[LINK] Microsoft: Vista follow-up likely in 2009 (Core Competencies)

steve jenkin sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au
Sun Feb 11 13:24:30 AEDT 2007


Howard Lowndes wrote on 11/2/07 10:51 AM:

MSFT is beleaguered  by it's history and incredibly poor management.
[See Cringely and Joel-on-software]

I posit that they've only ever had *2* successful products: Office &
Windows.
I don't know how successful Xbox & Win-CE are.  They don't show up big
on the c/o annual reports.

Not being able to leverage their talent/brand-name into new markets has
been a central problem for MSFT for last 10-15yrs.  Encarta, hotmail and
MSN don't contribute much to the bottom line.

As they've become bigger (what others may call 'more successful') -
they've been looking for other products/niches that  match their current
leaders:
- *big* market
-  gross margin >90%

They haven't realised that these are just not normal business operations!!!

BillyG, I think, understood this around 10 years ago, which is why he's
been unwinding himself out of the business. If he believed in MSFT's
continued dominance, I don't think he would've gone off to raise babies
and give away money. [He's stood down as CEO and Chairman and sold-down
a huge portion of his shareholding.]

MSFT will fail, very quickly, if it ever has to play in the real world -
say 20% margins.

Compare and contrast with Apple.

Apple is truly creative and inventive. They know they are in hardware -
but do a reasonable job on software.
And they had a time early on when they were the market Giants - and got
the stuffing knocked out of them...

They aren't squeaky clean - have a number of 'kill the company' faults
[Users have to be fanatics] - but they seem to be in much better shape
than MSFT.  Principally, they've realised that "computers" are old and
boring.  They've taken on the notion of embedded systems - gadgets and
appliances...

>
>>> He's drunk the Kool Aid. Vista was a failed development project.
That's a good synopsis.

>> their core competency has NEVER been software development. they've
>> always been good at:
>>
>> 1. buying software, crippling it, and marketing it very effectively.
>>
>> 2. watching what everyone else does, writing or buying a half-arsed
>> clone, using their monopoly to take over the market when they release
>> it, and eventually evolve it into something halfway decent by the third
>> upgrade....by which time, everyone else is doing other stuff and it's
>> time to repeat the process.
>>
>> i.e. they play catch-up and rely on their market dominance to survive
>> and triumph.
>>
>>
>> it's what they do.  it's what they've always done.
>>
>>
>> MS also has problems with Vista because they can't decide who their
>> customer is: is it the buyer/end-user of their operating system, or is
>> it the RIAA and MPAA? 
>> AFAICT, they've decided on the latter but with an (as usual) enormous
>> marketing push to convince people that it's the former.
>
> But which end user, corporates and business, or mom & pop & the kids? 
> I think that M$ have abandoned the corporate market because: 1) the
> corporates are conservative about the desktops that they use and they
> really are not interested in Vista or eye candy; and: 2) because they
> are not getting penetration into the server market.  I think M$ see
> their future as the domestic, multimedia, dumbdown market, and that
> would align with their alignment with RIAA and MPAA, et al.
>
>>
>>
>>
>> craig
>>
>


-- 
Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~sjenkin




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