To be honest I’m not a big Podcast fan. I only listen to two of them every week, with one related to video games (Le PodCast de Gameblog.fr), and one related to electronics available in North America made by two pretty smart guys extremely famous in their field, Peter Rojas and Ryan Block.

For their 17th opus, Peter and Ryan invited a couple of sharp guests from Engadget, Joshua Topolosky and Ross Rubin, to discuss Microsoft in 2008.

Why was this Podcast interesting? Although a bit limited to stuff /events taking place in the USA, the overall program is good and you can get an idea of what is happening there.

There are two points in this Podcast that are worth thinking about and debating.

The first concerns Windows 7, it’s interesting that both Ryan and Peter came up with the similar ideas of what we all (them and I) expect from the next MS OS… I had the chance to preview 7, and to briefly play with it and read a lot about it and have a pretty clear idea of what 7 is and what it’s not.

Personally I’d have loved for Microsoft to take another approach with 7, and build a new OS from scratch a bit like with OS X (even if OS X is based on Unix Code). 7 will fix many things that made Vista a nightmare for some and improved many others, however, 7 still carry the legacy of older version of MS OS (registry, drivers architecture…).

So how hard would it be for Microsoft to drop all the things that cripple performance and provide unstable OSs in the long term? Why didn’t Microsoft think a little out of the box by starting from scratch (or almost) to fully take advantage of current hardware? Apple did it somehow, they took the risk and succeed. Of course Apple has a tiny share of the market, MS has to please huge corporations to make sure that their 10 year old accounting software runs flawlessly on their shiny new Vista boxes…

This is no excuse really, solutions are here and many of us use it daily. Guys, what about virtualization? Since the arrival of Vista I changed to OS X and run Office 2007 on my OS X PC with VMWare, and performance is outstanding… How hard would it be for MS to integrate something similar on a brand new OS to support software designed and made for older OSs?

Worst of all, things we weren’t aware of (thanks Ryan), MS apparently invested a lot of money on this technology and we’re still waiting to see the results in our copy of Vista or 7.

The second interesting point is something that I didn’t realize because I’m not living in the US, the number of university students using Apple notebooks… I’m not going to argue or to start a PC vs. Mac debate, but I’d like you to focus on the pretty clever marketing approach Apple has here. I’m not sure who said this (Ryan or Peter) but nowadays in the US having a computer is mandatory in universities, and Apple worked very hard to make sure that their notebooks would be popular… If you’re stuck with OS X for 2 to 4 years, there’s a big chance that you will continue to use this OS later, either at home or at the office. While students may not be CEOs, a many of them may graduate to pretty nice positions, and most probably will ask for Apple computers giving a huge blow to MS that until today had the corporate market only for itself…

Will this strategy shape the future of both MS and Apple? I really think so, and at least in the US Apple may soon be a serious adversary to MS in the corporate market share.

Photo from Jonathan NGuyen

I strongly advise you to listen to this PodCast, it’s interesting and these guys are not your average geeks. I’m sure you may learn something by listening to them every week!