Can Microsoft Ever Recover? Windows 8, Windows Phone, Xbox One, Surface, etc.

[scdkad]

Great posts here. Despite the somewhat dour OP MS just continues to rake it in..

 

[Xpider_MX]

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:

MS always slapping in the face of trolls XDDD

 

[snowmutt]

One question - if you remove enterprise-focused products and revenue from MS, what's left?

That's kinda like saying:

Remove vehicle sales from Ford Motor Company, and what have you got?

Microsoft is a historically dominate enterprise solution company. Until someone comes along and knocks them from their perch, they will continue to be. That is what the outsider doesn't understand about things like Bing. They point to it and scream: "It will NEVER catch up to Google, why do it? It is a money pit!!". Meanwhile, it is used to focus in on business needs and is in the fabric of so much of what MS does, it supports everything they do that requires data/information gathering. It is vital to their future which is still and always will be enterprise needs first.

Do they want WP to be succesful? Do they want XBOX Music to be a huge money grab? Do they want XBOX to outsell the PS, regardless which number is behind the names? Sure.

But do not confuse the development of these and a dozen other products with what they have to do. Until Apple screws up, the consumer market is theirs with the iPhone, iPad, and ipod. Android leads in OS sales, but not profits per unit. Apple is playing a different game. When it comes to advertisement, Google owns that money stream until they screw up. Bing is a nice money maker, but Google is in a different world.

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.

 

[rex.reyesiii]

Until Apple screws up, the consumer market is theirs with the iPhone, iPad, and ipod

uhm "rumor" has it iPad's sales are going down. but I think that's mostly because of Android tablets though.

 

[rodan01]

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.

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.

 

[Michael Alan Goff]

uhm "rumor" has it iPad's sales are going down. but I think that's mostly because of Android tablets though.

I would say it has more to do with the market starting to mature. I doubt the tablet market will stop growing for a while, but it won't have the explosive growth that it had at the start.

 

[undulose]

Wait for some time to settle. There will be very big differences now with Satya Nadella's regime (can't you feel it)?

Sent from my Nokia Lumia 1520 (RM-937 Malaysia) using Tapatalk

 

[Michael Alan Goff]

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.

No, they haven't screwed up enterprise. They're still a major player in enterprise. One good example is that O365 subscriptions are up. Azure is still a big name. It isn't number one, but that doesn't make it a failure. I don't know how you're coming up with these things you're saying.

This just sounds like you started with the idea that Microsoft was in trouble and went to move the facts to try to make it seem like that.

 

[Grant Hildyard]

Phones
The iPhone did not catch on until us tech heads saw the advantages of them over standard phones at the time. When the average consumer started to see IT guys using these phones, they asked our advice and the iPhone caught on. Same happened to Android, techies started using them as they were more configurable than iPhone and now look at the market share.
One thing I have noticed is a lot of techies are starting to use Lumia's and that will filter down to the general public over time. And especially now that Windows Phone is now free, it will be cheaper for manufacturers to create Windows Phones instead of Android handsets.. Androids still cost licencing fees per handset for most manufacturers, so I see a large shift coming.

Tablets
Windows free under 9", 18 months I see a massive market share gain for Microsoft and anyone I know who has a surface have glowed about them, and people comment on mine all the time. Comments here regarding Microsoft being patient are spot on, Apple is losing market share hand over fist even though still making massive profits, but sooner or later they will get called out on their products as the competition are outpacing them technology wise and on price. Just give it a little bit more time.

Xbox
The PS4 might well win this generation, but MS can improve the situation with constant upgrades to the Xbone OS and they have a ****load on consoles ruling the loungeroom with universal apps and tv integration. But they need to seriously speed there cadence for updates up.

Enterprise
Cant be beaten

BING
Last I read they have like 20% of the search market and have increased their ad revenue and it is not running as a massive loss anymore. This can seriously dent google in the future, if Bing can pick up more market share and more advertising, it is effectively eating google alive from the insides. That's googles main revenue stream.

What do I want to see?
I want Satya to get aggressive. Google and Apple have effectively been carving their massive amounts of cash from the carcass of MSFT. iTunes on PC and Google through Windows search. Google wont write apps and block msft from writing apps for windows phone! OK. lock google out of MSFT store, lets have that walled garden.

