Sometimes companies get to believe their own myth and end up going down a path that is different to the path taken by their users. This creates a major disjoin between the company and its users which the users recognise immediately but the company doesn’t. The users usually then perceive the company as arrogant and out-of-touch and as a company that has stopped listening to its customers.

Sometimes the company fails with a particular product line (e.g., HP and its first tablets) and sometimes its fails altogether. Recent examples of companies that completely misread the market are the aforementioned HP, Kodak and Blackberry.  It was also only a few years ago that IBM almost came to the same crossroads but it managed to stem the collapse.

I guess the lesson is that it doesn’t matter how old the company is or how big or how respected, it can still get it wrong and it can still fail. This is probably truer today than it has ever been because trends and fads and favourites change so rapidly compared to yesteryear. For example, for how long will Twitter and Google rule the roost? I am positive that the next Google and Twitter are already in production and gearing up for the conquest. Does anyone not think that Google is arrogant; dictating what users want, not asking?

However, the company I fear is in more danger than most of becoming suddenly irrelevant is Microsoft. To my mind, Microsoft has pursued a path of change for change’s sake (and to hell with what the customers want) for too many years and I see it today as a giant room full of programmers and marketing people with no one minding the shop and no one steering the ship.

It makes most of its money from Windows and Office and yet these are two of the most disliked pieces of software on the planet. How many people actually love Windows 8 and Office 2013? Does anyone at Microsoft actually know this? They could ask me or anyone out of millions of users but they don’t and won’t. Like HP and Kodak and Blackberry they will internalise all marketing discussions and push through users’ complaints doggedly pursuing their own wayward path to the cliff top.

Windows ME and Windows Vista should have been big red flags but obviously they weren’t because we now have Windows 8 and Metro soon to be replaced by Windows 9. Remember the old expression, “Those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat history.”

In the past Microsoft has got off almost scot free because there was no real competitor waiting in the wings.  Even today, there may not be a single competitor waiting to replace Microsoft but there are competitors such as Apple PCs and phones and tablets, Android PCs, phones and tablets, Linux PCs and servers, Chrome books and the like. There is also Windows 7 (Vista fixed) and Office 2003 and Office 2010 to tide people over under a really strong challenger emerges. You do not have to buy Windows 8 and you do not have to buy Office 2013; there are alternatives.

Even the major fall-off in PC sales over the last couple of years doesn’t seem to have been taken seriously by Microsoft.

There are a lot of factors pushing Microsoft towards the edge of the cliff and all that is needed is a really strong ‘alternative’ (to Windows and less so, Office) or an acceleration of the trend away from Windows PCs to push Microsoft over the cliff. When the end comes, it will be fast, like the next ice age.

When it happens senior management at Microsoft will say to investors and soon-to-be-redundant staff, “We didn’t see this coming” and the rest of us ordinary consumers will just smile knowingly and shake our heads, “Why didn’t you talk to us?”

The post Microsoft era will be one of much, much simpler operating systems (e.g., iOS), much more stable operating systems, much simpler office products and corporate application software that runs in a browser on most devices and under most operating systems (e.g., iOS and Android and Linux).

We won’t need Windows and without Windows, we won’t be forced to use Microsoft Office.

The most important factor contributing to Microsoft’s downfall will be software vendors like us moving away from developing for Windows and into developing for browsers.  This is happening now and the pace is quickening. I predict that by the end of 2015 almost any application software you or any company needs will be available running in a browser. You will not need Windows.

By my reckoning, Microsoft needs to change direction and have a new and popular paradigm in place by the end of 2014 or it doesn’t have a future as the desktop king. Let’s see if I am right; we don’t have long to wait.

Frank McKenna is the CEO of the Knowledgeone Corporation, a long-time Microsoft ISV and the producer of the RecFind 6 product suite.

I run a software company called the Knowledgeone Corporation and we produce enterprise content management software for government and business. Because it takes so long to design, build and test a new product or even a new version, we have to try and predict where the market will be in one or two years and then try to make sure our product RecFind 6 ‘fits-in’ with future requirements.

Years ago it was much easier because we were sure Windows would be the dominant factor and mostly we had to worry about compatibility with the next version of Windows and Microsoft Office. Apple however, changed the game with first the iPhone and then the iPad.

We now need to be aware of a much wider range of devices and operating systems; smart phones and tablets in particular. Three years ago we decided to design in compatibility for iOS and Android and we also decided to ignore Blackberry; so far, a wise move.

However, the prediction business is getting harder because the game is changing faster and probably faster than we can change our software (a major application).

