2 ms·

Very few new lines of business. Most of their new ventures are failures or perpetually in the red.

• dragontamer 13y ago
  Who were Microsoft's biggest competitors circa 2000? Sun Microsystems? BeOS ? Apple's G4? The big players in Server-space have lost to Linux, but Microsoft has managed to remain big with Azure, Office 365. * Sun Microsystems / Java is basically dying at this point. Oracle screwed the pooch on this one. C#/.NET are big, and the biggest users of Java don't even use Java anymore. (See Android and Dalvik) * Internet Explorer has actually survived past Netscape Communicator, Mozilla (the original), and is making inroads into Firefox. Its a bit weird that Firefox was able to capture IE's marketshare, but IE has remained consistently in the top browsers for far longer than any other web browser right now. * Some products, like Microsoft SQL Server and MS Office, have been repackaged into new forms. Office 365 is price-competitive against Google's line of "cloud" products, and Azure is profitable. New business ventures have also begun * XBox / Gaming has been generally considered successful (despite mostly losing money so far) * Purchases, such as Skype, have brought Microsoft into other markets, like VOIP. ----------------- Most of Microsoft's "business ventures" are very successful. Windows Phone was the dominant Smartphone of 2007, with 42% marketshare. That is hardly a failure by any stretch of the imagination. I'm talking about Windows Mobile platform and older btw. (Future of Windows Phones, such as Windows Phone 8 / Lumia devices seems relatively positive, especially in India) Again, why are businesses... in business? To make money. PERIOD. And Microsoft is by all accounts extremely successful at it.