Microsoft is doomed, but first it’s going to make a ton of money | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is doomed, but first it’s going to make a ton of money

washingtonpost.com

13 pointsrbanffy19 comments

This constant 'Microsoft is doomed' meme is really beginning to annoy me. Yes, their heyday has past when everyone had a PC running Windows in their homes, but that does not mean the end of Microsoft.

"Tablets and smartphones are the future of computing" to which I say bollocks. If I'm working a 9-5 job and need a computer, I don't want to be two finger tapping on a virtual keyboard. Can you imagine the epidemic of RSI that would ensue. I want a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor, and I don't give a shit what they,re plugged into, but I highly doubt it's going to be a £400 iPad with no access to the file system. I'd rather use a Raspberry Pi if I have real work to do.

Yes, the vast majority of users just want access to Facebook and Twitter, but in business you want a Windows, OSX or Linux PC.

If developers were to actually start developing all iPad apps on iPads I might consider the battle lost, but as far as I'm concerned the PC maybe in decline, but that's to be expected after a boom. It will level out eventually.

imho that's the point, the consumer market will rely almost exclusively on smartphones and tablet, while the business market will remain just the same. So, in the worst case, Microsoft will became a purely business company, a new IBM if you will. Microsoft will do just fine.

Couldn't agree more.

That's called retreating 'upmarket' and it usually (historically) fails. IBM is the exception.

As clichéd as the Innovator's Dilemma is now, I find very few folks who have actually read it and processed all the strategies, and case studies in the book.

Spinning off a wholly independent entity that can compete at the new price level/market is Christensen's recommended approach. It's all in the book.

>Businesses are not going to put iPads on peoples’ desks any time soon, nor are they going to ditch Microsoft Office in favor of Google Docs.

That's interesting, because at MPoW we've been using Google Docs for several years and at most meetings I attend, you can look around the table and not see a single laptop; everyone is using a tablet or smartphone.

It's amazing how fast it's changed too. When I started here ~4.5 years ago, Office documents shared on network drives or emailed back and forth was the norm and if you had a meeting of n people, you can be sure there would be n laptops around the table.

Yep. It's changing really fast. BYOD is so popular here with big companies; clunky laptops are unopened for months at a time while employees happily use iPads for everything. Even if the company didn't pay for them. I myself cannot imagine how you do a lot of the work (or play) on tablets; but I know many people typing entire documents (books, (white)papers) on their tables in favour of laptops/desktops. So I see it changing fast; some people will not drop their keyboards, but when I get into a train now full of business people, you can count the laptops on 1 hand; the rest having iPads. That was completely different a few years ago.

I also found that statement jarring. Google Docs' collaborative editing is so useful in the workplace that standalone editors like Microsoft Office / OpenOffice seem like a quaint artifact of history to me.

Or to give it a slightly less linkbaity headline:

"Microsoft's current strategy and product range has a limited lifespan, but it's so cash rich it could just buy it's way into growth markets"

So, really, it's not doomed or dissimilar to most other mature large companies.

Microsoft is far from doomed, but it is interesting to see Digital compared to them. I have said since the iPhone came out that if Microsoft fails to compete within the mobile devices market that it would become another IBM or it would be merged into some other company. So far all signs point to failure on usurping the market from Apple or Google.

I think that we are still a ways off from this situation, but I cannot see Microsoft as its own entity in two decades.

Doomed is obviously used for dramatic effect. Needs to, and is struggling to adapt, yes.

Nevertheless, as the article hints, work (and even consumption and creation at home) is routinely done at desks. Whether we continue to call that "desktop computing" or "using a PC" or any other untrendy phrase is a matter of language. I believe tablets are sexy because of what they do, not necessarily that people like having to hold them or like small screens. They are great on the go, but when I am at home or at the office, I want large form-factor. I would prefer immersion.

I feel Microsoft needs to steadfastly improve their principal area of strength: work and play at desks [1]. I also think that with the nascent swing back to users recognizing the value of control, Microsoft should take the (daring?) position of being the only tech titan to encourage a decentralized cloud.

Reviewing my blog rant on Microsoft again, though, it's the nearly-last point about MSDN pricing that just has me shaking my head in disgust. The pricing is so unbelievably out of whack with today's development model.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft

It's doomed because Windows on PC is losing ground. Linux gaming is on the rise and it will push Windodws out even more.

Gaming is a tiny niche market in reality. Microsoft runs almost everything. Have you ever seen an ATM crash - yep you get a BSOD, or a ticket machine at a cinema, or a checkout till. Most of these machines are still running XP!

"Gaming is a tiny niche market in reality" Yes, it's just the biggest medium industry in the world, ahead of hollywood and music.

I was talking in regards to PC sales. Microsoft has gaming covered with the XBox, and to a certain extent IE. When I said niche, I was referring to gamers that buy PC gaming rigs. These consumers are not important to Microsoft, they have bigger fish to fry.

Microsoft doesn't care that much about PC gaming these days and this is another thing that will bite them. Linux will emerge as PC gaming leading platform in the future.

It often holds casual users from ditching Windows for Linux. I'm not talking about Windows being used in businesses. With Linux gaming gaining momentum, there will be significantly less reasons for many people to use Windows.

I really want this linux gaming thing to be true. I miss all those games I bought on steam that I can't play because I don't have a windows pc anymore and don't want to buy one just for that.

I don't use Windows for a quite a while already. Gaming on Linux is very possible these days, including using Wine. What's lacking though is DX11 support there which doesn't allow playing new DX11 only Windows games. But above I wasn't really talking about Wine, but about increasing amount of new native Linux games.

> "Microsoft is doomed, but first it’s going to make a ton of money" ...

... by milking the trapped, a.k.a. raising the price of client access licenses here and there - which incidentally explains why it still looks like a profitable company on the enterprise side of the equation.

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