5 ms·

I don't think Microsoft has to worry about its survival: Windows and Office will remain cash cows for the forseeable future. But they, like IBM before them, wil

by seldo 16y ago

I don't think Microsoft has to worry about its survival: Windows and Office will remain cash cows for the forseeable future. But they, like IBM before them, will lose all relevance to new directions in technology -- in fact, it's arguable that this has already been the case for years. The biggest argument for this that I can see is their online services division -- i.e. Bing -- which lost more than half a billion dollars in one quarter (they lost a similarly gigantic amount in Q1 2009), and hasn't had a profitable quarter since 2005 [see http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsofts-operating-income-2010-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsofts-o... ]. Even Microsoft publicly acknowledges that succeeding in online services is key for future growth, but they show no sign of being able to even begin approaching profitability in that space -- instead, they are losing more and more every year.

mjfern 16y ago
Good points. A question is how long Windows and Office will remain cash cows for Microsoft? 1. One future state is that most people transition from desktop computers to smartphones, tablets, etc. We then dock these devices for doing intensive work. 2. Another possibility is that we have smartphones and tablets, but transition from desktops and laptops to thinner laptops (e.g., netbooks, new Macbook Air, etc). The issue for Microsoft and others is then - what operating system and office software becomes the standard in this future computing environment: Windows and Office, Android/Chrome and Google Docs, Apple's iOS and iWork, or some other solution (e.g., OpenOffice)?
- bad_user 16y ago
  1) I'm not seeing how this can happen. Love my iPhone for Email reading / Skype chatting / quick browsing, but that's pretty much all the productive work I can do with it. My wife is also asking me repeatedly how the hell can I browse the web on that small screen. With my laptop I can also stay in bed AND type with the lights closed and without much effort. That's not something I can say about devices like the iPad. IMHO ... in the future devices will simply vanish from sight and get replaced by interfaces based on holograms projected from your furniture.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
"For the foreseeable future"? I foresee a future where windows as we know it is obsolete, even in the office, and MS's future as a whole is in doubt. iOS and Android don't look like Windows killers today, and they aren't. But they are harbingers of things to come. In 1975 the MITS Altair didn't look like a mainframe / mini-computer killer, and it wasn't. In a mere 10 years since the Altair (a toy computer) hit the shelves the entire industry had been overturned, and mainframes/mini-computers were dying out while micro-computers came to the fore. Micro-computers grew up a lot in that time frame, but the essential elements of their superiority were there from the beginning (simpler, cheaper, more mass-production friendly, performance tied to components not overall construction, faster/cheaper innovation loop, etc.) The same is true for mobile OSes and for web-apps. They have a lot of growing up still to do to compete with Windows everywhere, but the core is still there, and they have far less to grow than the Altair did. In another 10 years how much more sophisticated will be the iPad, iOS, android tablets and phones, and their native apps etc? In another 10 years how much more sophisticated will be webapps? In 10 years a VPS (or equivalent "cloud" instance) with hundreds of gigs of RAM and a terabyte of SSD storage and the CPU power to match will probably cost the equivalent of $20 a month in today's dollars. Add to that powerful new technologies like web sockets and all the other html5 technologies, along with new things we haven't even imagined yet. In 10 years gmail will be nearly 3x as old as it is today, imagine the innovations that will happen in that time. And I'm supposed to imagine that somehow there's no chance that Windows will lose its footing amidst all this innovation? Perhaps it won't, but I can't predict the future, and from what I see it looks like there are huge very real risks to Microsoft's cash cow.
- duck 16y ago
  It is true that the consumer side is pushing the enterprise a lot currently, but things that are core to larger corporations like the OS, Office, and backend services are no easy thing to switch-up. That is why you still see lots of companies running Novell/GroupWise. Do you really think it is meeting there needs? There is no one else out there that can support enterprise software like Microsoft (I'm not saying they do a great job all the time) and that is what the enterprise customer is really buying into.
- seldo 16y ago

by seldo 16y ago

mjfern 16y ago

Good points. A question is how long Windows and Office will remain cash cows for Microsoft? 1. One future state is that most people transition from desktop computers to smartphones, tablets, etc. We then dock these devices for doing intensive work. 2. Another possibility is that we have smartphones and tablets, but transition from desktops and laptops to thinner laptops (e.g., netbooks, new Macbook Air, etc). The issue for Microsoft and others is then - what operating system and office software becomes the standard in this future computing environment: Windows and Office, Android/Chrome and Google Docs, Apple's iOS and iWork, or some other solution (e.g., OpenOffice)?

bad_user 16y ago
1) I'm not seeing how this can happen. Love my iPhone for Email reading / Skype chatting / quick browsing, but that's pretty much all the productive work I can do with it. My wife is also asking me repeatedly how the hell can I browse the web on that small screen. With my laptop I can also stay in bed AND type with the lights closed and without much effort. That's not something I can say about devices like the iPad. IMHO ... in the future devices will simply vanish from sight and get replaced by interfaces based on holograms projected from your furniture.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

"For the foreseeable future"? I foresee a future where windows as we know it is obsolete, even in the office, and MS's future as a whole is in doubt. iOS and Android don't look like Windows killers today, and they aren't. But they are harbingers of things to come. In 1975 the MITS Altair didn't look like a mainframe / mini-computer killer, and it wasn't. In a mere 10 years since the Altair (a toy computer) hit the shelves the entire industry had been overturned, and mainframes/mini-computers were dying out while micro-computers came to the fore. Micro-computers grew up a lot in that time frame, but the essential elements of their superiority were there from the beginning (simpler, cheaper, more mass-production friendly, performance tied to components not overall construction, faster/cheaper innovation loop, etc.) The same is true for mobile OSes and for web-apps. They have a lot of growing up still to do to compete with Windows everywhere, but the core is still there, and they have far less to grow than the Altair did. In another 10 years how much more sophisticated will be the iPad, iOS, android tablets and phones, and their native apps etc? In another 10 years how much more sophisticated will be webapps? In 10 years a VPS (or equivalent "cloud" instance) with hundreds of gigs of RAM and a terabyte of SSD storage and the CPU power to match will probably cost the equivalent of $20 a month in today's dollars. Add to that powerful new technologies like web sockets and all the other html5 technologies, along with new things we haven't even imagined yet. In 10 years gmail will be nearly 3x as old as it is today, imagine the innovations that will happen in that time. And I'm supposed to imagine that somehow there's no chance that Windows will lose its footing amidst all this innovation? Perhaps it won't, but I can't predict the future, and from what I see it looks like there are huge very real risks to Microsoft's cash cow.

duck 16y ago
It is true that the consumer side is pushing the enterprise a lot currently, but things that are core to larger corporations like the OS, Office, and backend services are no easy thing to switch-up. That is why you still see lots of companies running Novell/GroupWise. Do you really think it is meeting there needs? There is no one else out there that can support enterprise software like Microsoft (I'm not saying they do a great job all the time) and that is what the enterprise customer is really buying into.
seldo 16y ago