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Comment by sker | Hacker News Reader

> analyst Rick Sherlund said the sale of Bing and Xbox, along with other moves, could lift fiscal 2015 earnings by 40 percent

Short term, quarterly numbers-focused business people. Lying off 50% of their employees will also improve their numbers by 2015.

Apple and Google have become the largest tech companies thanks to their consumer facing products. Selling Xbox and Bing will only seal MS's faith as another IBM. Windows Phone and Surface will stagnate (even more) and eventually they will have to be let go too.

Non-tech people often ask me if IBM still exists when it is mentioned in a conversation. They'll be asking the same thing about Microsoft in a decade or two if Elop takes over.

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IBM not only still exists, they are massively successful. Today they're worth more than Microsoft, in fact, because of a strategic decision to refocus on selling to businesses that has worked out extremely well. They've stopped being a household name since they stopped selling to households, but I doubt they're losing much sleep over that.

Microsoft's ratio of popular to unpopular consumer products has been dismal for years; it's hardly unreasonable to think they might likewise do better by refocusing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibm#1980.E2.80.932013

I'm not too sure about that. A lot of Microsofts dominance in business comes from the ubiquity of its operating system, while IBM has _always_ been big in enterprise / mainframe computing and research regardless of their "foray" into PCs.

Giving up the consumer market to focus on business puts this dominance in danger (even more so than the mobile/tablet threat), because someone might very well and up doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to the minicomputer makers, and eat their business "from the bottom up".

So I think the interesting question is whether Microsoft could survive and thrive on enterprise software/services in an environment where neither Windows nor Office were dominant.

>Selling Xbox and Bing will only seal MS's faith as another IBM. Windows Phone and Surface will stagnate (even more) and eventually they will have to be let go too.

These types of comments sealing the fate of MS comes up at any post relating to Microsoft. However its far from the truth, Microsoft isn't going anywhere as much as Adobe, whether someone likes it or not. Xbox is one of the major revenue earning division for MS (not from console but from games, digital rights and live) and it is going thrive despite their PR clusterf*ck with Xbox One. Windows Phone and Surface slowing gaining momentum and WP is starting to see large market shares outside of U.S.

> Xbox is one of the major revenue earning division for MS

This isn't even remotely accurate. Xbox barely draws a profit in comparison to it's office, windows, and services groups.

but IBM _does_ exist and (IIRC) has doubled it's capitalization in the last decade while paying out dividends every year.

It's not necessarily a bad fate for the stockholders, even if it's way more cool to be Apple than to be Oracle.

He is clearly a mistake. In the consumer space it is always innovate or die. For PCs people buy Windows because they are cheaper than Macs and linux is a nonstarter. Chromebooks are the new ultra low end. For Tablets: Apple is the high end, Android is the low end. Kindle Fires are niche, and everything else is basically worthless.

In the business space they need to counter the cloud and APIization of the market. They need to make it simpler, integrated and more effective on Windows devices. And they need to target small businesses. The need to cloudize workgroups/domains and make it simpler.

The rest of the cloud market being built on linux/open source and relies on web browser standards to achieve cross platform penetration. But in the current reality, Windows PCs and iPads are all that matter.

MSFT's market cap at the moment is 313.5B. IBM's is 193.4. Microsoft turning into an IBM would be a major win (and I mean in structure, not a literal 50% drop in market cap), not some sort of worst-case scenario. It's arguably even the best case scenario. IBM has been sustainably doing their thing for a long time now.

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