What will be the saving grace of MSFT?
Cortana everywhere, Xbox, PC, Tablet and Phone
Universal Apps (write once, run Xbox, Tablet, Phone & PC)
And stop the US Centric release of everything. MSFT have more marketshare outside of the US than they do at home, concentrate on that a bit more.

 

[Vistary]

Microsoft is the LARGEST software company, how come they need to recover?

 

[dkediger]

Microsoft already screwed up in the Enterprise.
1)..... now you have more iOS and Android devices than Windows PC being used in the Enterprise. ......

Say again? Besides personal devices (of which we don't do BYOD) I have 1% of my device base IOS/OSx, and 0.0% Android/Chrome. The last Apple purchase was a MBP for one of our owners about 6 months ago, with none planned in the next 3-6 months either. The iPads we do have were an OEM initiative that has largely been idle - they sit in desk drawers.

Anecdotes, taken individually, I know are not data, but I have seen no penetration of IOS/OSx/Android/Chrome in meaningful capacities in the environments of my, or my peers, networks. If anything, it has declined over the last 18 months to two years as initiatives to use them just withered away.

 

[Cleavitt76]

The enterprise environment I work in has similar device percentages to what dkediger describes. Except the iOS/OSx values are well under 1%. The dozen or so iPads that the company purchased are all but unused these days. It was kind of an experiment to see how they could be used in our workflows and to reference when supporting user's personal devices. They were pretty much useless in our workflows so all that is left is to use them to support user's personal devices.

As far as the user's personal devices, they can be used to connect to some of our systems. However, they accomplish that by connecting to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The VDI systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the OS on the virtual desktop that they are connecting to is Windows (which must be licensed). The user's personal device is basically just being used as a dumb terminal. So in our line of business, an iPad/Android tablet + a Windows desktop OS license + a percentage of a VDI infrastructure's hardware, host OS, etc. allow a user to do what a Windows 8 tablet can do natively for less than $500 (Dell Venue Pro for example). The cost for the iPad/VDI route is easily $2000 per user and probably quite a bit more. That is probably why we are only deploying it on a fairly limited basis. I'm not even factoring in the additional cost of supporting a system as complicated as VDI or things like SAN space and fiber channel switches/NICs for the clustered storage used by a typical VDI.

The point is that most companies would significantly increase their costs by switching to iPads/Macs/Android and it's not just because "apps would need to be rewritten in HTML5" (a monumental task by itself). It's also because those other systems lack even the basic tools/configuration required by an IT department to keep things monitored, working, and upgraded.

 

[rodan01]

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.

If a company adopts BYOD, you automatically get the same number of devices in other platforms than in Windows. Not only communication devices, devices that you could use to increase productivity, develop internal software for them, or adopt third party software.
If Windows keep declining in the consumer market, not only in mobile where is nonexistent, but also in the desktop as the Mac, Chromebooks and Linux are slowly taking market share, people will ask to access resources with all those devices, because as an employee you don't want to carry a PC and Mac, a Windows tablet and iPad, a BlackBerry and an iPhone, a wearable a vs b, just because your employer doesn't want to adopt new tech. So, BYOD is really hard to stop.

A solution is virtualization, which is not a good user experience and impacts productivity, and as you said It's expensive, I would said artificially expensive because the cost of Microsoft licenses. But this cost is another big incentive to adopt cross platform technologies in new projects and Microsoft will be forced to reduce it over time.

My point is, the seed that initiates the process of creating a multi-platform environment in the enterprise is already sowed and the process can't be stopped. There are economic incentives that move in that direction, there also a lot of problems to solve, for example the productivity of cross platform development tools the manageability of devices, security, but those problems will be solved.

 

[dkediger]

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.

 

[smoledman]

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.

BOYD has nothing to do with enterprise decisions companies will make. iPhones have to be able to talk to MS Exchange server. Nothing changes. Is Apple going to write the back-end too?

 

[smoledman]

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.

 

[Laura Knotek]

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.

The person you quoted is referring to enterprise use. YouTube is not even an enterprise app.

 

[Parishrut]

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.

 

[undulose]

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.

I've read somewhere that Google has given MS their apps' API's.





Sent from my Nokia Lumia 1520 (RM-937 Malaysia) using Tapatalk

 

[paulm187]

Not sure what you mean by recover? There are more Windows 8 machines than every iPad ever sold, with the Nokia acquisition Microsoft have become the No.2 mobile manufacturer in the world, the Xbox One is selling record levels and better than the 360 did. Microsoft made $8 billion on their devices division last quarter.