Engine Eater

Each year the team of analysts at Directions on Microsoft identifies the top strategic issues Microsoft needs to address over the next twelve months and beyond. Left unattended, each could ultimately interrupt Microsoft’s 25+ year run of growth and profits and leave the door open for younger, smaller, and more nimble competitors.

1.Take Vista into the Boardroom

Windows Vista could offer large organizations improvements in software development, security, reliability, systems management, and user interface. However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract, and sales of Windows upgrade rights to corporations have been disappointing. In 2006, Microsoft has to settle on a feature set for Vista that appeals to enterprises, explain clearly what that feature set is, and reveal what PC hardware and other infrastructure corporations require to reap the benefits.

"The Windows Client division has to tell corporate customers why they want Windows Vista, and why they shouldn't wait until they buy new hardware."
—Rob Helm, Director of Research

2.Lead on Application Security and Reliability

Microsoft has always offered guidelines for how to develop secure, reliable applications on Windows, but the company rarely had the discipline to enforce them, even with its own applications. The result has been a treadmill: developers inside and outside of Microsoft continue to write applications that fail or require unsafe levels of privilege to run, while the Windows team develops increasingly complex workarounds (such as the User Account Protection mechanism of Windows Vista) to keep these applications going. Meanwhile, Microsoft's antispyware team hesitates to say whether clearly malicious software, such as a recent digital rights management tool that shipped on some Sony CDs and that observers deemed a "rootkit," violates its guidelines. The run-up to Vista in 2006 could be Microsoft's last cha...