Microsoft should let Apple have the Toy Market

I was in Best Buy and saw some computers running vista with all the bells and whistles turned on. From what I could see, it was more annoying than cool. The whole presentation layer strikes me as something from a bad PowerPoint presentations - too much overuse of transitions, sparkly effects that provide no re all value, etc.

Microsoft, let Apple have the toy market. Give them the 1-5% of the consumer market that wants a dumb terminal with a fancy TV like interface. Concentrate on your strengths and where the money is long term. It's also where Apple will not be able to compete since they don't have the developer tools and programming language support that you get with Microsoft developer tools (.NET, IIS, SQL Server, etc.)

We've been getting exposure to Microsoft's new expression products and I can tell you first hand that its VERY COOL technology. And its cool not in the gee-whiz bang kind of way, its cool in how seamless and effective a tool it is. If you think about how difficult 3D applications used to be and how developer-centric these applications ended up being as a result, this changes the game.

So when you see Vista as a consumer OS, ignore it. Its important for Microsoft to compete in this space just maintain control over the desktop, but the real power of the newest Microsoft technologies and more importantly developer tools is in the use of 3D and rich media technologies to power money making applications.

So let Apple have the hip-cool market and concentrate on building applications that have been powering the Microsoft business market since VB 3.0 struck in big almost 15 years ago - medical applications, financial applications, business work flow and processes, logistics, medium sized businesses, etc.

VB 3.0, Access, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, etc. all were successful because an average business could get some instant productivity boost by hiring some decent intermediate programmers and get them rapidly developing business applications. Now with Expression, Microsoft can now add graphic designers, HTML coders, and digital media experts into the mix and power some very cool applications that have up to this point been out of reach of most average development shops.

Here are a few examples:

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/community/spotlight/Thirteen23.mspx
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=109413