Back in March, 2007, after the umpteenth crash and database rebuild cycle of Microsoft Outlook, and the 15-30 minutes of downtime, anger and stress that went with each crash, I kissed Windows goodbye, and moved to the Mac (read the post HERE). Needless to say, I never looked back.
At the time, I predicted a long, slow, path to entropy for Microsoft (measured in years), noting (respectfully) that that the huge tax required to support legacy customer investments by maintaining backwards compatability and supporting infinite thousands of hardware/software combinations in the Wintel ecosystem was incompatible with delivering peak performance and maintaining an innovation culture.
Flash-forward two-and-a-half years, and the company is an also-ran in Media and Mobile; has lost out in Search; has few compelling Internet service offerings; has suffered the ignominy of the Vista debacle; and while still quite formidable (and hugely profitable), is somehow, dare I say, irrelevant.
Meanwhile, readers of this blog know how Apple (and Google) have played their hands to market dominance, gaudy profits and cash-flow galore.
Well, for me, the next shoe dropped in my disengagement from all things Microsoft. What happened? First, some background.
To date, even as an Apple lover, I have avoided Apple Mail, which is somewhat feature light and less integrated across Mail, Calendar and Contacts than the richer, but annoyingly clunky, and slogging Entourage, Microsoft's email client for the Mac. (I am a pragmatic utilitarian, after all, which explains why I own a Blackberry and an iPod Touch, but not an iPhone -- no AT&T for me.)
Dissuaded in the past from deleting the ever-growing trash can in Entourage (the auto-empty trash feature is broken, and trying to erase a major block of emails basically locks down the system), I finally decided to bite the bullet and erase over two thousand pieces of email garbage.
Midway through the process, Entourage threw up an exception, told me my Office Database was damaged, and subsequent efforts failed to fix the problem.
Stoically, I said goodbye Microsoft Entourage, and hello to Apple Mail, iCal and Address Book.
It's a simple case of addition by subtraction; a small individual loss for Microsoft on the road to Death by a Thousand Cuts.
Related Posts:
- Comparing Microsoft to the Collapse of Capitalism
- Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
- Holy Shit! Apple's Halo Effect: How Apple has outflanked Microsoft (and the rest of the tech industry)
