But to keep pace with the future,Microsoft may need more than a new logo Some weeks ago,Hotmail vanished. The Web service that kicked off the email revolution now diverts users to the Windows Live site. And now,a quarter of a century since its last image exercise,Microsoft has a new logo. It is square. It consists of four squares. It is foursquare and solid,not exactly what a company needs when it plans to embark on an energetic year in which it will release new versions of almost all its major products. But Microsoft is the big one,so it can afford to be a little square. Or maybe not,because it is slowly losing control of the future. Its always been a bit of a laggard. Born to make standalone PCs that could talk to the world only through printers,it was taken by surprise by always-connected computing and the internet. Now,as computing moves from PCs to smartphones,it has again missed the bus. Microsofts phones have no market presence and though former giant Nokia is using its operating system,thats a sinking ship,too. Meanwhile,Android forges ahead like a runaway torpedo. At one point last year,half-a-lakh Android devices were being activated every day. Android uses Googles version of the open source Linux kernel. And the development of user-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Mint has begun to eat into the desktop market it created and still dominates. Meanwhile,free open source Office alternatives,created within the Linux ecosystem,threaten another important market for Microsoft. The giant is far from beaten but to remain a serious player,it needs more than a new logo. It needs a new vision in which it can clearly mark its place in the computing environment of the near future.
