Great, healthy companies not only dominate the market, but share of mind. Look at Apple these days. But when was the last time you thought about Microsoft, except in frustration or anger? The company just announced a powerful new search engine, designed to take on Google -- but did anybody notice? Meanwhile, [the] open systems world -- created largely in response to Microsoft's heavy-handed hegemony -- is slowly carving away market share from Gates & Co.: Linux and Firefox hold the world's imagination these days, not Windows and Explorer. The only thing Microsoft seems busy at these days is patching and plugging holes.It's not easy to dismiss Malone's analysis. He's been covering the high-tech industry for more than 20 years, most recently as editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine and earlier at the San Joe Mercury-News. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fortune, and the New York Times. He has hosted two national TV shows on PBS, and he's written a dozen books.
He continues,
There are other clues as well. Microsoft has always had trouble with stand-alone applications, but in its core business it has been as relentless as the Borg. Now the company seems to have trouble executing even the one task that should take precedence over everything else: getting "Longhorn," its Windows replacement, to market. Longhorn is now two years late. That would be disastrous for a beloved product like the Macintosh, but for a product that is universally reviled as a necessary, but foul-tasting, medicine, this verges on criminal insanity. Or, more likely, organizational paralysis.It's probably a stretch to say that Microsoft is dying, or that it will cease to be a major force in information technology. Still, it's hard to disagree with Malone's observations:
Does anyone out there love MSN? I doubt it; it seems to share AOL's fate of being disliked but not hated enough to change your e-mail account. And do college kids still dream of going to work at MS? Five years ago it was a source of pride to go to work for the Evil Empire -- now, who cares? It's just Motorola with wetter winters.Read Malone's whole article on ABC News.
Related posts
Microsoft eats more humble pie in enterprise software business
Microsoft: selling enterprise software is a "humbling experience"
Microsoft Longhorn cutbacks threaten Project Green
3 comments:
When you are looking at a company with as wide a product line as Microsoft has, it is easy to pick on various parts of the organization and predict doom and gloom. However to claim it is dying is ridiculous.
MSN Search is nothing to shout about, but when are 1.0 Microsoft products ever outstanding. Google is a tough act to follow and it will take time to be able to compete.
Look at XBox. It faced huge competition with the Playstation 2. It took a few years and a huge amount of cash, but if you go into a games store now you will see just as many if not more Xbox games than Playstation ones. Microsofts online gaming is killing Sony's efforts.
It really annoys me when the press berate Microsoft for their efforts on Longhorn. Microsoft have really opened up their development process in the past few years to help the user community provide more feedback on their direction. But they still are getting killed in the press. Headlines read "MS drops major portion of Longhorn" instead of reading "MS listen to community and agree to move major chunks of Longhorn into Windows XP, even though it will delay their revenue generating OS release."
Microsoft may look stagnant if you are an OS user. From a developer's perspective this is the most phenomenal period I have ever seen. The .Net framework is revolutionizing the development community with huge productivity gains and quality improvements. Future efforts like Indigo are going to have a similar impact on distributed computing.
Microsoft are focusing on their roots and that is a good thing for everyone. (Except maybe Oracle!)
Open source is the present and the future. You can download for example java and develop with
any IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans,etc, free also). Why buy Visual Studio.net and VB?. Why to have a package like Axapta running only
in MS environment?.
MS will be around for a while, however to say they are not is ridiculous. Microsoft is still one if not the one of the biggest third party software developers for Apple. But to also say that the work is not slowing down in the MS world is false in many markets around the America.
Take the inland Northwest for example mainly Spokane, Washington. In my business I do IT for Linux, MS, and most defiantly Apple. Apple is gaining in the server market here in short, but on the professional client side of things Apple has had the most dramatic increase in small, medium businesses and some gain on the big corporate businesses in this area.
Another false statement to say that Linux, and especially Apple Quoted above saying:
"They do not provide the complete picture (client software, server platforms, etc.) That Microsoft does"
Then you don't have access to the information you need to see what is going on at Apple, or even the Linux world. I to am an Avid Apple user at night and mostly throughout the day! ;)
Post a Comment