“There’s a myth a handful of Redmond loyalists and like, three people who follow tech want to believe. The myth that Satya Nadella has (or soon will) profoundly change Microsoft,” Rocco Pendola writes for TheStreet. “With Steve Ballmer playing the role of an uncool Mark Cuban, Nadella faces the impossible task of fixing the mess Ballmer left.”
“Without compelling consumer hardware offerings, you’re screwed with businesses. Because consumer preference ultimately dictates enterprise choice,” Pendola writes. “And that’s why Microsoft has no choice but to continue — feebly — coming after Apple. Even though it knows it should, it simply can’t let the Surface Tablet die. Without it, it’s even more as good as dead than it is now. So the marketing geniuses at Microsoft will try (and fail) to revive the PC vs. Mac wars via a device it clearly doesn’t understand. But it won’t work. Because Apple and Google have the consumer base covered. Because of this, Apple and Google have made incredible inroads with the enterprise and education markets.”
“If Nadella really is smart and the right guy to be Microsoft CEO, he’ll tear down Steve Ballmer’s entire legacy right now. Cancel this dead and tired foray into hardware, better integrate Xbox with the things Microsoft actually does well and beg Apple and Google to be one of the ‘software partners’ that will help power the next generation of iOS-, Mac-, Android- and Chrome-powered devices,” Pendola writes. “That’s the only route Microsoft has left if it wants to sustain its waning empire.
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in January:
It’s tough, if not impossible, to deliver the type of change Microsoft needs when you’re a lifer. 🙂
And, as we wrote back in February:
Satya Nadella is the wrong choice for Microsoft CEO. 🙂
What does Microsoft actually “do well”? Just wondering.
excel
Yes, indeed.
excel at what exactly? making a bunch of high paid nerds able to justify their existence because they write “code” that allows the managing of entry/analysis of data to be outside the realm of the ones entering/analyzing it without knowing how to code?? (read: pivot tables) Any spreadsheet master with some coding knowledge (even some simple code,,, watch out M$, here comes swift) can do what pivot tables do, just wait…
they have seen their day, i forsee…..
Xbox, excel, and making enterprises think they need them.
xbox one is being beaten soundly in every market it’s been released in, and consumers haven’t forgotten the double and triple takes MS did regarding the console’s price, kinect and DRM.
I hope that implies that Xbox developers will soon be porting their games, especially Halo, to other platforms.
Sadly, Microsoft owns some of these exclusive franchises (Halo, I’m looking at you) and I think it’s pretty unlikely they’ll ever do that.
OneNote and SharePoint are kinda cool, as collaboration tools go. They still have something to offer enterprise. They’ve got nothing for consumers, though.
Microsoft needs to do what IBM did when it became clear they had no traction with consumers. Retreat to their core competency, business software, and build out from there.
——RM
Unfortunately for Microsoft, business software now often contains a large mobile development component, which means they either need to create development tools for iOS, Android or both.
They can’t really get behind iOS development, because that is so close to OS X development as to be suicide for Windows. Getting behind Android is the alternative, but that just strengthen’s Google which is eating the low end PC market with Chrome.
The insurmountable problem for Microsoft is that both platforms it needs to build for, if it returns to its cross-platform software roots, are owned by competitors to its PC operating system.
I see pain to the horizon in Microsoft’s future.
Our company uses Sharepoint and it very efficient for multiple business tasks.
SharePoint…ugh. If that’s all the “good” that can be said, it ain’t nearly enough.
What does Microsoft actually “do well”? Two things, actually:
1. Volume licensing to perpetuate lock-in.
2. Certificate programs to elevate mediocre IT types above their peers.
Issuing CEO reports that Dilbert finds disturbingly incomprehensible.
Yawnnnnnn
The boys at Microsoft have always been a bunch of trash mouther’s. What else can they do when all they have to offer is second rate wares, no creativity, and not a clue. Microsoft plain and simple has no class.
Create something of quality and they would have no need to trash talk their competition. I’m truly amazed that a company with the resources they have can’t do better. Mismanagement at a mass scale.
If they can’t find a new way and a new path to walk, they are surely doomed. What a waste!
And no taste either. So said SJ.
Just read 2 or 3 paragraphs from Nadella’s company-wide memo a few weeks ago and it will become obvious that he is nothing more than Microsoft’s version of the pointy-haired boss.
Clueless.
Microsoft will do just fine, no matter what the analysts, writers, pundits, or you think.
They’re not going to disappear.
They are no threat to you.
they make some really great products for markets where Apple will never participate.
