Harvard Business Publishing

One of the excellent editors at Harvard Business Publishing forwarded me a link to a BBC article in an email with the subject line: "Could Windows by Disrupted?" I didn't have to click on the link to know the answer is yes.

You see, everything could be disrupted. The important question is will disruption play out in a way that favors or kills the incumbent market leader? The real interesting question is "Will Microsoft disrupt Windows?"

The forces of disruption are at work in every industry. It can happen more quickly in some industries than others, but the potential is omnipresent. And as Clayton Christensen pointed out in his seminal book The Innovators' Dilemma, market leadership isn't just an insufficient buffer against disruption, in some cases it is the root cause of failure.

Consider the management classic In Search of Excellence. While some of the companies featured in the book continued to excel after it was published, companies like Amdahl, Atari, Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation, Eastman Kodak, and Kmart all encountered serious difficulties. In fact, an analysis by IMD Professor Phil Rosenzweig in his worthwhile read The Halo Effect found that the average "excellent" company from In Search of Excellence generally under-performed the stock market in the years after the book's release.

What about Microsoft? Windows has been one of the greatest business success stories of the last century. Complain all you want about initially buggy software or how Apple is always a generation ahead. Microsoft has a dominant market share and runs a business that generates an obscene amount of cash.

But this too shall pass. Windows is threatened because the computer itself is losing dominance to other devices and models of computing are shifting to minimize the importance of the operating system.

The change has begun. So-called cloud computing, a model where much of the functionality a user experiences exists beyond their own computer, minimizes the importance of software that resides on the computer. Increased mobility and inter-connectedness will hasten the rise of cloud computing.

Further, the proliferation of connected devices like Apple's iPhone, Amazon's Kindle, Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii lessens the importance of the computer itself. Throw in virtualization--where a single physical machine functions as multiple "virtual" machines--and you have a recipe for a changing world.

Microsoft has no choice but to proactively plan for a world without Windows. The BBC article referenced an internal effort, code-named Midori, that's centered "on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC."

A promising start. The fundamental question behind Midori and other efforts that are surely kicking around Redmond is to what degree will Microsoft truly let go of Windows? Can the company truly approach solving the problem of enabling computer applications and providing productivity enhancements from a somewhat blank piece of paper?

Microsoft's overwhelming tendency will be to look at the world through Windows-colored glasses. The urge will be to try to force fit its current business model--where most of its growth comes through the sale of a new computer--onto new growth markets. If Microsoft does this, the company will miss the real opportunities to prosper from disruptive growth.

Because the essence of disruption is simplicity and convenience, disruption almost always grows markets. While it's hard to imagine something that surprasses the personal computer market, there are billions of people who have no computing power whatsoever. And there are hundreds of problems people encounter regularly that lack good, elegant computing solutions.

If Microsoft can take its awesome reservoir of talent and free that talent from the constraints of its business model, perhaps it can be the next example of a company that turned the forces of disruption to its advantage.