5 ms·

I'd be absolutely mortified if I was a Microsoft employee. Microsoft's monopoly on desktop PCs may become worthless in the near future as the average consumer

by zalzane 13y ago

I'd be absolutely mortified if I was a Microsoft employee. Microsoft's monopoly on desktop PCs may become worthless in the near future as the average consumer realizes they can do everything on a tablet and not have to bother with "slow and hard to use" PC. Office/word are becoming more easily replaceable with the advent of google docs and many free/cheaper alternatives. If their main revenue streams decline, they would have to enter a new market. Oh wait, the last time Microsoft broke into a new industry successfully was with the Xbox over 10 years ago. Ironically, Xbox is one of the few Microsoft products that I think have a long and healthy life ahead of it, but I don't think it will be enough to support much if everything else comes crashing down. I hope someone corrects me on this because there's nothing more horrifying for me than the possibility of someone like Oracle buying up Microsoft IP/patents if they go belly up.

irishloop 13y ago
I don't know, I work for a multinational manufacturing firm in the lighting industry and we have so many things tied up in Microsoft, it's hard to imagine we could extricate ourselves easily. Whether it's legacy Windows API applications still being used to track inventory or simply users' longtime use of Microsoft Office products, or ongoing development in a .NET environment, I do not think we (or many of our peers) are in any position to start moving away from Windows. Your point may remain for consumer electronics, but much of Microsoft's revenue stream comes from corporate users anyway.
- endersshadow 13y ago
  zalzane is also forgetting a big word: SharePoint. It's going nowhere, and it locks in companies to the Microsoft stack.
- jedmeyers 13y ago
  SAP might help you with your manufacturing needs. AFAIK Philips Lightning is using their products (SAP Manufacturing Execution and ERP).
  - irishloop 13y ago
    I am (sadly?) not in charge of those high-end decisions, though I think we're pretty tied into Oracle Hyperion.
kvb 13y ago
People have been predicting Microsoft's decline for years, but they just posted record revenues last quarter. They have a much more diverse set of profitable businesses than Apple, Amazon, or Google do - Office, Windows, SQL Server, Xbox, Visual Studio, SharePoint, Dynamics XRM, ... They have over a dozen different businesses bringing in more than $1B of revenue a year. That's not to say that everything's rosy, of course, but people have lost perspective on what an impressive money-making machine Microsoft really is.
- technoslut 13y ago
  Just because MS has their fingers in a lot of pots doesn't meant everything they do has value. Office and Windows is still their bread and butter while Office continually takes up a larger piece of the pie. MS is at a crossroads. If they push subscriptions like Adobe has, they could see a mass exodus of consumers away from Office. The future isn't bleak for MS. What the climate has been showing is that MS is at its best when it comes to business.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Yes, but then Google and Apple didn't gain hundreds of millions of new users every year with completely different operating systems than Microsoft's. Also "record financial record" thing can be very misleading for a company. It's not a predictor of success for the next few years. Competitiveness in the current environment is. RIM fell for the same fallacy for years. RIM actually had a "record quarter" in 2009, and they were still growing into 2010. The problem is they only tried to change when things started getting worse - around late 2010 or early 2011. They really should've started changing course in 2007, or 2008 at most, after the iPhone came out. But they didn't. Because they also thought their financials are improving, "so they might be doing something right". But all they needed to do to see if they are or aren't doing something right is look if their phones are competitive with the iPhone (and later the Android phones). And they clearly weren't. Microsoft's biggest problem, as with all companies getting disrupted, is that the new disruptive technology arrives at a significantly lower price. Sure you can buy Windows machines for $300-$400 bucks, but the are nowhere near as good as the Android/iOS ones in terms of performance and what you get for the money in terms of hardware. And the price point is only getting lower.
cookiecaper 13y ago
The problem with MS is that their whole business has been about propping up either Windows or Office. Both are in jeopardy now and Microsoft is panicking, trying to save these products without the reference frame of what they really are, other than the two businesses that every other Microsoft enterprise is designed to uphold. Even the Xbox exists simply as a way to underscore the foothold of DirectX and keep Windows PCs the primary platform for 3D simulation. Look at Windows 8. MS saw the tablet market explode and started to panic, aware that this may replace a lot of Windows PCs that would otherwise be sold to casual users. So they decided to integrate tablet stuff into Windows, so that Windows gets on devices that have this desirable form factor for casual users, and then they get the added bonus that the programs that work on their PCs will work just fine on their tablets and vice-versa. This is actually a somewhat compelling proposition, the issue is that the implementation was horrific. Microsoft, in their attempt to continue universal