OTOH, they have failed entering certain markets (where they probably don’t belong). My guess is that they will simply be the largest ENTERPRISE software company in the world. They should be happy with that.
The thing is, as the article pointed out, they won’t be in Enterprise for long if they don’t have anything that appeals to the consumer. The consumer will drive them out of Enterprise. If for no other reason than the fact that CEOs are … consumers.
Microsoft doesn’t really need consumer oriented products to survive in the enterprise space. Look at SAP. If a company so despised by users of its systems, and with no products in the consumer space can flourish, so can Microsoft.
Apple has all eyes open, just you wait and see…..
Can you imagine an “SAP” so easy to use as SWIFT?
all you need is a few converts in the company and an import tool, and bingo !-)
You’re comparing the world’s largest business software company to a programming language?
No
just to the vast majority of people who believe that they could do better cheaper and less complex work
No, executives are not consumers. Consumers have emotions. Executives care only about short-term profit maximization. That’s why Apple always had a hard time offering premium products to the rental-obsessed corporate leaders. Next, we need to understand that there are multiple kinds of consumers — Wally World shoppers and informed lifetime value-seeking shoppers.
I agree. That’s what they should be doing. The problem is, they ares schizophrenic. They want to be a hardware company, a mobile device company, a game console company, as well as an enterprise solutions company. While they are completely missing the boat on the former, they lose their advantage in the latter. Focus, Redmond! Focus!
To me, their story is one of naked megalomania, an undisguised lust to perpetuate the indecent hegemony they held in the Nineties, imbecilically convinced of their divine right to dominate every succeeding wave of technological innovation. All the money stacked in front of them blinds them to what looms ahead.
1. Recognize you are no longer a consumer company. The average guy on the street does not care about MS.
2. Spin off Xbox or just shut it down
3. Focus on enterprise! Make your cloud products work transparently with any reputable hardware/OS .
4. Get rid of Windows 8. Clean up the security holes in Windows 7 but don’t screw with it beyond that. It works! Leave well enough alone!
5. Get rid of another 25,000 people (on top of the 18,000 already announced)
She really needs to fire some top persons and put in people that has more innovative ideas to turn the company around. Isn’t that what the late Steve Jobs did? And the then take a page and do a total rewrite of windows. It is the same old windows as before and they keep adding and adding code to change the GUI. It is now too bloated that it is in a product that totally sucks. And they are going to do this GUI across all devices? This is what happened with the original Mac GUI and Apple done a total rewrite which is now OSX. Then wrote a new OS for the iPhone and other iOS devices. This is what Microsoft need to do to stay competitive or else they are going to end up like Blackberry.
She?
HA!
I beat hannahjs to this one !-)
oh wait, kevicosuave beat me…..
darn, gotta be fast in the blogosphere, and i am not….
I like it when you say my name 🙂
and I like to hear what you like, hannahjs….
thanks for the prose and diction and eloquence and insight and patience and everything in your posts
it brightens the visit
I appreciate that but what you bring — eMo-tion — makes it all worthwhile, makes life worth living.
A love story unfolding before our eyes?
Please don’t feel excluded 😉
You made me smile.
the story of love is bigger than all of us combined, and unfolds endlessly, right before all of our eyes
Love is a gas. It expands to fill a void.
Apple did not actually do a total rewrite of their operating system OS 9. They tossed it. Then Gil Amelio bought NeXTstep, the operating system that had been developed for NeXT computer from Steve Jobs. NeXTstep is actually UNIX with a nice GUI on it. UNIX remains the core of Apple’s OSes.
Essentially right. The happiest days of my life occurred when I was able to leverage unix knowledge to perform wonders on the new Mac OS X Server. Ever since the turn of the century, Apple has been cooking with gas and going like sixty.
I had early happy days pounding the mainframe anvils, showering sparks onto the suits of the idiot consultants. And in the Microsoft era there were triumphs to be savoured developing nifty DOS applications. But Windows always sucked, more or less.
If every dog has its day, it is late evening in Microsoft’s day…
I could only wonder what Microsoft’s ads would look like if they mirrored the “exemplary” comments here. There must be a reason why Apple products don’t require a user manual … easy to use because they don’t do much worth doing.
Ridiculous comment. So about 1 billion Apple customers bought products that don’t do anything? The reason they are where they are is that they do everything they were designed to do better than anything else you can buy.
Every Apple product has a manual, you just don’t generally need anything but a quick start guide to get going. The way it should be.
What “incredible inroads” is Google making in enterprise?