Should Microsoft become more Apple-like?

About a week and a half ago, Mary Jo Foley wrote a piece where she argued that Microsoft was planning to get more "Apple-like" in the PC and phone space, based on various statements from Microsoft executives. I intended to write a response that following Monday, but work intervened, which is all for the better, as I needed time to think on the subject a bit more.

I think it is good, to an extent, that Microsoft is considering what lessons to draw from the recent success of Apple with its iPhone product and the resurgence of Apple computers. Taking lessons, however, is dog-to-dinosaur different than adopting the Apple model wholesale. That model would achieve nothing for Redmond, in my opinion, because it is a model that sacrifices the best aspects of what makes Microsoft Microsoft.

The lessons Microsoft should take from Apple relate mostly to hardware and user interface design. Microsoft is the richest software company in the world, and has the money with which to hire the best hardware and user interface experts. Using those strengths to create great hardware designs and user interface conventions would be wise, even if it means that the certification process becomes a lot more intense. Apple is famous for its strict user interface guidelines. Perhaps Microsoft could do a bit of that itself.

...but only a bit. Bottom line, Microsoft is a platform company that should encourage third party software developers to dream up better ways to do things atop its platforms. Microsoft has built up the developers and API-level competence around that competitive advantage. Failure to leverage that would be like a sports team choosing to bench its best players, a group of people responsible for making Microsoft's billions and giving it a dominant market share.

An Apple-inspired Microsoft, to my mind, would still have created the Zune (obviously), but not forced it use a Zune-specific DRM (compatible songs for which can only be purchased through the Zune store) or prevented it from being managed from Windows Media Player. When speaking of the Zune, you could have spoken of the wider market for Windows Media-compatible music player products, which though still dwarfed by the larger market share for the iPod, would have served as deeper base from which to challenge the dominant iPod.

An Apple-inspired Microsoft would make a Zune every piece of which was licensable to third parties, allowing them to plug seamlessly into the Microsoft ecosystem. Instead, Microsoft chose to make Zune an island, which is a TRUE clone of the Apple business model, but hardly a model after which Microsoft should aspire.

Apple makes some great hardware on its islands. But, just because Robinson Crusoe made a great house out of the tools he had available to him doesn't mean that he is the epitome of architectural design.

Microsoft's strength always was that it created a broader base of ideas upon which the Microsoft profit machine rests. Microsoft can leverage the good ideas of third parties, who add to the attraction of Microsoft platforms even as they serve as lessons from which Microsoft can draw ideas. Apple's success seems more balanced on the end of a needle. As long as Apple is firing on on all its prodigious innovation cylinders, things go well. Should that engine ever sputter, Apple has fewer third parties who might take up the slack.

I'm completely in favor of a Microsoft that builds hardware and user interface design competencies in house. Those competencies, however, should be used as a means by which to lead the wider market of Microsoft-licensing OEMs in useful directions, not as walls with which to shut them out.

That's a true Microsoft strategy.