Did you notice? Almost every ten years, Microsoft reshape itself to better embrace the market. The last move was in late 1995 when Microsoft introduced Windows 95 that progressively lead to the end of the DOS era and eliminated at the same time other OS competitors. It was a big success for Microsoft and a revolution for PC users. During the next decade, Microsoft strategy was to lock PC users into their application and to slow down the evolution of the threatening Internet. In that regard, they killed Netscape and replace it with a stagnant version of their own browser.

We’re now late 2005 and it’s time for a move. But things are really not like Microsoft planned to. They’re not alone on the market and worse, new competitors emerged. The Internet has grown unexpectedly into something powerful and mature, and people got DSL lines, incredible fast and cheap. Microsoft is surrounded. On the Internet with Google, which is building the biggest distributed OS for web applications. On the server and embedded side with GNU/Linux and the Java platform. On the desktop with Apple which was the first to release an innovative OS with tons of exciting features that can only be dreamed of by PC users. And also by Adobe that recently acquired Macromedia and helped define standards for electronic publishing. Microsoft is more decided than ever to take back the control. They’re fighting on all fronts at the same time, being forced to take unexpected decisions.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft will mark the change. They adopted a brand new policy, a new look and developed new applications. They definitely need to catch up over the competition and provide the same kind software and services for users. They launched web sites to communicate about their new products such as Microsoft Max which is a direct answer to Google’s Picasa and Apple’s iPhoto. At first sight, it’s very hard to tell that’s a Microsoft product, it looks so unexpected and so Apple-ish. The next version of the Office suite — numbered as Office 12 — follow the same path, it has been entirely redesigned and will adopt a more modern look. The desktop will also feature Gadgets, the equivalent to Apple’s Dashboard Widgets. Sure a lack of imagination but not having them would means being outdated in people’s mind. But as usual, built-in technologies in Vista will also compete with widely accepted standards like PDF. If Apple choose to built their rendering system on top of the PDF standard, Microsoft doesn’t and they decided to implement their own presentation format.

Vista will sure be a connected OS. It feature the XAML technology that is a way for Microsoft to try again to lock users into a Windows-only Internet — XAML it’s a textual description of an application to be downloaded from the Internet, like a web page but that runs only on Windows. But XAML might not be enough to fight the competition and especially Google. Because Google shows that with actual technology you can already do amazing web applications and Microsoft will have difficulties to justify its own proprietary technology. By the way, few people know about it but Microsoft recently launched start.com, an experimental web site using standard web technology. A premiere for Microsoft. The site looks like Google News and use AJAX — a technique for building dynamic web applications with a better user experience. What’s interesting is that despite the arrival of Windows Vista, Microsoft is still investigating alternatives using standards — just in case — and that seems pretty urgent because they’re aggressively hiring Web and Javascript developers for it.

Microsoft didn’t have the choice. They’ve been forced to move by the competition and they’re doing it fast and aggressively. A couple of weeks ago, they announced a sharp reorganization of the company into three divisions to increase their speed to market. That promise very exciting fights in the future.