Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

I am persuaded by some of the recent arguments (John Siracusa's maybe?) that both the innovation and the money in general-purpose computing industry have moved over to the consumer side of the equation, and that this change has put MS in a worse position than they've traditionally been in.

Dominating corporate computing (for soooo fucking loooong) made MS billions and billions, but it also held back their two products, Windows and Office.

They couldn't ditch compatibility, they couldn't make disruptive moves, they needed to pre-announce their roadmap... and also, I'd guess that they probably just didn't see the business-to-consumer weight shift coming, just as they didn't see the Internet coming until it ran them over. (Neither did any of their peers, though -- Apple still had their own branded AOL-clone at a late stage, what was it, eWorld? The Internet ran over everybody as the 80s turned into the 90s. And MS is itself one of those hidebound big corporations; it's natural for those organisms to be slow.)

Anyway my point is that megacorps actually want a pretty limited computing product, compared to consumers. Barring esoteric business needs, they don't need, or even want, their employees to be able to, say, shoot HD video, make unlimited anonymous video calls to anybody in the world, track themselves jogging with accelerometers and GPS, play Angry Birds, and so forth. In general, megacorps want cheap, reliable, slow-moving tools that match their slow-moving planning and frankly limited needs. And did I mention cheap. Cheap.

Back when a PC cost as much as a used car, business purchasing drove the industry. But the human spirit and Moore's law went marching on, and in recent years we have a variety of desktop, laptop,and pocket phone/computers that not only outperform those used-car PCs of yesteryear, but may also feature wireless and nationwide magical Internet connections, ones much faster than the 128K ISDN-line that cost me 40,000 yen per month in the 90s.

So now you can buy a pretty kickass computer--one that fits in your pocket, or handbag, or backpack, whatever you prefer--for the price of like, two steak dinners with a date. (Maybe three or four for the macbook air.)

Cost-conscious companies with big headcounts don't need any of that good shit. So they end up with, say, a fleet of Dell Vostro 620S desktop PCs with 4GB RAM, archaic spinning-platter HDDs, and Windows 7 Pro (or XP still, if they are on a volume license (which they totally are)). So we're talking about $700 with a shitty Dell monitor. 3-4 year deployment life. MS'll make whatever percentage of that, plus a bit on the Office they'll probably use, but that's it for that duration.

Meanwhile, a guy and his wife will drop eight times that on smartphones over the same duration. iPhone, Nexus, Galaxy, whatever. (But yeah, mostly iPhone.) Or a tablet of some kind.

Because they want all that good new shit, and it's no longer so expensive that they can't have it.

So consumers, wow what a shitty word, okay I mean 'people doing their own things and living their lives' -- let's call them PEOPLE for short -- can now afford computers. Waitresses, stadium hot-dog boys, tax drivers, high-school students. That was not so much the case when MS started to achieve hegemony.

Back then, not only could PEOPLE much less frequently afford computers, but also computers weren't nearly as capable of doing the cool shit that PEOPLE are actually interested in. PEOPLE want to do cool shit, not just do some boring-ass work. Video mashups, GPS flash mobs, music buying, music bootlegging, angry birds, porn, cold fusion, etc.

Therefore, the companies aimed at PEOPLE are the ones who are, and have been for a while, making the more ground-breaking and innovative products. Lighter, simpler, more sensors, more stable, brand new re-architected OS software. The PEOPLE are the ones recently pushing the limits in computing. Demanding new, ground-breaking products. Rewarding innovation.

Computers were prohibitively expensive. But now they're not.

Computers used to not be able to do cool shit. Now they can.

So even if the ENTERPRISE market is still bigger overall in terms of units, ENTERPRISE wants shittier products, updated less frequently, for less money. That's what MS has provided over the past decade (with the exception of the less money part, har har).

Microsoft's products met those needs, but at the cost of tying MS to that legacy, and thwarting their ability to compete for the faster-evolving PEOPLE market, arguably now more important.

They are now trying to reinvent themselves. With Windows Phone surely, and it seems they are trying to make a break with the past even with Windows 8, though they are understandably halting in their efforts, loathe to disturb the waning cash cow. But serving the PEOPLE and serving the ENTERPRISE increasingly seem to be mutually exclusive. PEOPLE want new, awesome, fast, again! ENTERPRISE has different priorities. So MS has its internal schizophrenia. And no success on that front so far.

I didn't mean that the enterprise market was becoming less lucrative for everybody, although relative to the consumer market, it probably is. I meant that for Microsoft specifically their dominance of the enterprise over the past 15+ years has been milked for everything it is worth and has now become a hindrance to them, keeping them stuck in a narrowing rut.

Why a Motorola Razr instead of an iPhone 4S? Because the latter didn't exist. When IE6 came out more than a decade ago, it was the absolute best browser available. In 2004 when XP SP2 came out, it cleaned up a lot of reliability and security issues. You just have to look at IE6 with a 2001-based lens and realize what the alternatives were at the time.

IE6 was good enough to become the standard for slow-moving corporate types, and they're sticking with it. The every-few-weeks upgrades of Chrome and (now) Firefox are way too fast for them.

A lot of these big companies will stay with IE6 till the bitter end in 2014, when free XP support (security patches) goes away. I wouldn't put it past some of them to pay for XP support rather than switch to another OS, or to negotiate extended XP support into their Microsoft upgrade contracts.

This happens all the time at the hospital I work at. I'm constantly flummoxed by how behind the times software vendors consistently are. We're still stuck on XP for the foreseeable future because some of our vendors are still pushing updates that are totally incompatible with NT6 with no timeline for when it might work.

They've had half a decade to fix their software, and they just aren't doing it. I understand that Enterprise moves slowly, but you eventually reach a point of absurdity, as well.