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Strategy Shift In The Air For Microsoft
mrdaveb writes "In the face of a declining market for MS Windows and MS Office, Microsoft's recent statements and acquisitions point to a future in which .NET is a key driver behind a strategy which will see Windows CE devices taking the limelight. This article explores the problems which Microsoft face in maintaining their stranglehold, and their likely route to keeping Windows on top."
What Microsoft really needs is some way of ensuring that software wears out at a similar speed to hardware
It gets me wondering why consumer is willing to pay $4999 for a Plasma TV that has a specific (say 20,000 hours) lifespan, but can't stand paying a $49 software that has an expiry date.
Hardware used to last for 10-20 years (like old radios), but hardly live past 3 years nowadays, yet consumers are rushing out buying and replacing gadgets every day.
I guess the main influence is Open Source and freeware, which sort of prevent major software makers to gang up on consumers.
Wear & Tear on hardware is by nature, Wear & Tear on software is by design, and people can choose against that design, but not many people can break nature's monopoly.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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I Am My Own Worst Enemy
See what everyone else is doing.
Copy it, tying it to your own IP, proprietary architecture and co-opting it to erode better strategies and make it your own.
Bundle it.
???
Fail to Profit!!!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I disagree. They're a big corporation, and although they've done bad (and even some stupid) things, their goal is still to make money for their shareholders. If that goal requires that they be 'clever' and try and change their business model/strategy, I'm guessing they're going to do something. It might take them some time (more time than others), but I'm sure that Microsoft is not going to disappear. They're going to adapt to whatever market conditions present.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
I think we can all safely say that no matter how successful, or not, microsoft will be in the years ahead, the millions of users trained from birth to believe that windows id the worlds only operating system are unlikely to move en masse to the alternatives.
May the Maths Be with you!
Now enter the US postal service. You try setting up a small time mail service in your city and go to jail. You try using FedEx for what the Postal Inspectors deem regular mail, and you go to jail. Similarly, if you try to stop paying into the government retirement system and start your own with higher returns.... guess what happens? Or what if you try to open your own liquir store in Virginia or Pennsylvania across from a state run ABC. Jail.
We throw this monopoly term around way to much without acknowledging the difference between a natural, earned monopoly and a violent, coercive one.
- Microsoft has had the Office no-upgrade problem for a long time...
- .NET was specifically developed to (appear to) run multi-platform (or was this an accident on the part of microsoft?)
- The first full release of .NET was in 2002... The beta period was long before that...
- Of course MS wants development for WinCE/PocketPC to be as easy as developing for the deskptop... Perhaps that's why you can write a PocketPC/WinCE program right on MS Developer Studio?
- Yes, Microsoft would want everyone to rent out Office instead of buy a perpetual license. Every app developer wants that. Remember ASPs (Application Service Providers)?
This article sounds like its written by someone who just got into computers and is just finding out what's gone on for the last 5 years...
Personally I would just like to see Microsoft do something really well for the first time. They seem to take the approach I use at University: Do it as quickly as possible and put effort in where it can be seen. This is not what I would expect when it comes to a commercial product, and only works for proof on concepts. Now 21 years later, it's pretty clear Windows isn't a POC, so buck up and give us something we can really love. (For more information, visit www.apple.com)
I've been wondering about this for awhile. Microsoft's overall strategy has always been to be the mediator between your computer/data and you. At the beginning this was DOS, then it became Windows on top of DOS. Then Office to get to your business data, etc; Netscape was a major threat because they could usurp that position and allow you to get to your data through the web browser on a PC without needing a MS product. .NET is the ultimate implementation of this strategy. If they can really make it run anywhere: PCs running Windows, OSX or Linux on various hardware flavors AND on palms, consumer electronics devices, etc; Then they'll have succeeded in making a standardized "glue" layer between you and the hardware.
.NET and you have practically the same scenario as you have today except now Windows(.NET) runs anywhere.
.NET license...
Next port Office to
Linux? OSX? Windows? Bah, who cares, so long as you're running a
s/shareholders/board members & institutional investors/ . They're publicly traded; individual shareholders have little to no power or share of the profits.
Most of Microsoft's success can be chalked up to two failures by one other company...
IBM allows Bill Gates to own and sell MS-DOS under his own company's name, as IBM doesn't take the PC seriously.
