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Why Eric Schmidt Is Wrong About Microsoft Not Mattering Anymore
First time accepted submitter Gumbercules!! writes "Eric Schmidt said he believes there is a 'Gang of Four' technology platform leaders — Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook — Microsoft isn't one of them. I wrote about why I believe he's wrong and what it might say about Google's weaknesses. From the article: 'It's no secret that Microsoft have utterly failed to make significant roads into the mobile market place. Windows Phone 7 has approximately no marketshare (ok they have live 5% or so) and this has actually gone down over the last year. It's also no secret that Microsoft have failed to gain any semblance of "cool" and that they're also managing to drag Nokia down with them. It's not even a secret that nearly everyone who looks at the new Windows 8 interface-formally-known-as-Metro doesn't like it. However this isn't the whole story.'"
All four of the companies mentioned are walled-in gardens.
Ballmer and out-of-control, boy-billionaire eccentricities including management implementations, R&D based on petty jealousies and magical thinking are to blame for MS' slow, steady decline. Stick a fork in MS, it's done insofar as stock value as far as staking its entire hopes for the future on legacy Windows and Office market bases.
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Why would I buy a laptop or a PC for my staff ever again I could buy them a single tablet – or even pocket sized phone – that just connects to a dock or cable and viola - it’s now a fully fledged PC, running all my corporate software, legacy or otherwise on a full sized monitor with keyboard and mouse.
This paragraph proves that this guy has no idea what he's talking about.
A tablet has a completely different user interface with swipe gestures and a crappy keyboard.
Why would I want to run legacy windows applications on it that already had in many cases godawful overcomplicated user interfaces with tiny menus and microscopic meaningless icons.
Legacy photoshop on a windows tablet?
Or standard Excel or Word with a monstrosity of control toolbars/ribbons with gazillions of tiny controls?
Not going to happen.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yet another "Please come read my blog post where I totally miss the point of what someone said, but read it anyway so I can get some ad revenue" story on Slashdot.
I read the article. It boils down to "Microsoft may make a comeback so they matter". Given the lack of anything other than speculation in the article - the author could've just as easily replaced "Microsoft" with "RIM". I mean, really - we should expect Windows tablets to make a strong showing simply because they can run Windows applications? Then why didn't all the old Windows tablets end up ruling the roost?
Microsoft isn't a game-changer anymore. Sure, it's possible they'll rebound - after all, Apple was in the same boat in the 1990s. But they haven't demonstrated any reason we should give them the benefit of the doubt.
#DeleteChrome
An article about how wrong he is.. but no link to his actual comments? Really?
http://allthingsd.com/20121010/live-from-new-york-walt-mossberg-kara-swisher-interview-eric-schmidt/
Schmidt: Something unusual has happened. All four companies are networks/platforms generating enormous scale effects. We’ve never had that before: Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. All different, all competitors, all making enormous investments.
Swisher: You left out Microsoft:
Schmidt: Deliberate. ...
Mossberg: Why did you keep Microsoft out of the Gang of Four?
Schmidt: They’re a well-run company, but they haven’t been able to bring state-of-the-art products into the fields we’re talking about yet.
8:23 pm: Schmidt: The Android-Apple platform fight is the defining contest. Here’s why: Apple has thousands of developers building for it. Google’s platform, Android, is even larger. Four times more Android phones than Apple phones. 500 million phones already in use. Doing 1.3 million activations a day. We’ll be at 1 billion mobile devices in a year.
Schmidt: We’ve not seen network platform fights at this scale. The beneficiary is you all, the customer, globally. “This is wonderful.”
8:25 pm: Compare this to the PC industry. Phone user population is six billion, one billion smartphone users. Much bigger than the PC industry — maybe a billion, 1.5 billion installed.
Every month, quarter, year, the growth rate of mobile adoption exceeds everyone’s expectations. The phones become so useful that “it’s good enough for normal people” in lieu of a PC, for day-to-day events. Years ago, “people like myself, we missed that.”
1) It's Eric Schmidt. of course he's biased.
and
2) he didn't seem to be specifically talking about mobile. Facebook, Google+, etc.
So it's laughable that 100m apple phones, or 500m android phones is a significant platform.. but the OS used on 95% of a billion PCs somehow is not.
Eric Schmidt has spend a lot of time competing against Microsoft. I think he's mostly right. Microsoft has only been able to prosper through monopoly tactics and those won't work anymore. They come out with a lousy version 1.0 to keep competitors away, refine it some through versions 2 and 3, then version 4 becomes useful. They can't even think about that strategy now because someone else came out with version s 1, 2, and 3.
Microsoft is still dominant in the word processing and spreadsheet markets. Unfortunately, they'll probably lose that franchise, given the rise of PDF for interchange, and their unwillingness to port their products to either Android or iOS. Someone with deep pockets, probably Google, will come along and take those markets from them.
There's also a lot of back office software that uses their servers, databases, and development tools.But those markets will never grow as quickly as the consumer end.
They won't be going away any time soon, but if they're ever going to get back in to growing markets, they need to change radically. In the end, no company that size will turn on a dime, and its not clear whether there's still time for them to get back in the game.
