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Can Microsoft Survive If Windows Doesn't Dominate?
Nerval's Lobster writes "In his latest Asymco blog post, analyst Horace Dediu suggested that Windows' share of the personal-computing market is declining at a faster rate than many believe, once Microsoft's cash cow is put in direct competition with Android, iOS, and other platforms built for tablets. In that context, Windows' share of the personal-computing market has dipped past 60 percent on its way to 50 percent. The big question is whether it'll keep plunging. 'If Windows tablets start growing as fast as the tablet market overall then Windows could stabilize in share,' Dediu wrote. 'But if Android and iOS tablets follow their phone brethren in growth then it will be far harder for Microsoft to maintain share.' Yet despite that gloomy scenario, Dediu doesn't necessarily see a market-share dip as a cause for concern on Microsoft's part: 'Even if Windows dips to only 20 [percent] of the world's computing market it will still be perfectly 'viable' for some time to come,' he wrote. But even if Windows can perpetuate, will its decline fatally undermine Microsoft as a company? All that Windows (and Office) money also allows Microsoft to launch projects that lose money for years before they gain traction. Without that monetary base, for example, it's possible that the Xbox (which bled money for the first few years of its existence) wouldn't have survived long enough to become a viable platform from a financial perspective—much less the center of Microsoft's future plans for living room domination."
Microsoft owns both gaming and workplace PC's. Nothing is going to take that from them. Tablets aren't meant to replace PC's, they're just too different kind of devices. Microsoft has nothing to worry about.
Businesses have been flirting with Linux desktops for a decade. Another decade and they'll work up the nerve to ask for a date. They're like nerds that way.
Not to mention the Server & Tools Division that sells Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server,Lync Exchange, Visual Studio etc. keeps getting record revenue every quarter.
From http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/20/with-19b-in-revenue-microsofts-server-and-tools-chief-says-hes-just-getting-started-interview/
Meet Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s server and tools division, a division that builds and runs the company’s computing platforms, developer tools, and cloud services. Nadella leads a team of over 10,000 employees, and his group alone makes $19 billion in annual revenue – which is more than the combined revenues of Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, Netflix, and a few others in the Valley.
That doesn't even include Office and Azure recently became a one billion dollar business by itself. Microsoft is pretty well diversified, unlike Apple with it's reliance on iPhone and iPad and Google with 95% of revenue from ads. As usual, Asymco comes with shortsighted analysis that mistakes the trees for the forest.
That's why the people with their own money on the line are buying up MSFT (stock went from $27 to $35 due to the last earnings report) instead of the air-headed armchair analysis that we see on here of 'lol my grandma ditched her PC and got an iPad so that means M$ is dying'.
A real challenge to the Microsoft hegemony would squeeze out the idiocy and arrogance that currently dominates the company. Forced to pay attention to users and developers, Microsoft would never have created a disaster like windows 8, or the developer-hostile policy of allowing languages and platforms to "dead end."
Heck, someone at Microsoft might actually wake up and figure out that the policies and strategies that benefit Microsoft in the long run are those that benefit users and developers, not the marketing department, or upper management bonuses.
I joke. I joke. Of course this will never happen.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The public seem to be reacting by buying lots of Nexus 7s.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Microsoft makes more money on Xbox & business licensing than in the consumer market.
Consumer MS has been declining for a while now.
Doesn't stop some dumbass author from writing an article, or an editor who can't distinguishing between Windows desktop OS and Windows Server, from "predicting"/praying for the death of Microsoft via their lynx browsers.
Of course msft can survive.
But, can msft continue to dominate the industry the way they do today? Can msft continue to vendor lock everybody? Can msft continue to force so-called "upgrades?" Can msft enforce their proprietary documents format?
Sure msft can survive, but will they be anything like the msft of today?
In my opinion, the whole "PCs are dying, everyone will be on tablets and in the cloud by 2017" meme is a little overhyped. It's true that PCs are no longer the only computing devices available, and tablets are definitely getting good enough to replace PCs for most "read only" tasks. However, even with suitable Bluetooth keyboards and other accessories, creating documents and content on a tablet is still very difficult. I'm sure it will continue to be this way until some new UI paradigm pops up like 100% fluent voice recognition, wildly gesturing to type, etc. For writing software, messing with spreadsheets and even playing high end games, PCs still have a place. It's just not 99% of the market anymore. A good example of this is the Surface. It's amazing to have almost a full fledged PC in a tablet form factor and lets you build some really cool applications that the previous Tablet PC form factor didn't address well. But I wouldn't use it to write anything longer than an SMS, tweet or quick email...it's just not built for huge gorilla hands. :-) On the other hand, it's great for watching movies, surfing the web, and other Millenial-approved social media tasks.
