Microsoft Is a Dying Consumer Brand

Taxman415a noted a CNN story on the dying Microsoft brand where they talk about "The less than stellar performance of, and problems in, nearly every consumer division. It cites StatCounter's data showing IE's market share falling below 50%, and is even smart enough to note that's just one statistic with various problems, though the trend is clear. It also seems that MS doesn't want to compete with Android, so it plans to charge royalty fees to handset makers to discourage them from using it in their products. The conclusion is that MS will just be a commercial, not consumer company."

Comments

Re:Netcraft confirms it

[VGPowerlord]

Windows is dying!

You really trust this source?

I believe it when Netcraft says it!

Re:Really???

[adonoman]

If by "slow adoption", you mean the "fastest selling OS ever", and if by "niche product", you mean "sold more units than all versions of the iPhone and currently #2 in console sales", then yes, I'd have to agree with your first statement.

The rest of your comment I can agree with at face value. Microsoft needs to stick with a few things and do them WELL. All these half starts with their phones, and tablets, and etc... are killing any new buzz they try and generate. One of their biggest selling values in the corporate world is their backwards compatibility and long term support for their OSs. I can still pop in my Wordstar floppy from the 80s and open my grade-school assignments on my i7 running 64-bit windows 7, 25 years later - nearly complete binary level compatibility. (I do have to run it in XP compatibility mode, since 16 bit support has been dropped.) And yet here they are dropping support for Windows Mobile after just a couple years - not even unix-style recompile-for-a-new-platform compatibility.