Andrew Nimick Point Concept twitter.com/andrewnim

Well June has been an interesting month so far.

Pingar was the first ever New Zealand company to present at the ‘Launch Silicon Valley' event (shameless plug as I work for Pingar) and announced a partnership which allows people using Fuji Xerox scanners to scan a paper document and create meta data for digital storage on the fly. No manual input required.

In the wider news, there were calls for Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft, to stand down. Naturally his board stood by him. This was followed by an action which seemed to aim to kill two birds with one stone. Protect Steve and take some wind from Steve Jobs.

Microsoft released a video and presentations which give the first look at Windows 8. Set for release sometime in 2012? A few things caught my eye.

The influence of tablets and smart phones is clear. Windows 8 will include a tiled application and info widget screen much like the Windows mobile 7 does.

But the start button will still be there. It has to retain the old way of doing things (always has) for the enterprise. Can you remember the fuss when the ribbon first appeared in Office 2007? I can.

There will be a ‘timemachine' like backup. Windows' in-built backup is still a ‘miss' for me, there are plenty of products which do it far better.

Support for html5 and javascript applications. Now that is interesting as it means developers who make great web/ tablet apps can port them to run straight on Windows operating system natively and not in a browser. These apps can then have an app market place (sound familiar).

Windows 8 seems to want to play in two markets in a way that Windows has not since Millennium (you have to read that with a deep echo voice like the ads use).

Enterprise and consumer. With Xp, Vista and 7 it built for business and just sold a stripped down version to consumers, simple. But now it seems to be building for the consumer first.

Microsoft is hamstrung by its own success. It wants to be a consumer company, but fails to understand them and it needs to keep its enterprise customers happy. I see this by the way it is trying to talk direct to its customers about the cloud, yet is also doing it through the partner channels. You can see this with its cloud office offering ‘office365'. Is it true SaaS or something set up through partners, or both? It's a little bit like the confusion over which version of Windows do I buy? Oh the one which comes with my computer, whatever it is.

So why was that an attempt to take some wind from Steve Jobs? Well this week was his week to make lots of announcements at WWDC regarding the future of Apple.

Two operating systems to release, IOS 5 for iPod, iPad, iPhone and Lion for the Macintosh line. Added to that was iCloud (original name?) which creates the back end hub tying the machines together and which everyone has been asking for, for some years.

Apple has built a $1 billion data centre to manage the iCloud.

One of the things which made apps for IOS and apple a success was synchronization between machines and the cloud via the apps; record notes, write emails, message on the iPhone and it could appear on your desktop, rather than just recording everything to the cloud as we do with most SaaS applications; which some people have reservation about.

Microsoft has always taken the sensible approach of having the data sync between device and server (cloud), that's why Exchange mail server and Outlook are so successful and why Sharepoint is growing.

They did it because it made good sense for the enterprise. It's why office365 is tied to Outlook and office on the desktop (and to drive sales).

Now Apple intends to do it because it makes good sense for the individual consumer and it will drive sales by locking us into the Apple ecosystem.

The message is simple and focused, 'we know our consumers have more than one of our products and by making it easier for them to share the data between those products we will keep them upgrading”.

While Microsoft is talking about features which we will see next year, Apple is announcing things we will see next month along with a new messaging system, which may well become very attractive to some Skype users. A company Microsoft just paid $8 billion for!

I often get the feeling that Microsoft want to have everyone as a customer and tries to sell accordingly. When what it should do is more of what it has done with Xbox – exactly what Apple do so well.

Maybe it has lost its way and needs a change.