To heck with Microsoft, be what's NOW

We have to be very, very careful in our house about what we say. Anything, any random phrase that reminds my wife of a commercial jingle will set her off SINGING that jingle. If it’s lunchtime and we pull out the baloney, she starts crooning the Oscar Mayer song. If we drive past a Burger King, I’m treated to “Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce.”

The problem is that my wife, lovely as she is, sings like a wounded wildebeest. Whenever she breaks into song, the cows stop giving milk, the chickens stop laying eggs, and somewhere at NORAD an alarm starts going off. So marketing slogans are right out, in our household.

The last time Microsoft had anything catchy going in marketing, it involved a Rolling Stones song that I’m still not allowed to play in the house when the kids are home, because of one dirty line near the very end. But they’re trying again, this time with the tagline, “Be what’s next.”

Microsoft has a lot of good products. I’m not sure if one of them is Windows, which is why SO many of my colleagues, who are provided laptops by employers, put out their own money to buy Macs for work. Windows may be easy to work on, but it’s also easier for hackers and other folks to turn into a pile of doo-doo. Like I always say, you don’t ever really own a Windows box, you’re just sort of borrowing it, because no matter what you want it to do, it’s going to do whatever it feels like anyway.

“Be what’s next” is kinda funny, since when it comes to identity, “what’s next” for MS is a reconfig of “what’s old.” They took a bunch of stuff they had laying around, glued it all together, and called it something new, namely “Forefront.” It’s still AD, Sharepoint, and some bits and pieces, along with third party components. What’s new here is the packaging, and the supposed integrations. Sharepoint still scares me, because it’s notoriously unsafe, and lends itself to silo security policies maintained by whoever decided to toss up a site and publish docs on it.

One more little thing about being “what’s next.” And that’s sweating the cutting edge. The Next Big Thing is great for no-risk ventures like entertainment software, or various skunkworks projects. But when it comes to identity, in which you are being trusted with digital assets, the most precious of which is private information, you can’t afford to be cutting edge. You need tried and true, battle-tested stuff. You can’t afford to be the first kid on the block with the new bike; you need to get the bike that you know the chain won’t slip on, where the seat won’t fall off. Best of breed solutions are called just that because they’ve survived.

Sorry for the rant, but I’m starting to wonder why anybody would trust their enterprise identity structure to a company that can’t even safely or satisfactorily run a desktop.