By Matt Giancola, Field Service Consultant for Data Network Group.

For the better part of twenty years Microsoft has been the undisputed world-wide leader in all things software. But recently it seems some things have changed up there in Redmond, WA. Is it me or does every new desktop product that Microsoft comes out with nowadays seem to mimic the current competition? (I’m going to exempt Microsoft’s current Server products from this post as they remain the industry standard and are fine, fine products in my opinion.) Case in point: Internet Explorer 9. I installed IE9 last night on my new laptop and when arriving at the office this morning launched it for the first time. I could have sworn I was looking at the latest release of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. The layout, menu options and basic graphics are eerily similar to these other products.

This all started with Windows 7. This has been blogged countless times over the past few years but it seems Microsoft made no attempt to hide the fact that they were blatantly ripping off a lot of the visual and user experience aspects of the hugely popular Mac OSX operating system. And so far it has worked. As many of you would who are now using Win 7 can probably concur (excepting you XP diehards of course) the current OS is a thing of beauty.

It is going to be very interesting going forward to see how Microsoft reacts to this newfound competition and pressure that for years they didn’t really have to worry about. I was at a Hyper-V virtualization training session recently at Microsoft’s Denver facility and was strange hearing them describing themselves as the underdogs to VMWare in the virtualization market even considering they were latecomers to that technology. Will Microsoft continue to be the innovative trendsetters that made them the biggest corporate juggernaut this world has ever seen or will they come back to the pack and let these younger, hungrier competitors take more of the pie? This will be fascinating to watch over the next decade.