Microsoft seems to have missed this fact with Windows 8, probably because they were panicked about Apple and Android dominating the tablet market. Or their marketing department came in and said "zomg Millenials and hipsters are chooing a tablet-first approach to computing, we must capture this market." And that makes sense -- people of a certain age have been raised with Facebook and smartphones, so they're used to it. However, they also have jobs, and probably use PCs and laptops at these jobs to create content. Windows 8.1 appears to be backtracking on their tablet bet a little bit, but not totally -- the Metro "app" ecosystem is here to stay. (As a side note, my primary complaint with Windows 8 was not the Start screen, though it's nice they're bringing the button back -- it was the awful 2-D Windows 2.0 user interface, and it looks like they're not bringing back Aero in Win8.1, so that sucks.)
Microsoft will continue to have decent market share in workplaces. Desktop PCs will most likely fade out as laptops get more powerful, but the idea that the tablet form factor works for every situation is crazy. Even when hardware begins shipping with touch screens by default, some people will prefer not to use them. Windows Server 2012 (and Windows 8 under the hood) are actually very good products. But they do need to listen to corporate customers. How hard would it have been to bring back the classic Start menu for companies who are deploying on desktops and laptops? Why wouldn't you allow your customers who were happy with Windows 7 to keep most of what they liked while having the option to use the new stuff? In my mind, not listening to corporations who buy millions of licenses will make them less relevant, not the rise of the tablet.
Their own pride, and probably corporate policy which says "all things must be Windows".
If Microsoft announced next week they were doing an Android or a Linux distro, their stock would probably tank because that would be interpreted as basically saying "we're losing the fight, so we're looking into other things".
I agree that Microsoft is far from dead, and are likely sitting on huge cash reserves. But I don't see Linux and Android as a way forward for them.
They'd do a better job of actually listening to what people want out of their products, instead of just releasing a much hated Win 8 only to have to reverse course with the changes in Win 8.1.
Me, I'll be curious to see how they fare with the next XBox -- because I suspect lots of people are reading these press releases and thinking "gee, that doesn't sound like what I want".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In the early '90s, everyone said that IBM couldn't survive. Look where they are now.
In the late 80's, everyone said that DEC would crush IBM. Look what happened to them.
So I guess it could go either way:
Megasoft Business Services . . . ?
. . . or iSoft . . . a division of Apple Galactic Life Systems . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Microsoft owns both gaming and workplace PC's. Nothing is going to take that from them.
In the short run you are quite correct. In the long run though the picture is far less clear. Microsoft has viable competitors in gaming both in hardware and software which they have been unable to drive from the market. While not likely, it's hardly inconceivable they could lose their grip on the gaming market in time. The biggest source of Microsoft's dominance in the work place isn't Windows, it is Office. Specifically the Office file formats (.xls and .doc especially) are the main source of their dominance. That isn't going to change in the near future but history shows that office product dominance doesn't always last. Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, etc used to rule the office and eventually they were pushed out of the way. There are some very real threats to the Office monopoly (Openoffice, Google docs, etc) out there. Whether any of them will eventually push Office out of the way I honestly cannot predict but it isn't impossible in the long run.
Tablets aren't meant to replace PC's, they're just too different kind of devices,
You forgot the key word "yet". No, tablets don't compete directly with PCs now but in time they unquestionably will. Remember that PCs didn't compete directly with mainframes back in the day either but eventually they did. There is no fundamental reason a tablet couldn't be put in a dock and used as an office computer and in time the probably will be. A tablet is just a general purpose computer which focuses on a touch interface rather than a keyboard/mouse interface. I think it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to adapt them for office work.
I would love the ability to plug my phone into a dock at my office (possibly with some extra processing horsepower/storage and connection to the office phone system) and have it be my work PC as well. Think something along the lines of a Mac version of OSX when docked and IOS when undocked. Done well that would be hugely useful.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
You are comparing very old Apple technology, to very old Microsoft technology.
I am not sure if that proves anything about the current state of either technologies.
Samba 4 has a ways to go before it can replace AD. Believe me, I'd love nothing better than a drop in replacement for Windows Server, but I think Samba has at least another three or four years before it reaches that point.
Web based mail is great until you don't have access to it due to an outage, etc. At least with Exchange and outlook you have an off-line copy to work from.
Also, if you think that Email is THE killer app for Exchange, think again. THE killer app for Exchange is Scheduling (both people and resources) and I have yet to see any other product do it as well.
