“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 is the Soviet Union of the computing world. Just like the Soviets, they had big accomplishments in the early years. But the kind of oppressive bureaucratic mentality that dominates Microsoft will bring about its downfall.
Unlike Apple, everything at Microsoft is designed by low-level VPs who have no clue about design or meeting the needs of consumer. All design decisions are business-drive – just look at the “Shutdown” menu in Vista.
Right now, Microsoft is wear the Sovet Union was in the late 1970s. Still powerful, but slow and unwilling to recognize that its empire is in decline. It’s entering the 1980s and the day when the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its middle managers and sales guys is coming near.
Death is too good for them!
To NewType: to be more precise, USSR could survive if not ‘democratization’ policy by Gorbachev. However, the main burden was probably not him, but:
1) huge amount of ‘help for brother nations’ (which totalled more than half trillion dollars);
2) huge concentration of production efforts in military area, which absolutely did not help to provide 300 million people with good for real life;
3) dramatically dropping oil prices (whith coordination from USA government, a win of then-authorities);
And only forth-important factor is purely beurocratic, tied with planned economics.
And, unlike Microsoft, USSR did some actual innovation (besides doing killings of its own people in 1920s-1940s) — for example, if to track development of labor legislation in USA and European countries, it is easily seen that ‘wild capitalists’ were very afraid of revolution after 1917 and only since then hundreds of common people of Western countries got opportunity to know what is 8hour/day 40hour/week work, paid ill-time, paid month-long vacations, et cetera.
@ ChrissyOne: Great post – you really hit the nail on the head. MS indeed has no idea what to do to capture the public’s imagination, and thus we’ve likely seen the last of Bill Gates portrayed as the country’s ‘Tech Hero’. Yet, as you note, their business model doesn’t depend on that. Sure, they WANT to be big in music videos and everything, and probably will keep a decent hand in the game console arena, but they can exist quite well as nothing more than a business software supplier & upgrader – it’s certainly a lot easier. And even if they have to face some new innovation that the corporate world takes a shine to, they can just tap into their incredible reserves of cash & buy it – or copy.
So MS isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. They may be lumbering around like a dinosaur, but so do hippos and hey – they found their niche.
Anyway, poor analogies aside, there is another way to answer your question though; “Can you even imagine MS suddenly producing anything… good?” Actually, I can imagine it. However it will probably come when Gates & Balmer & Alchin are truly gone. And it won’t be an internal manifestation – that is to say, I think they’re gonna ‘buy their way out’ of the morass that Windows has left them in. But they’ll do it on the cheap … by adopting Linux.
I don’t think it’s been lost on some of the smarter people in MS how successful Apple was in adopting BSDUnix as the core of their OS and building out from there. More importantly, I think they noticed how relatively simple it was for Apple to also make OSX compliant with just about any Windows-centric standard that it came up against too. No DOS or NT required. Well, Linux is in many ways better than BSDUnix, its just as free, and certainly MS engineers have a wealth of knowledge regarding it since every ‘enterprise solution’ they come up with has to compete against it. In fact, ‘Winux’ will probably be a business-first offering (that’s the market where Linux distros have hurt them the most after all) – cheaper than regular Windows, but not free, and with drastically fewer maintenance costs – and then make it’s way into the consumer space later.
I know it sounds wild, but I really don’t think it’s a question of if MS will make a version of Windows based on Linux, it’s a question of when the Old Guard will finally retire, allowing the new people, who have no care about what ‘built the company’ to green light such a project. And once that happens, you might actually see a renewed MS. I mean, if you don’t have to worry about whether a new feature is gonna cause kernal panics, the shackles are off the imagination. So, it will start as something ‘fulfilling an IT need’ & making simple tasks “less painfully annoying”, but will probably morph into something else that may re-invigorate MS. Probably not the whole industry though.
After all, Apple will have already done that
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Another great post, Odyssey67. You drove the nail right through the board.
-c
MW: ‘used’ (to be a Mac Fanboy. Still a Mac fan)
“So, it will start as something ‘fulfilling an IT need’ & making simple tasks “less painfully annoying”, but will probably morph into something else that may re-invigorate MS. Probably not the whole industry though.”
So you just re-invented Vista’s SUA? (Subsystem for Unix based Applications)