I was just reading about CES 2014 on ZDNet and the major technologies previewed and displayed there. Most are carry overs from 2013 and I haven’t noted anything really new but even so, the question is which of these major trends will become major players during 2014 and 2015 (our design, develop and test window for the next major release of RecFind 6)?

1.     Wearables

2.     The Internet of Things

3.     Contextual Computing (or Predictive Computing)

4.     Consumerization of business tech

5.     3D printing

6.     Big Data

7.     The Cloud

Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of ZDNet, wrote an excellent summary of things to think about for 2014, see this link:

Larry sees China and emerging Chinese companies as major players outside of China in 2014 but I think the Europeans and Americans will resist until well into 2015 or later. Coming on the heels of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 their governments won’t take kindly to having their local high tech industries swamped by Chinese giants. He also talks about the fate of Windows 8 and the direction of the PC market and this is our major concern.

The PC market has been shrinking and even though Microsoft is still the major player by far a lot depends upon the acceptance of Windows 8 as the default operating system. Personally I saw the Windows 8 Metro interface as clumsy and as change for changes’ sake.

I really don’t understand Microsoft’s agenda. Why try to force a major change like this on consumers and businesses just when everyone is happy with Windows 7 and we have all almost forgotten Vista. Windows 8 isn’t an improvement over Windows 7 just as Office 2013 isn’t an improvement over Office 2010. Both are just different and in my opinion, less intuitive and more difficult to use.

Try as I might, I cannot see any benefits to anyone in moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and in moving from Office 2010 to Office 2013. The only organization benefiting would be Microsoft and at the cost of big disruptions to its loyal customers.

Surely this isn’t a wise thing to do in an era of falling PC sales? Why exacerbate the problem?

Smart phones and tablets are real and growing in importance. Android and iOS are the two most important ‘new’ operating systems to support and most importantly for us, browsers are the application carriers of the future. No software vendor has the resources to support all the manifestations of Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, etc., in ‘native’ form but all operating systems support browsers. Browsers have become what Windows was ten years ago. That is, a way to reach most of the market with a single set of source code.

We lived through the early days of DOS, UNIX, Windows and the AS/400 and at one time had about fifteen different sets of source code for RecFind. No vendor wants to go back to those bad old days. When the world settled on Windows it meant that most of us could massively simplify our development regime and revert to a single set of source code to reach ninety-percent of the market. In the early days, Windows was our entry point to the world. Today it is browsers.

Of course not all browsers are equal and there is extra work to do to support different operating systems, especially sand-boxed ones like iOS but, we are still running ninety five percent common source and five-percent variations so it is eminently manageable.

Does Microsoft realize that many developers like us now target browsers as our main application carriers and not Windows? Does it also realize that the Windows 8 Metro interface was the catalyst that pushed many more developers along this same path?

Let’s hope that the new CEO of Microsoft cares more about his customers than the previous one did. If not, 2014 won’t just be the post-PC era, it will also be the beginning of the post-Microsoft era.

I run a software company called the Knowledgeone Corporation and our main job is to provide the tools to capture, manage and find content. As such, we need to be on top of the hardware and software systems used by our customers so that we can constantly review and update our enterprise content management products like RecFind 6 so that they are appropriate to the times and devices in use.

I have spoken in previous Blogs about tablets and form factors and what is needed for business so other than providing the following links, I won’t go over old ground.

Will the Microsoft surface tablet unseat the iPad?

The PC is dead, or is it?

What will be the next big thing in IT?

Could you manage all of your records with a mobile device?

Why aren’t tablets the single solution yet?

The real impact of mobilization – How will it affect the way we work?

Mobile and the Web – The real future of applications?

Form factor – The real problem with mobile devices doing real work

Since my last Blog on the subject we have all seen RT tablets come and go (there will be a big landfill of RT tablets somewhere) and we are now all watching the slow and painful demise of Blackberry. In both of these cases we have to ask how big, super-clever companies like Microsoft and Blackberry could get it so wrong. Just thinking about the number of well-educated and highly experienced marketing and product people they have, it is inconceivable that they couldn’t work out what the average Joe in the street could have told them for free.

Then let’s also think about HP’s disastrous experiment with its TouchPad tablet (another e-waste landfill) and it becomes apparent that some of the largest, richest and best credentialed companies in the world can’t forecast what will happen in the tablet market.

In my opinion the problem all along, apart from operating system selection (iOS or Android?), has been matching needs to form factor and processing power. For example, no one wants a 12 inch phone and no one wants to write and read large documents on a 3 inch screen. This is why most of us still carry around three devices instead of one; a phone, a tablet and a laptop. This is just plain silly, what is the point of a small form factor device if I have to supplement it with a large form factor device? Like most other users, I really just want to carry around one device and I want it to have the capabilities and processing power for all the work I do.