dominance, failed to realize that people still on normal form factors, including the business market, would not take kindly to a full-screen, huge tile start menu, which is impossible to actually replace with something real, only a bunch of rough hacks to try and get back to a normal-type start menu. That's an interface for a casual device, not a serious business device, but MS has pushed it onto everything. Microsoft needs to come to terms, and it can continue and adapt to market conditions. They may have to give up a little bit of ground in the short-term, but they at least won't stamp themselves out of existence. OS X is a consumer-centric OS. Android and iOS are consumer-centric OSes designed for entertainment and/or casual use devices. Windows is still the undisputed king in user-facing business systems. They should really not be revolting their business users by forcing them to learn certain mouse gestures in certain menus to find a shutdown option, or blanking out their screens with humongous, disruptive context switches every time someone wants to open a program. This is much, much worse than the iOSification of OS X that some have bemoaned, for instance; while there is an iOS-like menu, it hasn't replace Spotlight or Finder, and you can use your Mac without that intrusion if you choose. Even Apple recognizes that the interfaces are not directly and universally applicable to the different devices. If MS recognizes that they need to focus on enterprise and conservatively integrate reasonable niceties from consumer-facing systems, they have a future. If not, they'll continue to flail about trying to be all things to all people, unwilling to accept that the tech landscape has changed and Windows may not be the universal thing anymore, and kill themselves. Without such aggressive Metro integration, no one would have had any gripes with Windows 8. MS should quickly repent and issue Windows 9 with Metro as an optional extension and a classic explorer.exe shell as the default, because that's what business users need and expect.
scholia 13y ago
Is Microsoft's stack easier and cheaper to replace than Apple's? Or Google's? I reckon you could easily move a company off both of those.... Considering the number of companies who apparently can't/won't move off XP (or even IE6) or Windows 7, it looks as though the Microsoft stack is quite deeply embedded in businesses. As was IBM's, and IBM is still a $100 billion (annual turnover) business about 15 years after it became irrelevant.
maxbaroi 13y ago
If you think you can replace the Office Suite with Google docs, then you don't know how the other half lives. It just wouldn't work for people whose primary programming and analysis tool is Excel on moderately sized data-sets. I just copy-pasted a 100,000 row query result from MS SQL Server into Google Docs. It's been about five minutes, and it still hasn't copied over. That's not a pathological case. Where I work, people routinely use excel spreadsheets with tens if not hundreds of thousands of rows. Granted, Excel would be the devil if its incompetence was malicious and not just stupid. And maybe when you reach that level you need to tell people they're doing it wrong and shouldn't be using Excel to manipulate things that are that size. But Excel just works for them so why would/should they switch over to Google Docs when it doesn't work? I don't know Libreoffice's capabilities well. I only have it on my personal laptop, and in the six years I've been running Linux, I rarely had any need to use the office suite there. If someone would speak to that (either way), I would appreciate it.
ma2rten 13y ago
I have a theory that there are three main markets for computer usage, each of which has different characteristics: recreational, productivity and gaming. The recreational market cares about media, information, news, music, video, 2D games, sharing pictures, Facebook, Skype etc. Typically these are typically the home users. They want free, but don't mind ads. They care about good design and intuitive interfaces. For them the PC is a large tablet. They are usually quick to adapt new technology, because there is nothing that binds them to one platform. Then there is the productivity market. These involves all kinds of professional software: MS Office, AutoCAD, Photoshop, IDEs, financial software, video editing, Share point. Customers here are often Enterprises, who care about reducing cost and risk. They are normally slow to adapt new technology (yes I am look at you, IE6), but care about the latest buzzwords. If the prices for some software is too low they get suspicious. This market also includes hobbyists. They don't mind learning curves for software, which will tie them in. Now MS Office (mainly Word, Excel and Outlook) is an interesting case, because it is the only productivity app that even most home users use. In many cases it is the only thing that ties them to Windows. I don't think there is any viable replacement for it yet, which has the same usability, functionality and compatibility (and I say that even though I myself solely use Google Docs). Finally there is the gaming market. They care about running the newest 3D games on the lastest hardware, which makes them good customers because they regularly buy new computers. Now it is easy to think the MS is on the way out on the recreational market, but a) that is not the only and maybe not even the biggest market and b) let's not forget that there is overlap (most recreational users are also productivity users). Microsoft may loose some revenue, but I don't think it they will get bought out for patents by Oracle any time soon.

