“Companies such as Microsoft and HP are completely lost,” Rocco Pendola writes for TheStreet. “Unlike Apple, they’re not creating new categories and reinventing and redefining past successes — as has been the case with iPhone and iPad. Instead, they’re taking last gasps at somebody else’s brainchild (i.e., the 3D printing push at HP) and feebly attempting to make up for embarrassing missteps (i.e., Windows 8 and all-in-ones at MSFT).”
“Meantime, Apple continues to operate independent of all this noise. With tunnel vision, Timothy D. Cook and his team dictate the pace in consumer and, increasingly, enterprise tech. HP’s already gone. What they’re doing barely warrants coverage,” Pendola writes. “But, at Microsoft, the real blood is about to hit the streets. This company is scrambling to stay relevant. Outside of Xbox, which it has failed to properly integrate into the Windows/Office whole, Microsoft has got nothing.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Related articles:
How and why Apple is beating Microsoft to a pulp – January 13, 2014
Gartner: Apple’s U.S. Mac sales surge 28.5% as Windows PC market drops 7.5% – January 9, 2014
Hey, Microsoft-clinging IT doofus: You need to let it go already! – April 19, 2013
Microsoft partners say Windows 8 caused ‘millions of customers’ to switch to Apple – April 18, 2013
Stick a fork in Microsoft’s Windows, it’s done – April 17, 2013
Steve Jobs’ revenge – April 12, 2013
Microsoft’s stock takes beating after putrid Windows PC shipment reports – April 11, 2013
Apple Macintosh on the rise as Windows PC market plummets – April 11, 2013
Apple’s revolutionary iPad presents quandary for resistant corporate IT doofuses – January 5, 2012
“You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.”
Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda!
I could, but I won’t, make a succinct comment on your observation mrbezoar!
@CrabApple: You poor youngster! I can’t believe that this much time has elapsed and no one has explained mrbezoar’s comment to you. It’s a quote from the goon Terry (played by Marlon Brando) in the movie “On the Waterfront”. It was really quite a good movie.
Good grief, Crabapple, but you are dumb! I won’t explain mrbezoar’s comment to you, as someone else already has saved me the trouble. But really, you are dumb!
Think nothing of the cultural gibes, Crabapple, some of us recognise you as a serious student of technology and the arts. Indeed, all of us are ourselves journeymen at best in this whirligig we call life, despite our best pretensions at playing the master.
Who would want to be the new CEO of Microsoft after he or she read stuff like this? An acceptance of that position would smack of idiocy.
Then Stephen Elop it is!
Me, so I can complete the screw up and take a nice package. Then I could afford all the Apple goodies I want. You don’t have to be good at anything to get rich as a CEO of a large corporation, you just need to get the job and your set for life, Just ask Steve B..
Doesn’t matter, whoever it is will make millions of dollars, regardless, win or lose. What’s a little shame if I’m a multimillionaire? Hell Gates and Ballmer are billionaires, and they have no guilt or feel any shame whatsoever.
Can’t hold $540.
HP always has their printers. Unless Apple wants that too someday. As for Microsoft, I can’t think of anything they are good at yet. Maybe 10 or 20 years down the road they will … No, I still have nothing in mind for Microsoft.
Ok, lighting! They could turn that “Blue Screen of Death” into some very pretty lighting. Maybe not, I will keep thinking about it. They could just return the investors money like Dell did while they have some.
I bought my LAST HP printer two years ago after 20 years. HP Printers are junk. Try and Epson or Canon – you know someone that wants your business and makes a good product.
My Epson Workforce 845 is the best printer I’ve ever owned.
My whole table moves when my HP is printing – delightful. Gotta love that ink “expiration” FUD the machine will eventually prompt you with too. People are doing a whole less printing these days.
Best printer on earth is a Brother Laser Printer. Works great. Replaced 1st toner cartridge after 2 1/2 years.
Printers are going to die off with the adoption of iPad light weight tablets. Every document you have ever known will be with you in an easy to hold and easy to show format.
HP is dead.
Hp should get Apple to let them license the whole iPad and make industrial-strength versions for “real workers” (seismology/geophysics/geology — Sheldon’s “Dirt People” — and others). All the add-on cases and stuff are crap, and in the sunshine… iPads and iPod touches are not very good in the field. We have over 100 touches and they, and their cables, aren’t doing very well. HP used to be really good at that kind of stuff.