MS Lync is also a nice little add-on as you can see if the email recipient, assuming it is someone internal, is online and can IM them instead. It makes communication much easier.
While Webmail may work for small organizations, large organizations are going to stick with Exchange for a while yet.
Nope, but at west it supports SMTP.
Ya know, I have to give Microsoft some credit on one thing: they were not always big in gaming, nor did they leverage their way into it, from what I've seen. That's a pretty recent phenomenon. Back when people were complaining about their PC coming with a "free" copy of Windows 3.1 that they didn't want, and which just provided a counter-incentive for upgrading to OS/2 or whatever, Microsoft wasn't in the console business. They had a few games, but were overall very easy to ignore. You didn't even have to run their OS; there was a time when an x86 box with MSDOS was pretty much only good for playing Doom 1.
By the time the XBox came along, many of us had only just recently gotten out of having to use Windows for business. I realize not everyone did, so Microsoft's position in the two different markets could seem contemporary, but they're not. You're talking about two different (but overlapping) eras.
It's pretty amazing MS built that from nothing, or amazing that we let them, as we all knew it would have to be unhealthy for everyone, long-term.
Things come and go. They used to look unbeatable in business, and nowdays there's nothing weird about a business which contains not a single Microsoft license of any kind.
That means Microsoft can be beat in gaming too, but beware, for it also means they could use their immense assets to quickly buy a lead position somewhere else. Who knows, maybe in 2023 we'll all be bitching about their unbeatable position in automobiles or nonalcoholic beverages or electricity or wheat or tribbles or Harry Potter prequel TV episodes.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Android is most certainly Linux.
What it is not is GNU.
Stallman's rants about "GNU/Linux" were actually onto something.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Let's rewind to a previous millennium long ago swept away in the sands of time. Let's go way back to . . . 1990.
Then the sudden realization hit. IBM's PCs were priced at monopoly prices and people were not buying them. The company was in crisis and had to reinvent itself. It got new management. Times got leaner. And they weren't committed to past management decisions.
By 2000 we had a much nicer IBM that was focused on its profitable mainframes and was friendly to both Linux and Java.
After Microsoft reinvents itself, it will have retreated to and focus on its profitable business. Microsoft has a very profitable and serviceable business with its Enterprise software Windows, Outlook, Exchange, Office, SQL Server, etc. Like IBM before it, Microsoft has already begun embracing open source (Apache, PHP, etc etc) that enabled its enterprise customers to do what they do.
Like IBM, Microsoft won't go away. Probably ever. But it will become a smaller and gentler Microsoft without the nastiness and bullying once it has been de-fanged of its monopoly power.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I have a PC running Windows. My household has a 100% Windows marketshare.
I buy a tablet and a phone. Suddenly my Windows only has 33% marketshare, while Android went from 0 to 67%!
But I still have a PC running Windows. So does a billion other people.
Gotta love 'em analysts.
I've thought a lot about this exact point. I, too, would like to see Apple come out with less expensive and expandable systems. I think the main reason they maintain their tight lock is they don't want the plague of problems that Windows users experience due to IDIC: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Anyone can make hardware that works, to varying degree, with MS OS, and MS will try to support it. And sometimes fail. And most frustratingly, fail intermittently. Apple maintains extremely tight control to try to minimize the IDIC problem and improve the user experience through higher reliability and fewer crashes.
There's no way Microsoft can fully test their products against the infinite combinations of hardware, old and new and forthcoming, that are possible in the world outside of their labs. Users are going to pay for this in the form of crashes and problems, it's unavoidable.
Apple, OS-X, iOS, etc., is not perfect. It has problems, but in my experience much fewer than Windows. I've used MS operating systems professionally since Dos 1.0 through Win 7 and currently use it, but I'm infinitely happier with my Mac equipment like the Air that I'm typing this on. OS-X has its limitations and problems, and though Win 7 is a very good product, I'm still a lot more frustrated with it than I think I should be. We pay a higher price for hardware, and it's fairly high-end hardware and lasts a long time. I would really like less expensive and expandable hardware, I'm just not sure that fits Apple's culture.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
That's why the people with their own money on the line are buying up MSFT (stock went from $27 to $35 due to the last earnings report) instead of the air-headed armchair analysis that we see on here of 'lol my grandma ditched her PC and got an iPad so that means M$ is dying'.
