Beleaguered Microsoft’s heyday is far in the past; its future is slow, inexorable decline

13 years ago

“Over the course of Steve Ballmer’s tenure as Microsoft CEO, the company’s stock price has gone nowhere, its market share has plunged — but its headcount has more than trebled. And that’s before adding another 32,000 employees as part of the Nokia acquisition,” Felix Salmon writes for Reuters.

“This acquisition essentially forces Microsoft to double down on its strategy (which has signally failed to date) of competing head-to-head with Android and iOS,” Salmon writes. “Nokia is a failing company — if Microsoft hadn’t swept in to save it, it would probably have gone bust pretty quickly — and one of the reasons that it’s failing is that no one wants to buy a Windows phone.”

Salmon writes, “Microsoft is now simply too big to turn around. Elop saved Nokia in much the same way as John Thain saved Merrill Lynch, by selling a fundamentally worthless company to a much larger strategic buyer for billions of dollars. That strategy isn’t going to work for Microsoft. Probably, there is no strategy which would work out for Microsoft. The company’s heyday is far in the past, now; all that the new CEO can hope for is to maximize profits as it slowly, inexorably, declines.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Don’t anybody get queasy on us now.

Heads will roll. Bodies will get axed. Redmond cubicle dwellers will be terminated.

And, in less than a week, Apple will fire some more high caliber bullets into the Borg’s writhing carcass.

It won’t be pretty (depending on your definition of pretty; it may be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen), but this is what victory looks like – and we fully intend to luxuriate in it for as long as it ~~lasts~~ takes.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tayster” for the heads up.]