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Well, you're conflating various things here: > One Windows app, deployed everywhere with a focus on productivity and smart services. In no way has there been a

Well, you're conflating various things here: > One Windows app, deployed everywhere with a focus on productivity and smart services. In no way has there been any capitulation. In fact Microsoft leads the space. Does Apple have universal apps ? The value of universal apps are debatable, but let's say Microsoft does rule that space. When $some_crazy_high_percentage of delivered phones are android and iOS, the market has spoken - people dont' care about running the same app on their phone and their desktop. Even if Microsoft successfully makes a shift to offering their app development platform on iOS and Android, they're now doing that from a position of weakness. There's certainly money to be made there, but its the difference between a serf and a lord. Microsoft is the lord of its own domain when they control the phone platform, and is a serf in Apple's. But then you switch to something else: > And does Apple or Google have an equivalent to Azure's strategic analytics plays ? No. But that's an entirely different rodeo than the whole thrust of the article, which is the declining dominance of the PC and Microsoft's lack of success in the mobile space. Apple doesn't even care about the enterprise computing space from that perspective, and Amazon absolutely does want to offer those analytics - it's an entirely different set of competitors. So, sure, yes, Microsoft is doing cool stuff with Azure, which is great, maybe that's the future of the business. But that's a very different business than owning 90-something percent of the software powering every personal computing device in the world.

cwyers 11y ago
> So, sure, yes, Microsoft is doing cool stuff with Azure, which is great, maybe that's the future of the business. But that's a very different business than owning 90-something percent of the software powering every personal computing device in the world. Is it? Phones and cloud services aren't in competition, they're complimentary services -- phones create demand for cloud services.
- mattzito 11y ago
  > Phones and cloud services aren't in competition, they're complimentary services -- phones create demand for cloud services. Sure, from the standpoint that devices create demand for computing services, which these days are delivered via the cloud. But there's a lot less of an inherent advantage that Microsoft has in that environment. On top of that, the money to be made is a lot lower. Let's throw out a scenario here - Microsoft trades its OS dominance for a dominance in cloud computing. They lose all of their OS revenue (unlikely to happen) in exchange for having a huge chunk of the cloud computing market (also unlikely to happen). If we model this out - Amazon AWS in 2015 will make roughly $6b in revenue, which is about 10% of the total public cloud market in 2015 according to IDC In 2018, this market is supposed to be 128b. Let's say that Microsoft in 2018 has 2x Amazon's current market share, which would be a huge success by any measure, that gives them ~$24b in revenue. Which is half of what they made in business software licensing in 2014. Half. They made 40 billion just on the business licensing end of their traditional software business. I fully believe Microsoft will continue to live and innovate and potentially succeed in this brave new world, but it will do so at a huge long-term impact to its revenue and size.

cwyers 11y ago

> So, sure, yes, Microsoft is doing cool stuff with Azure, which is great, maybe that's the future of the business. But that's a very different business than owning 90-something percent of the software powering every personal computing device in the world. Is it? Phones and cloud services aren't in competition, they're complimentary services -- phones create demand for cloud services.

mattzito 11y ago
> Phones and cloud services aren't in competition, they're complimentary services -- phones create demand for cloud services. Sure, from the standpoint that devices create demand for computing services, which these days are delivered via the cloud. But there's a lot less of an inherent advantage that Microsoft has in that environment. On top of that, the money to be made is a lot lower. Let's throw out a scenario here - Microsoft trades its OS dominance for a dominance in cloud computing. They lose all of their OS revenue (unlikely to happen) in exchange for having a huge chunk of the cloud computing market (also unlikely to happen). If we model this out - Amazon AWS in 2015 will make roughly $6b in revenue, which is about 10% of the total public cloud market in 2015 according to IDC In 2018, this market is supposed to be 128b. Let's say that Microsoft in 2018 has 2x Amazon's current market share, which would be a huge success by any measure, that gives them ~$24b in revenue. Which is half of what they made in business software licensing in 2014. Half. They made 40 billion just on the business licensing end of their traditional software business. I fully believe Microsoft will continue to live and innovate and potentially succeed in this brave new world, but it will do so at a huge long-term impact to its revenue and size.