The time constants of slashdotters discussing future of MSFT and the traders are vastly different. Slashdotter think 1 year is short term, 5 years is medium term and 10 years is long term. People buying MSFT @ 35 think 1 quarter as short term, 1 year as medium term and 3 years as long term. And the hedge fund honchos think 1 micro second as ultrashort term, 1 second as short term, and 1 minute as medium term and 1 hour as long term. And these hedge fund honchos will happily risk 1 trillion dollars for 1 micro second to pursue a possible profit of 25 dollars. And they will happily do it 1000 times a second. No wonder we are hosed.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
there is a lot more money in the Enterprise market than the consumer market. Enterprise customers are much less likely to change platforms than consumers are. If an individual wants to change from an iPhone to an Android phone it's no big deal. If a company with thousands of employees wants to switch from Windows to, say, OSX, it's a much bigger deal and much less likely to happen.
Apple has done very well in the consumer market and enjoys healthy margins on their products but that is starting to get squeezed a bit. Microsofts lack of success in the consumer market is well documented but they are still very profitable overall. Would MS like to have better success with consumers? Sure but it's not the end of the world for them.
Things tend to change slowly in the Enterprise market so for the foreseeable future Microsoft is going to be just fine.
IMO the real problem with Apple's desktop hardware is they don't offer a mid-range tower, so you lose out on a lot of flexibility. They've only got the all-in-one iMac, the ultra-expensive Mac Pro, and the Mini which is basically just a laptop without a monitor.
Even if there was something like the Mac Pro that used consumer hardware (e.g. not Xeons!) but was a bit more expensive than what you'd pay from most other vendors or if you built it itself it would at least be worth a look. But at the moment for me, an Apple desktop is just out of the question.
When Bill Gates first discovered the Internet in the mid-1990s, he spent three hours on line, and wrote in a memo "I didn't see a single Microsoft file format". Microsoft's dominance has relied heavily on proprietary file formats. But now, if it won't work on a tablet or phone, it's useless. This reduces Microsoft's control.
They're not doing so well on the other fronts either. I think Ballmer needs to go - if Microsoft is to survive. ;)
So now we're supposed to cheer for Ballmer to stay?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Windows can't be used to crash Android apps that compete with Microsoft's.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Think about it this way, Microsoft got started in the OS business by being an app provider whose apps a lot of people liked. They then leveraged that and the money to build an OS and then used the app business to build on their OS value. It was only later that the OS and the apps flipped in value, with the OS dominating everybody.
What the.... ?!@#$ parallel universe history are you talking about!??? Microsoft started as a language vendor (not typically considered an "app") selling BASIC, then got into the O/S business by buying QDOS and selling it at a ridiculous markup to IBM, who just wanted something quick for their (they though) ill-fated "personal computer".
They later used the profits from their DOS O/S to build "app"lications like Word to outcompete Word Perfect and Excel to outcompete Lotus 1-2-3. In the future, please take the time to have some clue what you are talking about before posting...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I don't think Apple cares about edge case midtowers or workstations. Witness the cold shoulder they've given to MacPros over the years. They're targeting a specific demographic, a lucrative demographic. Not the average Slashdot reader. They even seem happy to cede pro graphics to Windows - most big graphics companies run either Win7 or, for the really heavy lifting, Linux based proprietary solutions.
Apple wants to stay in it's groove which is high volume consumer appliances.
I'm going to bet that this years mythical refresh of the MacPro will be one of the last. Put some Haswell based Xeons it them, sell it for a couple of years and then announce it's the end of the line.
Going to piss a number of people off, but that's the Apple Way.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ill bet his universe has Unicorns in it.
And loose women.
Sigh, sucks to be us, I suppose.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Microsoft have always been ridiculously arrogant and out of touch with what their customers actually want, (most recent examples are their windows 8 GUI decisions and crappy Xbox case design), however I cant believe they really want the Xbox One to fail as a product.
To me, the decision to include always-on DRM in the Xbox One strongly implies that Microsoft already know for a fact that the PS4 will have the same thing too, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have taken such a big risk. Apparently Microsoft are already thinking that consumers will have no alternative choice to always-on DRM if they want a next gen console at all.
I hope Sony now see this as a potential tactical advantage that will guarantee extra PS4 sales from people that were otherwise planning on buying an Xbox One, and quickly remove all DRM (or at least any internet connectedness requirement) from the forthcoming PS4 before they release it.
Even more than that, a PC from 1980 is still a PC. A keyboard connected to a tablet (which works just fine today), and you have PC that would be the envy of power users from 1980.
Good analogy. While Detroit was stuck in the 1930s (until Japan gave them a scare) motorbikes were using the cutting edge of technology.