Sounds like a business opportunity. You can design, prototype, test your custom iPad, raise the millions of dollars you’ll need for manufacturing and marketing, and you’ll be good to go, easy.
Rocco is on his meds this week, I wonder how he will be next week.
Leave it to silverhawk to resort to nonrelevant character attack rather than discussing the subject….
Really, nobody cares who declares “x company is dying”, what matters is if that person has solid evidence to support his claim. In this case, death may be exaggerated. Not because Apple couldn’t outcompete these companies head on, but because Apple has always — and apparently always will — refuse to do so.
HP makes superb printers, laboratory electronics, and so forth. Carly Fiorina may have seriously wounded HP by driving the company to be a consumer PC box builder, but corrective actions are slowly bringing balance back to the company. HP has technical strongholds that few companies — including Apple — could easily supersede. HP may become a smaller company, but Apple has no interest in killing it.
As for Microsoft, it’s going the way of IBM. Despite its horrid consumer products, its pro products remain indispensible for many industries. Again, its great to see them suffer from their obvious mis-steps, but their death is exaggerated.
Silver, see how easy it was to have a conversation without personal attack?
Excellent logical analysis. Your predictions sound just about right and spot on. Time will tell. Hard to believe it was 16 years ago Apple was on the ropes, and there was talk of Microsoft being forced to break up because they were too big and abusing their monopoly. Jobs had the last laugh after all. Too bad he’s not here to enjoy it.
Anybody seen this?
http://www.electronista.com/articles/14/01/13/one.microsoft.strategy.credited.with.shift/
I call b*llsh*t.
Holy POOP! How much did Micros$hit pay for that?
Apparently they bought that ‘survey’ for $499:
http://www.forrester.com/Innovative+Consumer+Technology+Brands+Win+The+Battle+For+Mindshare/fulltext/-/E-RES107161?intcmp=blog:forrlink
WTF!
That will probably go down as the idiot article of 2014.
“If someone says anything bad about Apple, they must be wrong!” – any local of macdailynews
Note to Microslut: Nobody wants W8, Enterprise will stay with W7 or XP.
Note to HP: Stop encouraging tree killing. Go paperless. Junk your crappy printers and carts.
Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your point of view Widows XP is EOL in April. MS is leaving it to the Virus generators to do any further updates after that.
XP EOL?!
That’s amazing. There are a LOT of businesses running on the ol’ XP.
I wonder how many of those businesses will switch to Apple when the decision needs to be made.
Sure, the IT dinosaurs will try desperately to convince the bosses that new Windows machines are the only answer.
But more and more bosses are using their own iPhones and iPads and their kids are using iOS devices too.
The bosses won’t be so easily smoke-screened this time.
I wonder if we’ll see the biggest jump in Apple marketshare ever, come April.
*fingers crossed*
Just about every kid in college over the past 8 years or so, have been using Mac Laptops. A lot of those kids are now working in companies and at some point will have influence.
My company IT just installed Win 7 to replace XP. Screwed up a few things royally.
If you want to have some fun, next time you are in a business meeting with IT people ask them this question:
What are we going to do when Microsoft goes away?
Every time I do this I first get stunned silence. Then, the IT people reluctantly admit that that day is on the horizon, but they have no solution. That’s when I say, that’s why we are moving to iPads.
I wish it wasn’t so much fun to stick a dagger in a dying entity.
heh.
The “stunned silence” is your IT director calling you an ID10T in his head.
I learnt some time ago, in a room full of information technologists, to keep a low profile, not only as a member of a conspicuous minority, but in acknowledgement of a powerful and controlling world view. One must do business in such an environment, and that is seldom accomplished by provocation. In due time, my place on the agenda would arrive and I would carefully navigate the minefield of expertly devised traps. In my limited experience, this was stress its most distilled form.
Not Tunnel Vision: the term implies lack of awareness. ‘Laser-Beam Focus’ is probably better.
Exactly. Regardless of whether you like Rocco’s overall message, that was a confused abuse of idiom.
Apropos enterprise: today, I had to learn that Apple broke the “native” Cisco IPSec VPN Client they had (and still have) in OS X with Mavericks.
It’s going to be long way till Apple can de-throne HP or MSFT in the enterprise. Not with a yearly refresh-cycle.
Well, that or IT is going to turn into a complete support-hell – compared to the semi-hell it is now.
