ponder a new possible direction for a second organization that's involved with this latest Apple roll-out. That's right, though it's indirect, and the company had nothing to do development-wise with Apple's new operating system (OS), Microsoft is an involved party with the Leopard release. This is due to the inevitable comparisons to its own less-than-a-year-old-and-still-not-widely-embraced latest OS offering.

A quick search on the Internet will yield any number of reviews of Windows Vista placing it in less than a favorable view (perhaps Windows obstructed Vista), so our thoughts began to drift until we arrived at this question. Should Microsoft depart from the operating system (OS) market?

At first the question might seem absurd given that the company's flagship product is an operating system (ignoring critics' complaints from a quality standpoint). Although when looking at the company's other offerings combined with the speculation that Microsoft will take a significant hit in the OS market as users migrate to Mac OS X, we began to recognize the merit of the question.

Besides Windows, Microsoft makes a host of products that have been enjoying a good deal of success. Just to name some, there's the Office suite, SQL Server, MSN Search/Live Search, .NET development tools, Access, Hotmail, and Xbox. Over the years, Microsoft has been the butt of a good many jokes concerning Windows, but if the company were to abandon this product most of those jokes would no longer be valid. And that's because none of the other Microsoft products have been plagued with the troubles that Windows has (save perhaps Office macros).

So what's the take-away thus far? That Microsoft's products other than Windows are pretty decent. Sure, they still suffer from the interface woes that Windows has such as closing the last window of an application also quits the program or that some widgets are activated on a "mouse down" while others are activated on a "mouse up." The difference though, is that these other products have largely been developed with real forethought. For example, based on our own observations Hotmail's junk mail filtering introduced a dramatic reduction in spam, and SQL Server has proved to be both a powerful and feature-rich database server.

The conclusion we've arrived at is that it may be a reasonable business decision for Microsoft to end of life Windows and focus on the areas that it's truly good at. A number of software companies have gotten very big without having an operating system in its portfolio, CA, SAP, and Adobe all seem like good examples. Freeing up the resources used for developing Windows could help put Microsoft in a remarkable position when they're applied to the company's better offerings. With all the acclaim that Apple Mac OS X 10.5 has been receiving coupled with all the vituperation of Vista, now may be a good time to make the move.


© 2007 Kaomso