Is the Technology Era Over?

In Mary Jo Foley’s recent book “Microsoft 2.0”, which is aimed at answering the question of “how Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era” whilst exploring the infrastructure, leadership and significant products of the Redmond based software giant. It’s an interesting read, but one part (so far – I’ve not reached the end of the book yet), really stands out to me – is the technology era over?

BillG invented the “Technology Era”, he pioneered the early PCs aimed at business users as a tool and expanded that ethos further into the home consumer market via MS-DOS and then the GUI interface. Anyone remember the early Microsoft slogan “A PC on Every Desk and in Every Home”? Well, during the technology era, Bill and Microsoft made this happen. It’s now more unusual to find a desk without a PC than it is one with a computer or some description.

Ms Foley speculates however that we’re way past this technology blitz and the IT scene is now charting new explorations into new territories and new era’s are coming to fruition – for example, Apple has pioneered the “Design Era”, with their ‘hip’ iPod/iPhone/Mac designs. Sony and Nintendo currently leading the “Gaming Era”. Google pioneered the “Search Era” and also the “Online Advertising Era”. Facebook has pioneered the “Social Networking Era”.

All of these new areas of development, Microsoft have entered or increased their involvement within, however Gates and Microsoft are getting further and further away from this technology era that they developed and lead their competition and markets into. They achieved their goal, and are now its all too easy for people to forget the developments and constant improvements Microsoft have made without people being able to hail them as the next big thing. Its almost as if the underlying Operating System is taken for granted now a days, as these new services are deployed on top of the OS.

Its important to remember though that Microsoft still own more than 90% of the worldwide Operating System market and MS Office continues to be the office suite of choice in the vast majority of cases (and I still expect Vista to eventually become good, and even if I’m wrong its still likely that the next version of Windows will still incorporate most of the Vista features and be refined and improved further). They are by no means out of the game and no one should count them out or write them off for a long time yet – the next collection of eras (design, social, gaming, search, advertising, etc), may be happening, but rest assured Microsoft are right in there as a big player in areas outside of their very own “Technology Era”.