Vista, Office & Exchange: critical to economic prosperity

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 30 November 2006 16:02

Opinion and Analysis

(Sounds like a good idea for a sci-fi novel: a rogue programmer plants a time bomb in Vista and at a certain time and date every computer running it crashes and nothing can be done. Microsoft struggles frantically to find the bug but it too is paralysed because all its copies have failed too... But I digress)

The main theme of the press conference was not so much the stand-alone features of the individual products but their ability to work as an integrated whole to improve the collaboration that is essential to the effective functioning of any large organisation. Vamos' argument was that the huge leaps Microsoft has made in this area if exploited across all areas of commerce, industry and government where Microsoft's products are used, could bring significant productivity gains.

And certainly he is correct: so much of commercial activity today is based around Microsoft products that significant increases in their ability to help people work better, faster, more efficiently and more creatively alone and in teams would have measurable and non-trivial impact on the productivity of the economy as a whole.

Scary isn't it: just how much we are dependent on what those folks in Redmond produce. So, no I don't think Vamos was exaggerating when he elevated his company's products to being critical infrastructure.
But there's another aspect to this. Governments take great interest in critical infrastructure, , and rightly so. They apply rules and regulations to it aimed at ensuring it is available in sufficient quantity and quality to meet expected needs, and aimed at minimising the likelihood of failures disrupting the orderly functioning of society.

One way in which this impacts Microsoft is the growing momentum behind open document format among governments increasingly nervous about their ability to exchange and retain information being critically dependent on propriety technology over which they have little control.

The more Microsoft talks up the role of its products as being 'critical infrastructure' the more nervous governments are likely to become.