3 ms·

I feel like making a u-turn to be "all in" on enterprise is the wrong move and just delaying the inevitable. Computing devices are no longer bought in large nu

I feel like making a u-turn to be "all in" on enterprise is the wrong move and just delaying the inevitable. Computing devices are no longer bought in large numbers by exclusively big businesses. The iPhone has shown that business customers go home, buy consumer products, love how much better it works than what they use at the office and want to bring it to work. The recent data on mobile device sales compared to Windows PCs is especially damning. Secondly, Google, Facebook and the rest of "new tech" industry is not built on MS tech. What is actually enterprise? Size? If a gigantic company like Google can crunch all that data and have such amazing uptime without MS tech, then who needs MS? Every year a new generation create their own startup and they choose anything but MS. To me, enterprise means established, old and slow. If all the old guards will be disrupted and die out like I think they will, then MS will have no one left to sell to! Increasingly even the old guard is messing around with Linux and OSS in order to be more agile. Consumer is the future and MS needs to embrace it or die. They just have to stop making mistakes like Windows 8.

mukundmr 13y ago
The decline of the desktop and rise of the tablet / smartphone / wearable computers forces enterprises to have heterogenous systems that can support these platforms. It no longer makes sense to have a Microsoft only solution in the longer term.
arethuza 13y ago
"Consumer is the future and MS needs to embrace it or die" Google and Facebook may be huge, but as a percentage of the global economy they are still pretty small (e.g. look at the Forbes Global 2000) - the enterprise world is everything all those other companies need to operate and it's the world of IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and thousands of specialized ISVs. I'd be rather surprised if Google or Facebook wrote their own consolidated financial reporting or payroll software (indeed Google seems to use Oracle Hyperion FM for consolidated reporting and planning, as does Facebook). At the moment, Microsoft has some pretty decent enterprise products, but they only sell them through partners - one possibility for growth and really focusing on the enterprise space would be to emulate IBM and focus on services and products - either by greatly increasing the size of their existing consulting arm and/or buying a few of the existing large service partners.

mukundmr 13y ago

The decline of the desktop and rise of the tablet / smartphone / wearable computers forces enterprises to have heterogenous systems that can support these platforms. It no longer makes sense to have a Microsoft only solution in the longer term.

arethuza 13y ago

"Consumer is the future and MS needs to embrace it or die" Google and Facebook may be huge, but as a percentage of the global economy they are still pretty small (e.g. look at the Forbes Global 2000) - the enterprise world is everything all those other companies need to operate and it's the world of IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and thousands of specialized ISVs. I'd be rather surprised if Google or Facebook wrote their own consolidated financial reporting or payroll software (indeed Google seems to use Oracle Hyperion FM for consolidated reporting and planning, as does Facebook). At the moment, Microsoft has some pretty decent enterprise products, but they only sell them through partners - one possibility for growth and really focusing on the enterprise space would be to emulate IBM and focus on services and products - either by greatly increasing the size of their existing consulting arm and/or buying a few of the existing large service partners.