Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Should Dump Middlemen, Build Own Phones
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company and start making its own phones."
Microsoft do not have engineering talent nor software talents to pull something like that off, especially not in management. No matter how good of a phone the grunts make, management will kill its potential. It has happened countless of times before and it will happen again.
Xbox is not a success and while now making modest profits it has lots and lots of investments to recoup before giving any payment on the money spent. Its an utter failure up until today and if nothing ground breaking happens it will keep on being a third rate console.
The only way Microsoft could succeed is to break out a mobile team and totally isolate it from any managment and Microsoft itself. Even when they buy an excellent and complete product like Danger they still manages to wipe it off the planet my mismanagement.
Im also not so sure being a top down shop like Apple is good in the long run. Those kinds of companies tend to stiffen up and become stale and slow pretty fast when given enough market share.
HTTP/1.1 400
Personally, if I had a choice, I'd gladly take Microsoft's non-viable business model at $18bn profit in the last year more than I'd take any other technology company's as that's over double Apple's profits and nearly triple Google's profits.
Microsoft's got a perfectly viable business model, such that it's still consistently slaughtering the competition in the technology market in terms of profit they make year on year- I think IBM is the next closest at around $12bn and HP 3rd at about $9bn, although I could be wrong, I've not been paying attention to all of them.
The issue is simply that Microsoft is struggling to grow their market even more, not that they don't in fact make fuck loads of profit, and have a metric shit ton of assets and equity. The fact is it can do things like the Kin, the Zune, the XBox, and whether they flop or not is irrelevant when they're still pulling in more profit than any other technology company out there from the profits of their core business. If however one of their adventures does turn out to be a hit then great, they've widened the gap even more, if not, then, well, their lead in terms of profit is still pretty massive and even Apple and Google's resounding successes in comparison over the last decade haven't even come close to closing the gap. Unless Microsoft has a secret oil drilling operation that's going to explode due to poor maintenance in the gulf of Mexico soon then there's not too much that'll change that in the forseeable future. As a company, financially, they're still a behemoth, and are as solid as a rock.
Danger was purchased by MS and tasked to build the kin. It wasn't a project that they bought fully featured like google did with android. The Kin was fully developed form concept to launch while the former Danger employees were under microsoft. Engadget has the whole scoop of internal politicking at MS that led the the demise of pink/kin if you want more of the details. BUt win7 phone is a go, they would be really dumb to change directions, yet again and go it alone. They've already made too many changes in plans that have lead them way behind.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.