by zalzane 13y ago

irishloop 13y ago

I don't know, I work for a multinational manufacturing firm in the lighting industry and we have so many things tied up in Microsoft, it's hard to imagine we could extricate ourselves easily. Whether it's legacy Windows API applications still being used to track inventory or simply users' longtime use of Microsoft Office products, or ongoing development in a .NET environment, I do not think we (or many of our peers) are in any position to start moving away from Windows. Your point may remain for consumer electronics, but much of Microsoft's revenue stream comes from corporate users anyway.

endersshadow 13y ago
zalzane is also forgetting a big word: SharePoint. It's going nowhere, and it locks in companies to the Microsoft stack.
jedmeyers 13y ago
SAP might help you with your manufacturing needs. AFAIK Philips Lightning is using their products (SAP Manufacturing Execution and ERP).
- irishloop 13y ago
  I am (sadly?) not in charge of those high-end decisions, though I think we're pretty tied into Oracle Hyperion.

kvb 13y ago

People have been predicting Microsoft's decline for years, but they just posted record revenues last quarter. They have a much more diverse set of profitable businesses than Apple, Amazon, or Google do - Office, Windows, SQL Server, Xbox, Visual Studio, SharePoint, Dynamics XRM, ... They have over a dozen different businesses bringing in more than $1B of revenue a year. That's not to say that everything's rosy, of course, but people have lost perspective on what an impressive money-making machine Microsoft really is.

technoslut 13y ago
Just because MS has their fingers in a lot of pots doesn't meant everything they do has value. Office and Windows is still their bread and butter while Office continually takes up a larger piece of the pie. MS is at a crossroads. If they push subscriptions like Adobe has, they could see a mass exodus of consumers away from Office. The future isn't bleak for MS. What the climate has been showing is that MS is at its best when it comes to business.
mtgx 13y ago
Yes, but then Google and Apple didn't gain hundreds of millions of new users every year with completely different operating systems than Microsoft's. Also "record financial record" thing can be very misleading for a company. It's not a predictor of success for the next few years. Competitiveness in the current environment is. RIM fell for the same fallacy for years. RIM actually had a "record quarter" in 2009, and they were still growing into 2010. The problem is they only tried to change when things started getting worse - around late 2010 or early 2011. They really should've started changing course in 2007, or 2008 at most, after the iPhone came out. But they didn't. Because they also thought their financials are improving, "so they might be doing something right". But all they needed to do to see if they are or aren't doing something right is look if their phones are competitive with the iPhone (and later the Android phones). And they clearly weren't. Microsoft's biggest problem, as with all companies getting disrupted, is that the new disruptive technology arrives at a significantly lower price. Sure you can buy Windows machines for $300-$400 bucks, but the are nowhere near as good as the Android/iOS ones in terms of performance and what you get for the money in terms of hardware. And the price point is only getting lower.