IBM fails to protect their PC design, not taking PC's seriously, and clones flourish providing a ready market for MS-DOS
Most of everything else Microsoft has profited wildly from is centered around these two items. Microsoft has demonstrated that they are not a very inventive company by buying up lots of technology companies and immitating others. Where they have attempted to innovate in new markets they have usually fallen flat on their face and lost hundreds of millions of $. If it weren't for the O/S, Office and Server divisions Microsoft wouldn't be able to sputter so frequently.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Win CE devices are going to continue dropping in price as they become more common. There's no way Microsoft is going to be able to earn anywhere near the margins they make in the PC business on a $100 cell phone, and there's no reason why hardware makers in the competitive electronics marketplace won't switch to open source (i.e. free) alternatives in the not too distant future in order to make their products more competitive. It's not like there's a huge inventory of Win CE software out there that absolutely must be run on these portable devices.
If MS is betting the future on CE devices, dump your MS stock right now while it's still worth something. MS remains a one trick pony, and their one trick is their OS monopoly in the PC marketplace. In spite of their billions, they've never been able to dominate any other industry and they never will because they're incapable of innovation. Their entire culture involves around theft, acquisition and intimidation. Expecting Microsoft to compete in a more open marketplace and win would be like expecting the Mafia to get into the automobile manufacturing business and compete with Toyota. They aren't structured for that kind of business, have no aptitude for it, and their strong-arm techniques only alienate customers and potential partners.
"Microsoft's profit is currently focussed on two major products - MS Windows and MS Office. Both of these are in decline."
/. can one of the most profitable companies in the world with record profit and revenue for this past quarter be considered in decline. I'm not saying I approve of how they do it, but it is funny how FUD can go both ways.
Only on
If Microsoft is capable of adapting to changing market conditions, they may adapt.
But they may not be capable. The book "The Innovator's Dilemma" explores cases where corporations were not capable of adapting to changes in the market space caused by "low-end" competitors moving upward into the formerly plush (well-controlled) market.
Open source has the potential for doing this to Microsoft, IMHO.
When a consumer is buying a plasma at Best Buy (for example), I don't think in fact they are buying a TV with a life of 20,000 hours. I think they have no idea that is the case, and as far as they are concerned that TV should last for years and years.
I do not think that yet people are fully bought into the notion of device failure in a year rather than ten. After all, people are used to the TV's they had before which did last perhaps ten years or so (that was the case for my last TV, even really a bit longer than ten years).
People still get refrigerators that last for a while, and other appliances they probably plan to keep as long as the house.
I think also there's a function of money where people expect for hosuehold electronics/appliances to last longer as the cost increases. Certainly a lot of people expect this of cars, preferring to keep a car ten years or longer and assuming it will hold up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
MS has screwed up so many times in the handheld arena, but now the technology is getting to the point where maybe they can get their bloatware to work: i. mobile devices are getting powerful enough and cheap enough; ii. 3G and effective wireless netweorking are getting to the stage where they are reasonable as mobile data carriers.
MS has been losing money in mobile for many years. This might give them an edge in the future.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm in the middle of learning to create a program on a windows CE device. Since it's going to be used to aquire data I figured it would be nice to install some form of DB on it. Sure enough there is SQL 200 CE for the ce .net devices. So Here I am thinking this is great I'll install that and away we go. 1 day later I'm still working on that install.
.Net installed and I really can't complain about it. Best IDE I've ever used hands down.
.Net on CE devices may work nicely but the hours of hoops to jump through just to get started is a real pain in the ass. By far the best part of this exercise has been visual studio. I added the necessary parts as a reference and away it goes.
First I already have visual studio
Second I know that I need SQL server to replicate the DB's with so I head off to MSDN and grab it.
500 or so meg later and I burn it to a CD(my media versions of the subscription haven't arrived yet) and start the install. Installation doesn't appear to do anything. After messing with it for a bit I remove it. Remove the desktop edition, and remove the old sql client tools. run the install again and it works. Fine I can live with that.
So I install sql 2000 CE It tells me that I need sql 2000 SP1 installed. I assumed that the newest version on MSDN would have the service pack installed already but I would be wrong.
