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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

They can survive for a long time still but in the end they will be just another dinosaur. Apple was lucky, Steve came back and had ideas that changed the world in many ways and at the exact right time in history. I was at Apple a year before he came back and left thinking it was doomed. MS is still a strong company with a lot of money, but they have nothing that will change the world and their own future. The future belongs to those who can invent it but revolutions are hard to come by. What do they have that will give them a massive advantage over everyone else? Nothing I can see.

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The combination of PCs, tablets, phones, search, consumer services, living room entertainment, a compelling software and server stack, and the best R&D in the world gives them the potential to do things other companies can't do.

Microsoft is incredibly well suited to compete in the future. Although it is easy to dismiss Microsoft due to their stumbling in the consumer market in the past couple years, you have to realize this is going to be a decades long battle for Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Out of those 4 companies, I'd say Apple is the one who needs to diversify their profits and rapidly improve their ability to create services.

Microsoft does have incredible R&D. If they did some serious culling of whatever bureaucratic cancer has infected the company, they could probably make some compelling B2C products. I bet their B2B products will sustain them for a while, though.

"...and the best R&D in the world..."

Xerox had the best R&D in the world as well. (PARC)

What MS needs is that ability to turn R&D into products.

Of the 4 companies... I would say only Apple has the DEMONSTRATED ability to turn R&D into products. I would say MS is the CLEAR leader of the 4 in terms of raw R&D. Google really does look more and more like a one trick pony. And, curiously enough, Amazon is the company I could see getting its tentacles into the most parts of the global economy over the long term. (Well... Amazon and Facebook)

But all of that ignores unexpected external influences... like the NSA scandal.

> Google really does look more and more like a one trick pony

Curious, to which trick do you refer?

The one that makes them money.

Advertising.

Microsoft has a couple of massive advantages that most hacker's tend to dismiss. 1. A massive workforce of MS developers. Not the ones employed by MS themselves but the huge number of dot net developers out there. Apple has a decent amount of developers now but MS and Java dev numbers still dwarf Obj-C devs. MS also has developers at every level of the stack. Low level C++ to the web with ASP.NET MVC and Javascript.

2. Microsoft has proven that it can produce quality software at every single level of the consumer technology stack. OS, B2B, B2C (office, Visual Studio), Mobile OS/APPS (One note on iOS is a really well done app and windows 8 mobile has not sold well at all but it's still very well designed and developed) and xBox proves that they can establish themselves in new markets, and Massive scale services (Azure). None of the other major players have this.

Apple - I love apple products and software but never have I seen so many failures at services as Apple has put out. iCloud is a great example.

Google - Great services in the SaaS sense but so far has done a pretty poor job on the PaaS area. Google App Engine is pretty far behind Azure and AWS. Plus they completely ignore desktop computing as a whole.

Amazon - The clear leader in the PaaS field with AWS. Azure is a great service but AWS has had massive success. The kindle fire is still a pretty weak offering compared to the others on the mobile device side.

Microsoft - Windows 8 mobile is a good OS but it lacks the great apps/well designed hardware to drive adoption. Windows 8 on desktop has been a flop sure but windows 7 was a pretty good success and I'm willing to bet windows 8.1 will do alot better than windows 8. That's their pattern since Windows Me. Flop-Success-Flop-Success. Azure is a great platform as a service. Reliable, fast, and good pricing with a lot of great features that even AWS doesn't completely match, though AWS still has some features that Azure needs to catch up on.

So MS has proven ability on all levels and a huge group of experienced developers to help drive adoption. Where they have fallen down so far IMO is that mobile has always been a sideshow. Not the main focus. So they create subpar devices and fail to drive developers to great the great apps that are needed. The big question is if they can truly design a great piece of hardware. If they do then they are in position to control huge pieces of the industry again.

All that said the latest previews of the next X-Box don't leave me feeling good about their future.

You don't think having by far the biggest and best research organization is a competitive advantage?

Not if the rest of the company is unable to turn the results of that research into products that aren't just another vehicle for shoving Office down people's throats.

IBM's size wasn't enough to stop Microsoft's uprising. I doubt Microsoft's size is enough to stop the next Bill Gates.

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