It occurred to me recently how terrible it must be to be Microsoft (a common thought).

I realized that the Windows user experience is essentially unchanged since I got my first PC, 15 years ago. It ran Windows 95, and Windows remained my OS of choice until 2008. Except for the occasional special effect, the Windows experience remained more or less the same.

Of course, although Windows looks pretty much the same as ever, it has grown under the hood. I remember installing Windows 95 into about 50MB on disk, and it running fast on my 133Mhz Pentium with 16 MB memory. Windows 7 wants 8 times the speed, 64 times the memory and 250 times the disk space. While the elegant and robust OSX redefined usability expectations, and projects like Compiz blew geeks away with its 3D accelerated desktop, Windows just piled on weight.

But now, Microsoft is facing a whole new kind of failure. The new lightweight operating systems of phones, tablets and netbooks are making their forebears look very fat. They demonstrate that a modern operating system as small as iOS or Android can be extremely usable and simultaneously look great (I’m actually reminded of the UI on those computers in Star Trek).

These new desktops are so successful that they’re setting the direction for personal computer user interfaces. We’ve seen iOS move to the iPad, and bits of it appear in OSX. Android OS has moved from phone to tablet, with ChromeOS aimed at netbooks and PCs. Like ChromeOS, small and fast cloud-based OSes such as JoliOS are appearing. The Unity desktop, previously reserved for the Ubuntu netbook remix, has now replaced Gnome as the default Ubuntu desktop. And then, there are the TV Oses - Google TV, XBMC, Boxee etc.

In these cloudy/web 2.0 times such small operating systems seem fully functional. They can run a browser as well as the incumbent behemoths, can run small apps, and other than that quickly get out of your way. Their small size and fewer moving parts lead to much improved reliability. Your giant 16 gigabyte Windows installation, with its thousands of features, is a growing frustration when all you want to do is get your browser open so you can get on with work. Microsoft might be looking at a future that doesn’t have a place for their biggest asset.

UPDATE: 2nd June: Microsoft announce the new UI for Windows 8. This is a desktop designed both for touch and for the desktop. It’s layered over the normal Windows UI, and is clearly borrowing from Windows Phone 7, and aiming at the same goal as the Unity desktop and perhaps even ChromeOS. The way it is sitting on top of the existing desktop reminds me of Windows 3.11 sitting on top of DOS. Didn’t quite work, but was a stepping stone to something more integrated.