“Today, Microsoft’s behavior is dramatically similar to Apple’s a decade ago. Microsoft similarly sits on huge wealth and revenues and wields significant market control, but the company has been unable to develop new markets,” Daniel Eran writes for RoughlyDrafted.
“Its attempts to move into TV DVR boxes and consumer electronics, broaden the Windows PC into tablet consumer devices, sell its software technology for use in phones, PDAs, game consoles, and music players, and sell DRM for media rentals have all been billion dollar failures,” Eran writes.
Eran writes, “Microsoft’s three profitable segments, Server products, desktop copies of Windows, and sales of Office, are very much like three Apples from 1995. Still making billions, but operating as if they are completely unaware that they now face intense competition for the first time.”
Eran writes, “Combined with a reliance on isolationist, proprietary platform development and strangled by the tentacles of legacy, Microsoft’s position as a lazy dinosaur is retarding its ability to compete against faster moving rivals, including the daily builds of Linux attacking its efforts in the Enterprise, and the new Macs being pumped out through Apple’s retail stores to take on premium PC sales on the desktop.”
Full article with much more here.
Microsoft will not all of a sudden disappear as the dinosaurs did. MS has WAAAY too much money to just go away. They will die a very slow death. Actually Office will probably never go away. As it dies MS may see that Office is its most valued asset and decide to release it for Linux.
Office on Win/Mac/Linux/Solaris would dominate if the price is right.
(i hate office though)
Wow, just think of all the oil they will have in the 327th century now!
Apart from the odd and unnecessary political interjections, this guy writes really well.
Digg should be ashamed of their censorship and allowing themselves to be bullied by a bunch of MS fixated thugs.
Glad that kind of thing hasn’t happened on MDN.
The worst thing about Microsoft is that they make so much profit on such crap, their operating profit was very roughly a third of their sales for the last year. That’s profit on old, insecure, rubbish products. God knows how much money they’d make if they actually did genuinely good things across the board.
Seriously, nobody knows if dinosaurs died THAT quick! Few centuries were nothing, at that time.
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But believing there’s too much monney to disappear is a dangerous bet. What about the early 20th century economical crisis?
All those billions could just worth nothing within few hours. The value of blank paper could be higher then these small printed black and green one…
M$, the old tyranosaur, could disapear quite swiftier than it’s old cousins.
Rehashing old history in a number of web pages to generate hits will get you one click on the “continues –>” link…
[continues below]
[continues from above]
…but one click only.
almux: M$, the old tyranosaur, could disapear quite swiftier than it’s old cousins
…or M$ could experience a resurgence in part as a result of the more-popular-every-day Xbox 360. It’s a computer and an HD-DVD hard drive disguised as a video game box which you can find in more and more living rooms… where Steve Jobs wants to be. So don’t be too quick to predict Softy’s demise.
I hope Apple buys Nintendo. They were made for each other.
Fatal: Do you think dinosaurs died overnight? The mass extinction that occurred at the end of the cretaceous period could have taken several thousand years to occur. Interestingly even before that calamitous event, dinosaurs were in decline. That could be due to changing climate, increased competition from mammals or a combination of those and other factors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous-Tertiary_extinction_event
I think the parallel is rather good. Dinosaurs were well adapted to the Cretaceous environment. However when conditions changed and other species evolved that could compete more efficiently, they started to decline.
It is unlikely that a catastrophe similar to a meteor hitting the earth will occur in the computing world. But Apple (and Intel) are innovating faster than M$ and the PC makers making their products far more attractive.
The conditions have change – people want to do more exciting things with their computers than running office. From science through to IT, Apple have more potential to provide more efficient products that are easy to use.
M$ decline has been happening for years now but in the next 5 it will accelerate dramatically.
…and we ALL know what happened to the Dinosaurs!
Actually MS is looking more like the dodo than the dinosaur…death by stupidity
Microsoft has grown obese and sluggish by going after the low hanging fruit and has become the Richard Simmons of the tech world. The question is, can they be as successful at drawing attention to themselves?
Microsoft is becoming Microhard and the Zune is the last of the fruit within reach. They will perish if they aren’t disciplined enough to focus on what matters most; even parasites will eventually abandon its host.
re: Microsoft has grown obese and sluggish by going after the low hanging fruit and has become the Richard Simmons of the tech world. The question is, can they be as successful at drawing attention to themselves?
Microsoft is becoming Microhard and the Zune is the last of the fruit within reach. They will perish if they aren’t disciplined enough to focus on what matters most; even parasites will eventually abandon its host.
—–
Well Bill Gates has gone – so thats one parasite that has left M$.
i like it when MDN writes “full artile with MUCH MORE” at the end of their articles. makes me wanna read ’em!
Eran writes, “Its attempts to move into TV DVR boxes and consumer electronics, broaden the Windows PC into tablet consumer devices, sell its software technology for use in phones, PDAs, game consoles, and music players, and sell DRM for media rentals have all been billion dollar failures,”
Easy explanation for this snippet: Consumers, enterprise or otherwise, look at any given computer controlled hardware device and see that Windows is at the helm, i.e. Windows, Windows CE, Windows tablet, etc., and scratch their respective heads and say to themselves, “There’s got to be something better.” Or is it just me.
I dunno.
If you follow the beliefs of the President, our planet, the universe, et al, are only 6-10K years old.
“The Good Book says it’s gotta be that way.”