cookiecaper 13y ago

The problem with MS is that their whole business has been about propping up either Windows or Office. Both are in jeopardy now and Microsoft is panicking, trying to save these products without the reference frame of what they really are, other than the two businesses that every other Microsoft enterprise is designed to uphold. Even the Xbox exists simply as a way to underscore the foothold of DirectX and keep Windows PCs the primary platform for 3D simulation. Look at Windows 8. MS saw the tablet market explode and started to panic, aware that this may replace a lot of Windows PCs that would otherwise be sold to casual users. So they decided to integrate tablet stuff into Windows, so that Windows gets on devices that have this desirable form factor for casual users, and then they get the added bonus that the programs that work on their PCs will work just fine on their tablets and vice-versa. This is actually a somewhat compelling proposition, the issue is that the implementation was horrific. Microsoft, in their attempt to continue universal dominance, failed to realize that people still on normal form factors, including the business market, would not take kindly to a full-screen, huge tile start menu, which is impossible to actually replace with something real, only a bunch of rough hacks to try and get back to a normal-type start menu. That's an interface for a casual device, not a serious business device, but MS has pushed it onto everything. Microsoft needs to come to terms, and it can continue and adapt to market conditions. They may have to give up a little bit of ground in the short-term, but they at least won't stamp themselves out of existence. OS X is a consumer-centric OS. Android and iOS are consumer-centric OSes designed for entertainment and/or casual use devices. Windows is still the undisputed king in user-facing business systems. They should really not be revolting their business users by forcing them to learn certain mouse gestures in certain menus to find a shutdown option, or blanking out their screens with humongous, disruptive context switches every time someone wants to open a program. This is much, much worse than the iOSification of OS X that some have bemoaned, for instance; while there is an iOS-like menu, it hasn't replace Spotlight or Finder, and you can use your Mac without that intrusion if you choose. Even Apple recognizes that the interfaces are not directly and universally applicable to the different devices. If MS recognizes that they need to focus on enterprise and conservatively integrate reasonable niceties from consumer-facing systems, they have a future. If not, they'll continue to flail about trying to be all things to all people, unwilling to accept that the tech landscape has changed and Windows may not be the universal thing anymore, and kill themselves. Without such aggressive Metro integration, no one would have had any gripes with Windows 8. MS should quickly repent and issue Windows 9 with Metro as an optional extension and a classic explorer.exe shell as the default, because that's what business users need and expect.

scholia 13y ago

Is Microsoft's stack easier and cheaper to replace than Apple's? Or Google's? I reckon you could easily move a company off both of those.... Considering the number of companies who apparently can't/won't move off XP (or even IE6) or Windows 7, it looks as though the Microsoft stack is quite deeply embedded in businesses. As was IBM's, and IBM is still a $100 billion (annual turnover) business about 15 years after it became irrelevant.

maxbaroi 13y ago

If you think you can replace the Office Suite with Google docs, then you don't know how the other half lives. It just wouldn't work for people whose primary programming and analysis tool is Excel on moderately sized data-sets. I just copy-pasted a 100,000 row query result from MS SQL Server into Google Docs. It's been about five minutes, and it still hasn't copied over. That's not a pathological case. Where I work, people routinely use excel spreadsheets with tens if not hundreds of thousands of rows. Granted, Excel would be the devil if its incompetence was malicious and not just stupid. And maybe when you reach that level you need to tell people they're doing it wrong and shouldn't be using Excel to manipulate things that are that size. But Excel just works for them so why would/should they switch over to Google Docs when it doesn't work? I don't know Libreoffice's capabilities well. I only have it on my personal laptop, and in the six years I've been running Linux, I rarely had any need to use the office suite there. If someone would speak to that (either way), I would appreciate it.

ma2rten 13y ago

I have a theory that there are three main markets for computer usage, each of which has different characteristics: recreational, productivity and gaming. The recreational market cares about media, information, news, music, video, 2D games, sharing pictures, Facebook, Skype etc. Typically these are typically the home users. They want free, but don't mind ads. They care about good design and intuitive interfaces. For them the PC is a large tablet. They are usually quick to adapt new technology, because there is nothing that binds them to one platform. Then there is the productivity market. These involves all kinds of professional software: MS Office, AutoCAD, Photoshop, IDEs, financial software, video editing, Share point. Customers here are often Enterprises, who care about reducing cost and risk. They are normally slow to adapt new technology (yes I am look at you, IE6), but care about the latest buzzwords. If the prices for some software is too low they get suspicious. This market also includes hobbyists. They don't mind learning curves for software, which will tie them in. Now MS Office (mainly Word, Excel and Outlook) is an interesting case, because it is the only productivity app that even most home users use. In many cases it is the only thing that ties them to Windows. I don't think there is any viable replacement for it yet, which has the same usability, functionality and compatibility (and I say that even though I myself solely use Google Docs). Finally there is the gaming market. They care about running the newest 3D games on the lastest hardware, which makes them good customers because they regularly buy new computers. Now it is easy to think the MS is on the way out on the recreational market, but a) that is not the only and maybe not even the biggest market and b) let's not forget that there is overlap (most recreational users are also productivity users). Microsoft may loose some revenue, but I don't think it they will get bought out for patents by Oracle any time soon.