Play it cool, play it cool, 50-50 fire and ice.
Having a good selling tablet makes you an leader in computing?
No. Amazon is there because of AWS, not because of the Kindle Fire.
This is basically a list of companies that Eric Schmidt sees as direct competitors to Google. Each one established and now dominates a field that Google desperately wants to get into: the cloud (AWS vs GCE), mobile (iOS vs Android) and social media (Google+ vs Facebook).
The reason Microsoft is not mentioned is because it does not pose a serious threat to Google in any of these markets.
Uh huh....that's why Apple makes way more money than IBM and Microsoft combined.
IBM was a money printing machine for a time.
So was Microsoft.
Today it's Apple that prints their own money.
Sometime in the future it will be someone else. It is the nature of things.
The question currently is how long Apple will be able to keep it up without King Jobs at the throne.
What horse shit. They may not matter in search or mobile due to their current market share, but I'd speculate Research in Motion is a great example of how one day you are on top, the next you are bottom of the heap. MSFT has been churning out desktop and server operating systems, enterprise applications and CRM/ERP solutions for as long as I can remember. With further penetration into the virtualization market I'd say MSFT has a bright future and an obviously consistent and impressive track record. Remember, MSFT was piling up hundreds long before google, facebook and amazon even existed.
Why would I buy a laptop or a PC for my staff ever again I could buy them a single tablet – or even pocket sized phone – that just connects to a dock or cable and viola - it’s now a fully fledged PC
What I don't get is the requirement for a viola to go with the cable...?
Microsoft is making money
Horse and buggy makers were still making money (and lots of it!) when the first Model T rolled off the assembly line. Doesn't mean a big change wasn't coming.
The bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows and Office on the desktop. PC sales have slowed and begun shrinking - people just don't need to upgrade as often and the market is saturated.
The iPad alone is a significant slice of the PC market (25% in the US) but more importantly it continues on a tremendous hockey stick growth curve. That's a market that Microsoft cant sell Windows to and refuses to sell Office to. It doesn't take a genius to see the wall of pain coming Microsoft's way and Windows 8 is a desperate attempt to push what worked in the past into a new area. Windows has been so successful in the PC arena that Microsoft cant imagine life without it or any strategy to monetize iPad users that doesn't involve billions in risk on producing their own hardware (like, say, Office for iPad.... A no-risk proposal that might cost a few million in developer salaries).
That's always how entrenched players get beaten. It simply doesn't matter how dominant Microsoft is on the desktop because all the growth is happening in tablets and mobile... And being good early does you nothing there, you have to be good at the right time - the time when the market starts to look like a hockey stick so network and ecosystem effects can become self-reinforcing. Microsoft has already missed that point. That's why people think they are irrelevant.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
At least Google lets you get your data out.
"Coolness" is an added value which the market appreciates, but what matters the most to the market is the practicality of the product - and in Microsoft's case, I'm sorry to say there is a lack of practical value for most of its products today.
Uh...what? Granted, this is from 2010, but it hasn't changed much:
"Worldwide, 500 million customers use Office. Office's marketshare has held steady at 94 percent for years according to market research firm Gartner. The next closest competitor, Adobe has a mere 4 percent of the market. "
http://www.dailytech.com/Office+2010+to+Launch+Today+Microsoft+Owns+94+Percent+of+the+Market/article18360.htm
So those 94 percent of people find no practical use in Microsoft products?
Classic problem with a lot of tech blogging.... people often look at the particular niche they are interested in and expand that to 'technology'
My niche: Agricultural simulations built atop large social networking site APIs.
My blog title: How modern technology has consolidated around Farmville and the rise of Farmville Cash will eventually replace the global currency markets.
I hate printers.
The threat to office is from cloud services. For children doing homework, google drive is great, and be sure they already discovered that. Once using these tools, no way they will ask their parents to pay for MS office.
Uh...what? Granted, this is from 2010, but it hasn't changed much:
"Worldwide, 500 million customers use Office. Office's marketshare has held steady at 94 percent for years according to market research firm Gartner. The next closest competitor, Adobe has a mere 4 percent of the market. " http://www.dailytech.com/Office+2010+to+Launch+Today+Microsoft+Owns+94+Percent+of+the+Market/article18360.htm
So those 94 percent of people find no practical use in Microsoft products?
I am one of those guys using Office, and I'm old enough to remember using Lotus 1-2-3. Then, office was a real gamechanger. Now it's a commodity, most of the people using it would just as well use open office. They're not changing it because a) retraining b) admin tools.
As much as the cloud paradigma can be attractive to Microsoft, in their shoes I'd be wary: anybody can enter that market provided that it has given you a login and password ( Facebook document repository?), and they are not asking people for a yearly fee. I'd probably put up ads saying "Microsoft: your documents are REALLY yours", promise to give out free document viewers for eternity with a facility to copy them to newer versions, and to never mess with the program menus and shortcuts, and stick to the personal PC model like it was a mix between a young Gloria Swanson and Adriana Lima.
"Microsoft: we can do without a modem.... can you?" looks like a catchy phrase to me.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)