FZ
Always Right,
I’m a liberal Democrat and even I can’t stand you–get your political crap off of this site. What are you, twelve?
You are NOT representative of the progressive movement.
I dunno either but,
I don’t think MS’s decline is anywhere near slow enough to use it as an example of slow evolution/de-evolution. Furthermore, (and I admit up front that this is overly optomistic, never the less…), we may wake up one day and find Apple in a whole new market position compared to MS, with particular regard to the OS race. If/when this happens I think its going to be more about what Apple has done than what MS hasn’t, even though MS’s apparent laziness will certainly help its demise, should that actually happen – which it hasn’t – unfortunately.
No, I’ve begun to see the competition between MS and Apple more along the lines of the race between the tortoise and the hare. By evolutionary standards the tortoise is a relatively old creature, and more importantly – SLOW. But most importantly, the hare took a lot for granted when it came to understanding what it takes to win. It takes a lot more than simple time.
Pick your analogy, but MS Windows is going down, and tomorrow would not be soon enough for me.
Hi Jim.
47. Registered Independent.
MW-“movement”
As in, “I’d love to continue talking with you, but right now, I have to make a bowel movement. Excuse me. Be right back”
Bill Gates did what he set out to do – to get a PC on everyone’s desk. That’s what MS was about in the 80’s, and they did it. Everyone has a PC now, it’
s part of our lives, so good job Bill. But Microsoft, as an enduring entity, now faces a problem – they actually achieved the goal they were built around, so for the last decade we’ve been stuck in the ‘what now?” phase.
MS is proving again and again that it doesn’t have any idea ‘what now’. It merely continues.
So Bill is gone, now serving humanity far better with his charitable foundations.
MS is now in the capable hands of one of those mammals that survived the fall of the dinosaurs.
The question is – Does anyone really see this changing?
Can you even imagine MS suddenly producing anything… good? I mean, not something that fulfills an IT need or makes doing simple tasks less painfully annoying than they were in XP (or Vista), but something really new that gets people thinking about computers in a new way to re-invigorate this tired, stale, commoditized industry?
They try really hard, but the problem is ALWAYS the same. MS has a DEVELOPER/REVENUE centric idea of what computing is. They look at what they can do, then how they can sell it, how they can monetize it, and finally how their hardware partners can sell new containers for it. They NEVER start with the consumer. They never ask “How can the task be done in the simplest, most elegant way?” and build a product around that. They never consider that the act of doing a task is what people pay attention to, not that the product may do 500 things.
In short, they have no taste.
And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean it in a big way.
I need my media player to have exactly ONE feature – I need to access my media in an easy and efficient way.
That’s it! No squirting, no endless clicks through menus, no customized background images. I just need to get to my media with one hand in the car or on my bike or wherever. Simple.
But MS can’t understand this. They have armies of geeks that love to do head-to-head comparos of feature-sets, and the one with the longest list of features always wins. Does anyone ever actually take one of these products out for a walk to see if a human being can actually enjoy using it? A thousand features do me no good if I have to read a manual and fish though layers of menus to get to them. You can bulld a ham-radio into a Zune and guess what? I’ll never use it. So why not lave the specialty gimmicks to the accessory manufacturers and pare it down to the basics, and make the basics work well before you slather them in whipping cream and sprinkles?
If MS is such a fantastic software company WHY can they not create a product as good as iTunes? Because they sure can’t. WHY? It’s not a lack of resources, it’s a fundamental difference in ideology.
MS and Apple are both in the business to make money.
Apple makes money by creating products that make consumers happy.
MS makes money by creating products that make its partners happy, because they are the ones with the money, weather it’s bloating the OS to require a new upgrade cycle, playing ‘arms-race’ by introducing competing, incompatible formats to play partners off each other, or mystifying back-end processes to the point of creating the entire IT infrastructure in order to support them. This is all part of the plan to keep people on MS. Not to make a better products that people would FREELY CHOOSE, but to take away their ability to choose.
0c
MW: ‘price’ (matters, but it’s not the only metric, otherwise we’d ALL shop at Wal*Mart)
My favorite paragraph at the end of that long article was:
“Like a hungry dinosaur stuck in a snow bank, Microsoft is in starvation mode, eating itself rather than using its energy to look for new food. It knows there’s no more easy new food options available. Microsoft is dying.”
Classic!!
Windows Vista: It’s Marginally Less Completely Impossible To Enjoy Using™
-c
(with props to DNA)
There, I’m finished.
Jim, the point I brought up is at once serious, and valid.
Dangerous state of affairs when the Prez discounts input from others, because “The Lord” speaks to him, and he has “gut feelings” about thing.
See?
Gut Feeling + Idiocy= Disaster
AS some have alluded to on here Dinoaurs died oyt over a very long period certainly far longer than it will take Microsoft to inevitably decline. While estimates vary they were in serious decline for perhaps up to 100, 000 years or more. even after the meteorite impact they servived for rather longer than mankind has been around so beware believing we are around long term with or without Redmond and if the US Govt persists in allowing this particular Dino to eat up any ‘local’ superior (potential or actual) competitor Microsoft may well take more than itself with it when it finally goes.
Once the ‘spiral of death’ begins it is really hard to stop.
Investors start withdrawing their funds, bankers refuse to lend money, your top developers leave, customers stop buying, the dud employees stay on and begin thieving the stationary, the share price drops and it begins again at the top.
Apple was in it (only plateaued due to Mac’s Fanboys), now MS is in it. Once it begins, it only gets faster.