The circle is complete

Over at the ever-fascinating Stratechery, Ben Thompson dissects Microsoft’s Mobile Muddle. I especially like one of his recommendations (emphasis mine):

Embrace services. Services seek to touch every device, and, as I’ve written previously, are much more suited to Microsoft’s culture. Moreover, Microsoft has many of the pieces already in place, along with their primary remaining trump card: Office. Microsoft should use this trump card with Apple specifically: offer Office on iPad exclusively for a specified time in exchange for Bing as the default search, fuller iCloud integration with Azure, and/or built-in Xcode support for Azure cloud services. Apple has most of the best customers – the ones who will pay for services; Microsoft needs those customers desperately, and Nadella should go hat in hand to Cupertino.

The irony here is huge for those of us who remember 1997, and Steve Job’s MacWorld speech: 

 We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job, and if others are going to help us, that’s great, cause we need all the help we can get…The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting healthy, and this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry, to get healthy and prosper again.

The situation is almost perfectly symmetrical. Without Apple, Microsoft is… well, not dead; there’s a lot of life left in a rump-Microsoft focused on enterprise sales alone. On the other hand, for Microsoft to survive in its current incarnation as the Everything Company, it needs to do something extreme like this.

I think this move would also make sense for Apple, as a way of further getting out from under Google’s thumb without having to build all the services for themselves. I mean, I actually found Apple Maps to be an improvement, but there have been too many issues with iCloud as well for Apple to be seen as properly credible in online services.

If Microsoft really were to follow all of Ben Thompson’s advice and also fork Android using its own services, we could end up with a duopoly of strong cloud-based mobile back-ends, with Apple providing the balance between them. Sounds like a pretty good future to me…