Yahoo Is Not the Problem - Microsoft Is
The spectacle of Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo feels like watching two dinosaurs trying to mate: painful and irrelevant. It is revealing not in its denouement but in its genesis. That Microsoft should even consider mounting such a bid shows how that its products have failed and its strategic thinking is stale. And while Yahoo shareholders are wondering how they're ever going to make money, I'm more interested in wondering whether we are watching the beginning of the end of Microsoft's dominance.
Consider, for a moment, the world in which it competes. A late entry after Netscape, Microsoft launched a truly better browser and won the browser wars. So what? You can't make money from browsers. And winning that war didn't prove that Microsoft had finally understood the Internet - it still doesn't get it. The gateway to the Internet wasn't the browser but search. And, as the world knows, Microsoft can't do search. But what about e-commerce? Not Microsoft's space. Internet telephony? Nope. Email? It's been left to cheeky startups like Xobni to try to bring Outlook into the 21st century. Social networking? Forget it.
Nor can it do content. Am I the only who remembers Bill Gates, as envisaged by WIRED magazine, floating in a pool dreaming of media moguldom? Well that never happened. As everyone told him at the time, it's hard to make the software world and the media world mix and Microsoft didn't try long enough or hard enough and it wasn't willing to change.
Databases? The market's owned by Oracle. Music? Owned by Apple. Movies? Likely to be owned by Apple, certainly not by Microsoft. Telco convergence? Microsoft isn't a major player. If I owned shares in Microsoft, I'd start to wonder what those 60,000 employees are doing in the 'velvet sweatshop' for which the company is famed.
I might draw comfort from two thoughts: operating systems and corporate sales. But my comfort would be very short-lived. VISTA is now widely recognized not just as a catastrophe - ugly, unwieldy, buggy, convoluted - that customers will actually pay to avoid. But it's an especially scary catastrophe because no one outside Microsoft has any confidence that anyone inside Microsoft can fix it. This may be a re-version of the old adage that the people who identify problems aren't the ones to solve it. But Vista confirms all one's worst fears about the way Microsoft builds its products: too many people, too slow, too much detail, no vision.
Which takes us, finally to the corporate market, which even Microsoft's fiercest competitors concede it owns. But for how long? The other day, I met an IT consultant - one of an army of people who work with small to medium-sized businesses, installing and maintaining their networks. What, I asked him, was his take on VISTA? Simple, he said. He was moving all his clients on to Macs.
Was he serious? Sure, he said. Look at it this way: Macs need very little maintenance because, basically, the hardware and the software work. That means they need less support. If I can charge the same for support but have to do less work - why wouldn't I recommend Macs? I asked if he worried about enterprise-specific software. No, he said: it was all migrating to the web, so it was platform-independent. Apple doesn't run a corporate sales team and Steve Jobs has always maintained he's entirely focused on the consumer market. But with IT consultants like this - who needs a salesforce?
When I contemplate the 27 million small businesses that operate in the US, 99 percent of which have fewer than 500 employees, I start to see that Macs stand a chance of becoming an enterprise solution for a very big part of the economy.
So while Yahoo shareholders are tearing their hair and wondering what will become of them, it's the Microsoft investors I feel sorry for. Sure, it was smart to walk away from a bad deal. But it's not the same as having a real strategy or products that work. Not being dumb just isn't the same as being smart.
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Anyone could figure anything in this article, except some of your conclusions. Microsoft was never much of corporate company, unless you mean the various computers in companies. Often companies are slow to upgrade anyway.I doubt much if large companies would like macs because of the compatibility problems. Macs only let you use their hardware which is why the software is more simple and elegant, but you probably can't use the company printer. As for Microsoft not designing good software, programmers argue about it but they tend to be biased like people who work for one auto company or another. Fact is microsoft works on virtually any type of hardware, at least xp does. All of the bulkiness and almost every other problem is casued by this. If you've ever used some type of linix you know the problems there. Probably your monitor doens't work. Interesting unix isn't mentioned anywhere in the article even though those applications running on the internet need to be running on something. I don't think too many programmer use Macs either. Of course, none of this has anything to do with how much money Microsoft makes. They have the single biggest pile of cash probably in the history of Wall Street. The biggest threat is that people don't use Vista and continue to use XP, which in many parts of the world is easily available for free which is why they are halting XP.
