Is it too late for Microsoft?

I get that Microsoft has made some missteps lately, but I find it insane that there seems to be this mindset of Microsoft being on some big downward spiral to oblivion.

They are still making boat loads of cash, they are still making things people want and do use, and they are making a lot of exciting changes. No, it is not too late for Microsoft.

I think that the larger problem is not "too late" so much as the trap of success. Let's assume that corporate growth can be modelled on a sigmoid curve, with small companies growing exponentially and large companies growing asymtotically in mature markets. There are a couple of really big problems that large companies necessarily face:

1. Real, disruptive innovation is never worth it. Not only do you have the issue that exponential growth in small units will not contribute to exponential growth to the business as a whole but if you disrupt your support structure, you lose on the whole. So, large companies have to be conservative and only acquire disruptive players when they reach a certain size. However this furthers the problem because at that point those players will not continue exponential growth for very long.

2. Large companies are far more reliant on streams of income and partner supports that are subject to disruption than small companies. This again makes it harder to pivot.

3. Large companies have much more inertia than small ones, making pivoting even harder.

I don't know if it is "too late" for Microsoft because I don't know what "too late" means. Too late for what? Too late to do what? The company is large and changing remarkably rapidly these days (though I saw the beginnings of change starting when I worked there a decade ago).

But the future will certainly be painful for Microsoft. Everyone knows this, even everyone who I know that still works at Microsoft. Is it too late for them to survive? Certainly not. But success on the scale of Microsoft in our market is too often a dead end, and getting out of that dead end is never pleasant.

There's no way Microsoft could have created Office for the iPad since Satya Nadella took over as CEO; same goes for a lot mentioned here. I bet he'll be great for the company, however we can't give him credit for everything.

It is hard to imagine anything is too late for a company that made over 20 billion profit last year. Even if Windows has done worse aren't Office sales increasing on OS X for example. Microsoft is a company that sells Office first and foremost.

Microsoft is a company suffering from the innovator's dilemma. Releasing Office on iPad was a good first step. I however believe that they will ultimately marginalize themselves in the consumer markets (if they haven't already, for example look at the Windows Phone share, Surface RT issues, etc). They will likely remain a formidable force in the enterprise market for years to come.

So this is not exactly news, is it.

It's just the ramblings of a blogger, based on a bunch of hypotheticals and old info (i.e. again "not news").

Which part of this "editorial" is actionable here? Should Microsoft have thought "hey, if it's too late we better just give up"?

Does it mean you should abandon all Microsoft products because it's "too late"? Office is still a good product, and becoming better, and available on more platforms. There are challengers, but Office is keeping up.

What exactly does "it's too late" mean anyway? Too late for what? Is Microsoft about to go bankrupt? No. Is it too late for it to be 1995 again? Who cares?

I guess, Microsoft's final stage will be either like an exploding supernova (like Sun, the company) where it will emit a lot of open source software in the wild and die, or like a red giant (like IBM) where it will focus on business customers and get more of them.