There are third party solutions that are very secure. There are some pretty smart developers out there that actually write software for Macintosh computers.
Articles like this always say that Microsoft’s downfall comes from the fact that they cannot innovate. While I certainly agree that they cannot innovate, there is another deeper problem that Microsoft has. People just don’t like them. I work in IT and I started getting this sentiment before Windows 8 ever came out. Microsoft has tarnished its own image with lies and trashy code. No PR machine can cover up a pile of crap forever. Eventually, people are going to smell the crap. People don’t like Microsoft and they don’t trust Microsoft. That is Microsoft’s biggest issue. If Microsoft got a Steve Jobs-esque visionary (not sure where this person would come from) as there new CEO, and this person did not have to take orders from Bill Gates on the BOD, they might be able to create appealing products somewhere down the road. The issue is overcoming their reputation. I don’t know how they can ever do that. The word, “Microsoft” leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. If looks like crap, smells like crap, and tastes like crap, it is probably crap.
This includes wary business partners too as Microsoft has shown it will abandon them in a heartbeat if it’s in their own best interests or something that’s failed in the marketplace.
HP will probably do OK. They make servers, networking equipment and other stuff like that. In fact, I think Apple put a bunch of it in their server farm in NC. I don’t know what they run, probably some form of UNIX.
Certainly no one thought they filled it with a bunch of Mac minis or Mac Pros. ; )
You need not wink. None of us here are pleased to have Apple’s servers NOT running OS X Server. 😛
Gotta eat your own dog food Apple! It’s actually rather GOOD dog food, if you keep up with its code requirements! But nooo. So no wonder OS X Server sucks these days. 😥
Yesterday I heard a TechTard on TV call HP “the biggest technology company in the world“, among other stupid things.
No It’s Not. And HP’s not doing well either! It’s not even going to BE a ‘technology company in the world’ at this rate!
Kind of sad.
Well, I agree with some of this. Microsoft has totally screwed up their desktop and consumer products besides Xbox. The funny thing about Xbox is that it is probably the most Apple like platform M$ has ever built. Controlling the hardware, software and creating a vibrant echo system?! Sounds like a very familiar strategy, and it worked! Too bad the rest of the consumer product teams for them didn’t follow suit. Not that they would have made a dent in Apple anyway. But their trajectory in the enterprise is another story completely. Their now very robust and mature combo of windows 2012 r2 and system center 2012 r2 are really top notch well designed products that do a lot of things really well. VMware and even to an extent Citrix had a real lead that many of us in the Enterprise space feel has evaporated. In many ways Microsoft has passed VMware and has built a powerful versatile platform for the enterprise future. While Office 365, especially the enterprise versions that offer Exchange and sharepoint in the cloud got off to a rocky start, they have been constantly upgraded and tweaked the platform to a point where while they still are working through some issues, it is totally ready for prime time in a lot of ways and businesses are starting to get on board and an accelerating pace. In many ways, Microsoft would probably fin a lot of success in ceding the consumer products toApple and concentrating on their enterprise servers, iaas, and azure, which is actually becoming quite good. Not sure what they should do with Xbox since while great, it doesn’t fit with enterprise stuff. Maybe spin it off to Sega and revive them. If I remember correctly, the dreamcast team gave birth to xbox in the first place.
BS. They will not go out of business, they will suffer but to say they will go out of business is ridiculous. HP for one has a very large and loyal customer base in their server products and for good reason. They make great servers with very strong management tools. I know this because I face it all the time as we try to get our products in customers doors to replace their HP servers.
Windows on desktops will also still have its place and customers.
Also don’t count on Win 8 being the end of Windows. MS survived the revolt against Vista and Win 7 did just fine. It can happen again, there are droves of Windows users that are just not upgrading yet for whatever reason, be it crapiness of Win 8 UI or the fact that PCs last a lot longer then they used to. These people will never go Mac and there are many of them out there. MS says Win 9 will be out in 2015, which probably means 2016 but many customers will just hold out for that.
HP is a good and innovative company which deserves to Live. Microsoft in the other hand…. Let it die, die die, let it shrivel up and die….
Good.
Microfaggots should go bankrupt. Because they fucking ruined Rareware.
And they need to pay the fucking price from taking Rareware away from Nintendo. Those Microshit faggots. They can all burn in hell for that ultimate sin. You hear me, Microsoft? Go fuck a gay, homeless man and get AIDS and die!