If MS is in the toilet, then its a pretty darn nice toilet to be in:
Microsoft banks $20B in revenue, Surface pulling in $500M quarterly | Windows Phone Central
From the Article:
One question - if you remove enterprise-focused products and revenue from MS, what's left?
Until Apple screws up, the consumer market is theirs with the iPhone, iPad, and ipod
But, make no mistake: Enterprise, despite some gains by other companies in the past 20-30 years, still is Microsofts to lose. And they won't. They are too ingrained and are too aggressive. In 5 years, we will wonder what the big debate was during this period.
uhm "rumor" has it iPad's sales are going down. but I think that's mostly because of Android tablets though.
Microsoft already screwed up in the Enterprise.
1)They are irrelevant in Mobile, now you have more iOS and Android devices than Windows PC being used in the Enterprise. The long term consequence is that companies have to develop their apps in a cross platform technology, they can't use exclusive MS technologies. That opens the door to cheaper solutions for the desktop like Chromebooks and even Ubuntu. If the enterprise apps are developed in HTML5 you don't need to pay a Windows license to run those apps. This won't happen fast, It could take years, but we will see some companies adopting Chromebooks and using remote desktop for the few apps that are Windows exclusive.
2)They bet everything in the cloud in their PaaS solution, while Amazon is all IaaS. The result: Now Azure is insignificant compared to Amazon AWS, in fact AWS is so big that if you add the next 10 competitors, AWS double them. So, as companies move to the cloud and stop buying licenses of Server products, Microsoft lose money, they are moving primarily to Amazon not Azure. Azure is growing at 150% rate, but It's so small that I think is not enough.
Microsoft screwed up and they have recognized publicly, now they repeat like a mantra "cloud first" even thought Microsoft is irrelevant in the cloud. Not everything is lost, It's still early in that market and the MS has a big advantage in PaaS which could take off in any moment, but you can see how nervous they are.
This quarter and a maybe the next two will be heavily distorted by the end of life of XP, I think the company is in trouble and without this effect you could see It in the revenue, the end of life of XP is hiding the problem, they also giving up in mobile a bit, they marketing spending fell drastically, that also helped to increase the margins.
Microsoft already screwed up in the Enterprise.
1)..... now you have more iOS and Android devices than Windows PC being used in the Enterprise. ......
Companies move slow, but aren't in a bubble, they won't be 20 years locked in a technology while the consumer market moves away and tech change completely. Even more now that computing is becoming ubiquitous and tech improve faster than ever. The consumer market is becoming several times bigger than the enterprise market and will drive the innovation, enterprise will have to adapt to this changes.
Sure, the seed has been sowed, but I've been in this business a long, long time and have seen many other similar seeds sowed and fail to bloom. Desktop Linux? That doesn't mean BYOD is doomed, but not all aspects have been fully exposed and worked through yet. It's going to be a long, tough road to overcome data security without resorting to virtualization, and its attendant costs.
In my industry, the mobile apps just aren't there, and aren't coming in the foreseeable future. At best, our vendor partners are going the HTML5 route, and we sit on advisory panels for most of them so we know. They are very cognizant themselves of avoiding ecosystem lock in on the development side becoming a competitive disadvantage.
I'm all for getting the right device in front of my people, but more important is a proper workflow. It's just not there yet, and looks to be several dev cycles away.
Ironically enough, the nearest "universal" app out there is what, Office? You have traditional standalone, O365, Online, and Chrome webapp. But our work is more than Excel and email. We've tried to place a few tablets with people, but no one really wants them to "work" on.
I think there is a real argument that Microsoft offers the most compelling, viable, and comprehensive vision right now.
Potentially MS might provide the most compelling platform, but the devil is in the details as always. When I look at modern GUIs, Chrome OS is flat out better than Windows 8.1. You can bet that consumers look at Chrome OS and think "yeah that's sort of like Windows desktop that I'm used to but with excellent Google services". That's the rub isn't it? Google consumer services are flat out better than anything else on the planet:
Search, Maps, Youtube, Mail.
These are all best-in-class that everyone uses if they act objectively and not as an MS ******. Why would you deliberately use worse Bing search, maps and Outlook.com except to be a ******? Believe me I really like Outlook.com GUI compared to Gmail, but the implementation is fundamentally flawed for me and so it remains a secondary account. Bing search results are still a joke compared to Google and Maps are equally worse, especially when you look at POI data and lack of street view.
No chance as far as the mobile market is concerned. It might overtake ios, but not android. Google equivalent services are great. If windows phone was here along with android, the market share of windows would be much greater. But since it has come late, it has to offer compelling reasons for people to switch. What does WP8 has that android doesn't for an average customer? I am an average customer. We got tiles, they have widgets that can do more. We have wallpapers, they have live wallpapers. For every paid windows phone app there are multiple free android equivalents which are better and more frequently updated. Even the least downloaded apps have hundreds of reviews. Windows got office, but windows phone doesn't support bluetooth keyboards. :straight:
What windows phone needs is a killer feature that turns heads and draws people in.
All IMHO.