| Is Microsoft Dying |
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| Written by Peter McLarty |
| Tuesday, 05 May 2009 14:09 |
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This is an interesting topic of discussion that circulates around from time to time. Microsoft has some 20billion of free cash so it will be a long and painful death if it was to fade out from here on. Excluding a buyout and absorption by someone else, Microsoft is going to stay for some time. Their existence has been driven by the advantage they have had with ownership and in effect control of the desktop. For those old enough and a bit tech savvy will remember the early browser wars that drove the eventual changes to Internet Explorer being part of Windows 95 and this bringing about the demise at the time of Netscape. The then lack of a good alternative left us for a number of years with a fading product that was slowly dying through a lack of innovation. Along came the phoenix from the ashes and with a lot of work created the Firefox browser, Apple has then come along and delivered a new OS for the Macs with Safari and all of a sudden their is some competition and innovation.
The corporate application space has been evolving for many years to deliver richer and better applications via the web, funny its a bit back to the terminals and mainframes but now with a GUI and a mouse. The backend of course can be just about anything from a PC based host through to a mainframe. Microsft has failed to deliver very effectively in this space, Sharepoint has some marketshare but often it has come into organisations through a vendor that has written something that utilises Sharepoint. Web based mail has beeen a poor cousin to Outlook. Their strength on the desktop has failed to deliver on the web as that would have cannibalised that market, problem is competitors saw the open door and drove straight through it. Google and others are delivering a compelling reason to move to web delivered applications. and Microsoft is losing control, or perhaps has already done so but as yet insufficient momentum has been gained to deliver a significant punch. A few are probably landing in the fact that what should have been hadnsome dividends to Microsoft in the form of Exchange licenses from Universities, has in fact seen that revenue go to Google instead. All it will take is a major corporate customer to make the jump and Microsoft could face a groundswell migration off Exchange to Google and along with it will likely go Office licenses. Microsoft is now struggling to invent its future, is it still the desktop king, it will likely be for some time and its doing its best to buy back angry customers with the Windows 7 Release candidate. It has failed to deliver in the server space, with many issues that still plague the platform due to the inadequate security model, funnily whilst delivering something new in Windows 2008 Server they have in effect emulated their most likely competitors Unix and Linux. Unix Servers were smugly criticized by the Microsoft team for their cumbersome command line tools, of which for many were in effect availble via X Windows. So right now Microsoft needs to innovate and for mine Microsoft has had a dearth of innovation in its lifetime and then focus around that. If not that war chest is going to dwindle away and Microsoft will become what many other companies before them and only be a topic of the old war horses "Remember when Microsoft...."
Jason Hiner on his Sanity Check blog at Techrepublic site has written a good take on what could happen to Microsoft and what has lead it to its current dilemma. Some pretty clear thinking on the current view and an idea for a way forward. I am sure Microsoft is listening and will take on board such comments
Peter McLarty Technical Consultant
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 06 May 2009 13:09 |
