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The Soul of A New Microsoft

Posted by Zonk on from the nice-picture-j dept.

BusinessWeek Online is running a front page story today about the new future of Microsoft. By 'looking beyond Windows', the company is utilizing fresh blood to come up with new products like the Zune, the Xbox 360, and various online sites. While the Zune probably isn't getting off to as successful a start as they might have liked, the article argues it's a positive sign that they're at least making the attempt. From the article: "The point is that Microsoft needs to find its un-Vista. Several of them, in fact. The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history. New business models are emerging--from low-cost "open-source" software to advertising-supported Web services--that threaten Microsoft's core business like never before. For investors to care about the company, it needs to find new growth markets. Its $44.3 billion in annual sales are puttering along at an 11% growth pace. Its shares, which soared 9,560% throughout the 1990s, sunk 63% in 2000 when the Internet bubble burst, and they have yet to fully recover."

3 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. The market is crazy.. by LilWolf · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Its $44.3 billion in annual sales are puttering along at an 11% growth pace.
    Really, 11% growth is considered bad? That's 4,8 billion growth annually!
  2. Stories like this are perennial. by dpbsmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history."

    Yeah, right. Like the upheaval when they announced a top-to-bottom-all-new-strategy named .NET, and the upheaval when they decided this Internet thing was really important and reorganized themselves top-to-bottom to take advantage of it, and the upheaval in 1995 when Bill Gates said that the "social interface" was the future of computing and introduced the all-new revolutionary Microsoft BOB.

    (Social interface? Come to think of it, where have I heard something like that out of Microsoft just recently...)

    Microsoft is always talking about upheavals, but meanwhile what they actually do is keep cranking out big bloated monolithic versions of Windows with badly-copied slightly-distorted features in other operating systems, and strong-arming PC vendors into preloading them.

    --

    "How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!

  3. Re:need to find their heart by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You can't get to the top by leveraging a monopoly, because when you have a monopoly you're already at the top.

    There are so many valid criticisms it's a shame to make them up.