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The Odds Are Increasing That Microsoft's Business Will Collapse

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urlwolf:

The world has changed radically in the past few years.  The Internet has continued to free app-makers from dependency on Windows or any other desktop platform (and, thus, from dependency on Microsoft).  Apple's iPhone has revolutionized the mobile business, unleashing a whole new wave of personal computing devices.  Apple's iPad seems on its way to supplanting the low-end PC business.
Importantly, none of these trends depend in any way on Microsoft's original monopoly and cash cow, Windows.  None of these trends generate so much as a dollar of revenue or profit for Microsoft.  (Microsoft is nowhere in mobile.  Or tablets.  And it is reasonable to think that, in these two huge growth businesses, nowhere is where Microsoft will always be).
Google, meanwhile, is trying to do the same thing to Apple that Microsoft did to Apple 15 years ago: Separate software and hardware and create a ubiquitous software platform for the world's developers to build on.  This is a smart strategy, and it's resonating in the developer and consumer communities: Google's Android and Chrome started slow, but they're gaining momentum rapidly.  What's more, Google is not just undercutting the alternatives on price--it's giving away its products for free.
Once again, the Chrome/Android momentum has nothing to do with Windows.  Once again, it doesn't benefit Microsoft in any way.
Now take a look at what Microsoft's biggest Windows customers--Dell, HP, and the other big PC manufacturers--are up to. Dell is in talks with Google to begin developing devices designed to run Chrome (and who can blame it--if it doesn't do this, it will be left behind in the next wave of consumer devices). And HP just bought the wreckage of Palm so that it would have a better mobile operating system with which to compete against Apple.  From Microsoft's perspective, these last two developments are disasters.


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read more.

They make good points. Thoughts?

Curt:
I trust that Microsoft some day will stumble and be in danger, because the leadership is conform and whatever. However, I don't imagine they will actually collapse. It is not as if you are in immediate danger of loosing everything if you have more than a quarter of a billion customers...

40hz:
@urlwolf - Interesting.  :Thmbsup:

Nothing there is really all that new as far as I can tell. But it's still worth reading if for no other reason than to be aware of what a lot of other people are reading. And for better or for worse, Mr. Blodget does get read.

Unfortunately, Mr. Blodget is a former financial analyst. He thinks like a financial analyst. And he talks like a financial analyst. His perspective on technology is skewed to primarily see "tech" as a business investment rather than something that gets used by real people with real jobs.

There is nothing Google or Apple are doing that Microsoft couldn't do if it felt the need. To a certain extent, Microsoft is in a unique position to benefit so long as Apple and Google and Adobe and Amazon continue to bicker. With luck, they'll all sue each other out of existence leaving Microsoft as the only player with a piece still on the board.

I dunno. I don't think Microsoft is as much a bumbling elephant as most of the Wall Street crowd seems to believe. Maybe it's just sour grapes because Microsoft no longer affords them the opportunity to make a quick buck on their shares. Or maybe it's because they really don't understand technology despite the fact they can trot out all the current buzzwords or fake a little expertise by rehashing and rewording opinions they've read over at SlashDot.

If the biggest threat to Microsoft is losing the OS and Office suite to a web-based product, they'll simply put more effort into RDP and Office Live (which Blodget seems to be unaware of) than they already have.

But there are also other alternatives which I blathered at length about over on a thread that Zaine started to discuss OpenOffice. Link here if anybody isn't sick of listening to me by now.

Eóin:
Apple's iPad seems on its way to supplanting the low-end PC business.
-urlwolf (June 22, 2010, 08:05 AM)
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Ha, what utter nonsense. I'd even be dubious it will replace netbooks given the lack of a keyboard.

In fact, it's not hard to envision a future in which the "desktop PC," as Microsoft currently defines it, becomes an oddity--a strange throwback to a world in which a single local hard drive (or a box of floppy disks) constituted the center of someone's work life.-http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-business-could-collapse-2010-6
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Personally I find that very very hard to imagine. Most of the article reads as one dubious hypothesis after another. And when someone words their personal notions and theories as fact they lose all credibility in my eyes.

steeladept:
+1 for each of the comments.

He obviously doesn't understand tech, or market segmentation.  Anyone who equates Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Live as the same product doesn't even follow Microsoft at all.  He is just snapping up readers by following the popular Microsoft bashing and making a headline out of it.

The ONLY thing I read that even made sense was that Microsoft will not be the stock rocket that it has been for the better part of 3 decades.  The will still be a good "new" blue-chip for a long time.  At least as long and as well (if not better than) his beloved Apple.  Looking at shortcomings the way he does, you would think Apple and Google have no weakness, and Microsoft has no strengths.  I give him that Microsoft is not as bleeding edge and always right (business sense compared to the competition) as it used to be, but that is hardly reason to believe they are down and out.  Before the Macintosh was released by Apple, people were saying the same thing about them.  More recently, some were proposing that Apple stagnated until the release of the iPod blew that thought out the window.  No, I am convinced this is just a slower time for Microsoft where they will do a lot of introspection before busting out again just like Apple did in the 90's.

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