The company is loss ground to Google. It’s time to remuneration attention to issues of privacy, security—and simplifying things for PC users

by Greg Blonder

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Other than another profitable quarter, Microsoft (MSFT) has little to celebrate these days. The company is falling sadly behind, serving fewer ads, video clips, search results, or personal Web pages than rival Google (GOOG). Microsoft’s $300 million ad campaign humanized Bill Gates but left consumers wondering, Where’s the beef? The body can’t even seem to buy up competitors (Yahoo! (YHOO), anyone?).

And the world is moving away from the species of desktop-based software that makes up Microsoft’s bread and butter, shifting toward a more distributed form of computing that exists in the so-called cloud, where the operating plan (OS) disappears into a fog of user-friendly online applications and servers, sporadic across the Internet.

In the midst of so much upheaval, what’s an 800-pound gorilla to do?

Fortunately, large monopolies can reinvent themselves. IBM (IBM) did it. Twice. How else could the company that dominated the mechanical punch-card market have crossed the hiatus to overlook electronic computers? And reinvention is precisely how the company known for mainframes—those mammoth, centrally located machines supporting thousands of users—pioneered the personal computer.

Microsoft must drain on its actual trial, market allotment, and turn into money that’s not tied up in buybacks to define the computer of the future. Here is my three-point plan:

1. Take the lead on retreat: What, assurance Microsoft? But who else are you going to trust? Google, the company that scans your e-mail and every mapping request to determine what one. ads to send your way? Or what about Facebook, which has a hard time keeping pictures of your drunken escapades clandestine from potential employers? Remember that it was President Richard Nixon, a Republican, who opened communist China, and it was Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat, who passed major civil rights legislation. So the idea isn’privately shaky.

What’sitting more, protecting privacy is in Microsoft’s interest. It’s the pure act of jujitsu over against Google, what one. has much to gain from the ad targeting techniques that put privacy in jeopardy. Microsoft, without ceasing the other hand, has a immovable desktop revenue stream, which means it can temporarily accept lower ad rates. By taking the high road and refusing to resolve the minutiae of personal Web surfing behavior, Microsoft could calm reduce the value of Google’s targeted ad placement, becoming the friend of the very customers who ability otherwise gain arrive at PCs anything but "PC."

Enhanced privacy controls on Internet Explorer 8 Beta are a elementary step. But these controls are hardly more than opaque and confusing Band-Aids. Microsoft should redesign its software to allow without the name of the author surfing by default. It should do passwords secure, maybe by sacrifice pertaining to physics devices that rest on a key ring or reside considered in the state of software in a cell phone, spitting out new passwords daily.

2. Build software around the way we actually use computers: Today’s computer world is miles advanced from even a decade past. No longer a restricted trade cat’s-paw, computers are now a social common where our kids graze and our companies transact occupation. I haven’t taken a film-based photograph in five years, and I haven’t written a first draft on yellow legal paper in 10. My computer contains my most certain and important records—and yet Microsoft Windows treats that information in the same manner with if it were disposable.

Instead, it should:

•Treat upgrades as regular. The primeval PCs were built as if they were your last. Data were spread in the same manner as dandelion seeds across the unfavorable drive in mortal formats reliant on buggy programs for access and interpretation.