Very interesting points, Margaret. Perhaps I can shed a little different light on what you've said, and thereby suggest a compelling explanation for just why Microsoft is now doing so poorly.
It may well be that senior executives at Microsoft start each day in a dim chamber filled with little fountains, incense and tinkling bells, sitting in the Lotus position and clearing their minds of all thoughts and all mantras but one: "OWN-n-n-n
You see, they fundamentally believe that they must "own," and therefore must (re-)invent, everything. It was vitally important them to believe that there were "browser wars," and that they had "won." They needed to hear a Federal judge proclaim that they had a Monopoly.
Their competition, most-notably Apple, knew "value added." They understood that you don't need to "own" everything; only a few, key, "right" things. Apple didn't invent an operating-system from scratch; ditto the browser. They didn't try to invent their own Java or JavaScript implementation, or their own SQL database. They took ... leveraged ... what was already there, and made it better. They scratch-built, owned, and patented, only what mattered most.
These competitors DIDN'T try to be-and-do everything themselves. They focused. They leveraged. They deployed their resources most-carefully. They drew a clear bead on what their respective customers wanted, and deliver a consistent product-to-market success rate. Oh yeah, and profit.
You know, if I may "comment to my own comment" here ... the practice of "grow big, dominant, and large, and buy-up everything that might compete with you in any direction that you might be going," that I might seem to be disparaging here, is actually a classic business tactic that normally works well. In the hardware-world it still does: IBM, Intel, AMD, "everybody else."
This counter-vailing tactic that emphasizes collaborative development, and the leverage-b
Microsoft never had any good programmers and they never will. They design lousy software because their designers do not know anything about what they are doing. It's more hit and miss than most people realize. They realized how crappy they were from day one so what they did was to make up for it by using very smart marketing strategies. That got them to the top with the lousiest software in the world. Before the public really found out how bad the software was it was too late and the market was locked. Inertia on the part of the consumer set in as the average person does not have the time to sort out the good from the bad and the ugly. That being said the same thing can be said for yahoo as far as lack of quality goes. They are really in trouble and hobbling around on one leg. I know many many business people like myself who have stopped advertising on Yahoo because of their lack of expertise. They are extremely lame compared to Google. Essentially both Microsoft and Yahoo lack creativity and they are both in deep doodoo.
Hey... those are harsh words to level at a very large group of professional programmer
Engineers don't make perfect decisions ... neither does management ... but they're people, and their efforts don't deserve to be vilified.
I have to call you on the statement that Internet Explorer was a "better" browser than Netscape. It was not. What Microsoft did that "won" the browser wars was to bind Explorer inextricably into its operating system. That meant that if you used Windows, you HAD to take Explorer with it and you could not get rid of it. It was this dishonest and anti-competitive move that undid Netscape - however, Microsoft's victory was Pyrrhic. While they were celebrating their defeat of Netscape, savvy programmers were coming up with Firefox and Opera and Safari and so forth....
As long as E business is run by control freaks who sweat the details and miss the big picture, bad new technology will forever be at the mercy of consumers. The techies who win the E wars will be the ones who return the web to we the people and sell us back the freedom taken away by the telecoms.
Be the first one to figure out how to do that, and the ghost of Brooke Astor has a really nice apartment to sell you. "Cash" will be no problem.
Well, looks like Bill is busy catering - perhaps he'll pull a "3-COM", shut down Washington State and move it to China...Ko
http://www
"We're approaching the second decade of (the) digital age," Gates told Lee at the start of their meeting at the presidential Blue House, according to a media pool report.
South Korean automakers Hyundai Motor Inc. and affiliate Kia Motors Corp. announced with Microsoft Tuesday that they will use Microsoft's in-car software for controlling personal music players and telephones with voice commands.
"We're doing some very interesting work on automobile software," Gates said after dining with Lee. "That's a really wide open area."
The three companies also plan to set up an automobile innovation center. Hyundai and Kia form the world's sixth-largest automotive group.
Separately, Microsoft also said Tuesday that it will invest $280 million in a new research and development center in Beijing and will double its full-time research staff in China to 3,000 people in three to five years.
Lee, a conservative former construction CEO, swept into office in February with a vow to boost economic growth through deregulation and increased foreign investment.
He named Gates to his global advisory committee on Tuesday.
The joint projects in South Korea announced during Gates' visit could trigger $6.9 billion in economic impact over the next five years, the Blue House statement quoted Gates as saying.
http://ap.
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