So 430 meg later I have downloaded SP2 (sp1 is rolled into it) and another 120 or so meg and I have SP3. Install those. Reinstall sql CE. I get further but I now need to install IIS so that the two can comunicate. It didn't come preinstalled on this XP pro SP2 PC so I get to track the program down, set it up then get the database installed then I can get back to the 20 minute tutorial I was following.
Deploying programs to the device is trivial. If all the rest of the software was at the same level as visual studio I wouldn't be using linux as my desktop at home.
Basically, they bought VirtualPC so their future customers, running on some non-x86 processor, can run legacy x86 Windows programs along side their .NET-based programs. The detail being that of course, the .NET-based apps are running in a ( licensed ) Microsoft operating system environment. As an added bonus, the OS used in VPC is yet another licensed MS operating system! Even _more_ software sales for M$!!
It's just the M$ way of _not_ betting the farm on x86... which is the true point of .NET, at least according to this guy.
Hey, they're not stupid at M$, they just like *MONEY*!!!
.NET has been around for a while, but it finally might be beginning to pick up. The w3schools stats for February* have included .NET as an OS platform, with a small, but rising share. Perhaps MS are looking for the same (initially slow) take up of IE6 or XP.
Of course, the real news is that Firefox has hit 20%, with other non-IE taking the total to over 25%. Yeah, I know, "lies, damn lies and statistics, and all that", but it should mean the end of IE only sites, when it can be shown that they are turning away 1 out every 4 site visitors.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
About Longhorn. It was supposed to be the Great Leap Forward for Microsoft and yet most of the cool features have either been pulled for future releases or being backported to XP. This will probably be the first version of Windows where there is very little incentive to upgrade from the previous version for most of Microsoft's users.
The absolute worst thing that could happen to Microsoft would be for Windows to lag in sales. So much of their company rides on the success of Windows and Office that if one of those gets badly damaged it would have very damaging results for the entire company.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I (still) say that Microsoft is being forced into changing their application delivery model by Google. What choice do they have? What happens when Google rolls out a word processor, spreadsheet, and a dozen other "Office-like" apps all of which run right in your web browser, and they offer it all at a really, really competitive price per user (especially to businesses), and Microsoft is still selling clunky old CDs?
Look at it this way... Which would you rather have: this or this? One of them comes on a CD, and becomes outdated very quickly unless you continously patch and upgrade it. The other is just a URL that you type into a browser, and you can let them (Google) worry about keeping it up to date.
If I had two identically priced and featured products and one was running on .Net and the other JME, I would not even think twice about selecting latter.
.net. It seems that .net is for the little guy's who are too cheap to spend the money on an enterprise product.
There are many in the world who have had enough of the instabilities and insecurity of microsoft software who will do just the same. Just look at the ratio of enterprise applications running on java vs
Time to buy those Options on Microsoft Stocks.
JsD
[karma=(moz+nix+ooo)-ms]
Read about it here
OCO is Loco
A natural monopoly is an industry where the most efficient production is through a monopoly. This means Municipal water supply, electricity distribution, local telephone service, public postal services, etc.
Microsoft's monopoly came about mostly by their exclusive contracts with hardware vendors, agressive bundling, and buying up competitors. This is the antithesis of a natural monopoly.
The article states, as a central premise:
.Net architecture seems like a sensible (more generality) and well-executed improvement over Java ideas.
"What Microsoft really needs is some way of ensuring that software wears out at a similar speed to hardware. Unfortunately for them, although fortunately for the consumer, it is quite hard to build planned obsolescence into software."
WTF? That is utter nonsense. The Windows security model dates from before ubiquitous internet. It was not designed for a modern threat level and has NOT been adequately updated to deal with it. It does not get any more worn out than that.
The article makes it out that Microsoft's problem is that there is no market for innovation in operating systems. Bullshit. There is a huge market for innovation. Just look at all the features Apple is adding to MacOS (quartz extreme, spotlight..) and look at how the Linux Kernel continues to improve (real time support, reentrent kernel, massive multi-CPU scaling and clustering, constant time scheduler, ever more platforms). Microsoft's real problem is that their Windows development operation has become so bloated and inept that they can not supply timely improvements. They have not kept up with the competition or with the hackers, and are only falling further behind. And most of the "innovative" features announced in Longhorn seem to be inspired by OS X.
This does not seem to be a problem with Microsoft generally. They do execute well in other areas. IMHO Halo and the Xbox are good products, whatever their profitability. The
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