It is for this reason that I believe the next big thing in the tablet market will be based on phones, not tablets. I envision slightly larger and much more powerful phones with universal connectors (are you listening Apple?) and docking capability. I would also like it to have a minimum of 4G and preferably 5G when available.

I want to be able to use it as a phone and when I get to my office I want to connect it to my keyboard, screen and network. I want to be able to connect it to a projector when visiting customers and prospects and I want a dynamically sizing desktop that knows when to automatically adjust the display to the form factor being viewed. That is, I want a different desktop for my screen at work than I want on the phone screen when travelling.

This brings up an interesting issue about choice of operating system as Windows owns about 95% of all business PCs and servers. I have previously never thought about buying a Windows Phone (I had one once a few years ago with Windows CE and it was awful) but my ideal device is going to have to run on the Windows operating system to be really usable in my new one-device paradigm.

I wonder why Microsoft didn’t think of this?

I run a software company and I design and build an enterprise strength content management system called RecFind 6 which among other things, handles all the needs of physical records management.

This is fine if I have a big corporate or government customer because the cost is appropriate to the scale of the task at hand. However it isn’t fine when we receive lots of inquiries from much smaller organizations like small law forms that need a records management solution but only have a very small budget.

A very recent inquiry from a small but successful engineering company was also a problem because they didn’t have any IT infrastructure. They had no servers and used Google email. However, they still had a physical records management problem as well as an electronic document management problem but our solution was way outside of the ballpark.

Like any businessman I don’t like to see business walk away especially after we have spent valuable consultancy time helping the customer to understand the problem and define the need.

We have had a lot of similar inquiries lately and it has started me thinking about the need for a new type of product for small business, one that doesn’t require the overhead and expense of an enterprise-grade solution. It should also be one that doesn’t require in-house servers and a high overhead and maintenance cost.

Given our recent experience building a couple of iOS (for the iPhone and iPad) and Android (for any Android phone or tablet) apps I am of the opinion that any low cost but technically clever and easy-to-use solution should be based around a mobile device like a smart phone or tablet.

The lack of an in-house server wouldn’t be a problem because we would host the solution servers at a data centre in each country we operate in. Programming it wouldn’t be a problem because that is what we do and we already have a web services API as the foundation.

The only challenge I see is the need to get really creative about the functionality and the user interface. There is no way I can implement all the advanced functionality of the full RecFind 6 product on a mobile device and there is no way I can re-use the user interface from either the RecFind 6 smart-client or web-client. Even scaled down the user interface would be unsuitable for a mobile device; it needs a complete redesign. It isn’t just a matter of adapting to different form factors (screen sizes), it is about using the mobile device in the most appropriate way. It is about designing a product that leverages off the unique capabilities of a mobile device, not trying to force fit an application designed for Windows.

The good news is that there is some amazing technology now available for mobile devices that could easily be put to use for commercial business purposes even though a lot of it was designed for light weight applications and games. Three examples of very clever new software for mobile devices are Gimbal Context Aware, Titanium Mobile SDK and Vuforia Augmented Reality. But, these three development products are just the tip of the iceberg; there is literally a plethora of clever development tools and new products both in the market and coming to market in the near future.

As a developer, right now the Android platform looks to be my target. This is mainly because of the amount of software being developed for Android and because of the open nature of Android. It allows me to do far more than Apple allows me to do on its sandboxed iOS operating system.

Android also makes it far easier for me to distribute and support my solutions. I love iOS but Apple is just a little too anal and controlling to suit my needs. For example, I require free access to the file system and Apple doesn’t allow that. Nor does it give me the freedom I need to be able to attach devices my customers will need; no standard USB port is a huge pain for application developers.

I am sorry that I don’t have a solution for my smaller customers yet but I have made the decision to do the research and build some prototypes. RecFind 6 will be the back-end residing on a hosted server (in the ‘Cloud’) because it has a superset of the functionality required for my new mobile app. It is also the perfect development environment because the RecFind 6 Web Services SDK makes it easy for me to build apps for any mobile operating system.

So, I already have the backend functionality, the industrial-strength and scalable relational database and the Web Services API plus expertise in Android development using Eclipse and Java. Now all I have to do to produce my innovative new mobile app is find the most appropriate software and development platforms and then get creative.

It is the getting creative bit that is the real challenge. Wish me luck and watch this space.