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---- Microsoft: Ready To Spend Money On Finding An Answer To Google

vincevincevince - 1:13 am on Sep 27, 2008 (gmt 0)


This needs to be seen from Microsoft's point-of-view:

  • Their office suite is clearly going to fall out of the market within a decade to open source alternatives, especially as a global response to recession. Shareholders and voters are demanding cost savings everywhere and many places have already successfully switched from M$ Office.
  • Their latest, greatest, and very expensive OS is poorly received and a substantially worse product than leading Linux distributions for most users
  • The sub-notebook class is demonstrating that people demand their OS isn't resource hungry and are happy to do without bells and buzzers - a complete change of direction for M$ who until now have believed that adding bells and buzzers is the best way to sell an OS.
  • The server battle is and remains lost, despite comical tactics used to increase M$ 'server' counts. Whether firms are starting a small site or running a massive online business, MS Server does not seem the best option to them.
  • Database lines are dying. Hardware is cheap, memory is fast, and free frameworks make free databases do just as well and just as fast as expensive SQL server products.
  • They took ASP and made ASP.NET complex and expensive in an effort to make it better hence are now losing to PHP even faster than before.
  • Nobody believes silverlight will get any more traction than ActiveX Applets. That sector is lost to Flash and the next entrant is likely to be Javascript + SVG or a similar entirely open source non-proprietary system.
  • They thought Linux users didn't matter and didn't support them, forcing them to create their own leaner, meaner, free and often plain better alternatives which are now jumping across to Microsoft's platform and posing an increasing threat both to their OS product and to their software sales.
  • Software development is now dirt cheap. Browser-hosted software on a par to Microsoft's top installable offerings of the 90s can be custom built just for you without emptying your savings account. Therefore, competitors don't have even a tenth of the overheads Microsoft has (and refuses to slash).

    Faced with that, and more, you'd want to chase after the company which is doing well in this changed climate too. I can't see Microsoft being around in twenty years if they don't crack this.

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