Just look at the Windows Phone and Windows 8.
The issue isn’t just “making mony” per se, the issue is when do you sacrifice short term to increase long term gains. Building a cheap, inferior product and trading on reputation may “make more money” this year but it can also put you out of business five years down the line and then you aint making no money at all.
This doesn’t explain it. At least not in terms the market can understand.
What explains it is that you are evaluated at the business unit manager level in terms of return on investment.
That makes bundling Office with the Surface Pro 2 a political impossibility. Instead, you get Office 365 for a month, and ads that claim Office is bundled with the Surface Pro 2.
In short, what has killed, and will continue to kill MSFT is horrendous product marketing.
Surface can destroy the iPad if Office is bundled and the Type Cover is included. It’s not, so it won’t. Also, the price difference between a 256 and 513MB version is almost double. Memory can’t be that expensive, and the backplane is the same.
X-Box One. No backward compatibility with the 360, and it costs $100 more than the PS4. PS4 has no backward compatibility either, but it is selling three times more units (conservatively) than MSFT.
If that trend continues, developers will choose PS4 to support before MSFT. You don’t see developers clamoring to support the Windows Phone.
Amazing - you pioneer the business model that killed Apple (provide a good, low cost OS and give away the developer tools while your competitor charges a premium for hardware, OS, software, and developer tools.
MSFT is failing because they forgot why they made more money in the first ten years. Good software at a reasonable price. (Value discipline).
Google is wrecking both companies, and will continue to do so, using the same business model MSFT used to kill Apple (before MSFT bought Apple).
Pretty simple. Windows 8 blows! Although the youngsters may like and use the tile-ey thingies on the tablets and phones, as a desk/laptop OS it is horrible. It is not just different the way 95 was from NT, or 7 from 2000, it is bloated and weighted toward all the social tile-ey thingies.
No recognizeable start menu (added later), no means to go directly to system functions, or paths to system functions in a familiar way.
All in all, sticking with 7 until the wheels fall off, then moving to the ultimate windows patch, Linux.
KYPD
How do you make money? How about selling your database software suite for a tens of thousands of dollars per license? How about changing your volume licensing scheme to be so convoluted as to be vexing to even the most seasoned IT accounting professional? How about treating your mom and pop shops like complete trash while sending your mega-corporation clients on sales junkets to Hawaii?
I’ve been an IT professional for over 20 years. I’ve worked with enterprise-class Microsoft products like Server, SQL, SharePoint, Active Directory, Exchange, etc. for over 10 years, and I’ve been actively involved in licensing “true ups” for the last 5. I’ve never seen a company contort themselves in ways like Microsoft to keep a customer happy, but in the end, they still make hundreds of thousands of dollars off of their clients for what? A license?
I’ve worked in mom and pop shops who spent $500 for a single server license while large corporations with thousands of servers pay less than half of that, and while I’m not complaining about the difference between single vs. volume licensing, I am complaining about how they treat these two customers respectively. Mom and pop shop wants support for their product? Call India, wait for a call back, muddle through a possible fix, get frustrated. Corporation wants support? You get a TAM to make a call, you get an English-speaking support rep on the phone in minutes, and you get regular follow up.
Microsoft isn’t in the business of customer happiness, they’re in the business of making money, even if that means a program riddled with security holes.
Every company needs a top exec whose job is to think about how to make money. Putting him in as the very top dog is generally a bad idea.
The Leader of a company that wants to excel must have a vision above and beyond "making money" to achieve that goal. Making money is a by-product, not the goal.
MS destroyed itself from within, yes it will still exist and make money, but it lost its crown as an innovator long long ago.... And this guy and his leadership is not the sole reason, but a very very big part of it. Now, to be fair, this guy did nothing without GATES approval, so Mr Gates owns this as well.
However, when you decide you are going to rate all your employees on a 5 point scale and 20% of them no matter how goo d they are will be graded as an F when compared to the rest of their team, you are going to undermine the very thing that put you and keeps you on top. You could be a certified genious and superstar, but if you get teamed up with 4 other superstars who burn just a bit brighter than you, or worse yet, are better at playing the political game than you, and POOF you get a bad review, no raise, and you say F this, and go get a job elsewhere for more money and less BS... And this is EXACTLY what MS did for years, drove off great talent that they had, and lost completely their ability to innovate.
They aren’t going out of business, but they will never be a tech leader again. They destroyed their ability to innovate, and have spent so much time trying to defend a dying territory that the were end gamed around.... They are still doing it to this day. Nearly 7 years since the first Iphone was introduced and there STILL isn’t a version of MS OFFICE for iOS and their Android version finally came out late this year and isn’t compatible with the overwhelming number of tablets on that OS....
Balmer made money for stock holders, but he destroyed the company as an innovator...and basically traded long term greatness for shorter term ROI. MS will not go out of business but they are done being a place that young engineers are clamoring to go work for.... And that’s a very bad thing long term.
Personally, I have used MS products for years and most of the time I like them and the way they work. I very recently was introduced to Windows Office 2013. OH my Lord! As far as I am concerned this new ‘latest and greatest’ Office product is the pits.
Pay a yearly subscription to use!? Everything is online and it uses the Browser for Excel. Plus it wants to put everything in the ‘cloud’ to safeguard it. Uh... No! Not for me. I’ll just keep on using the older MS office until these ‘geniuses’ get their act back together. My data is mine, I don’t want it on the cloud for any reason.
It’s like the old military credo ‘If you can touch it, you own it and control it’. If my data is in the cloud, I can’t do that and anyone who can ‘hack’ into it can then own my data.
So if Ballmer was thinking Money, money, money.... How do we make more money? Then he forgot a big lesson! If you don’t keep your customer happy, then that customer will go elsewhere for the product he/she desires and that WILL make them happy.
>> Ballmer explains that from day one, his job at Microsoft was to think about money.
The Business Insider’s view concerning cause of failure...
Yet another article from BI showing its liberal affinity.
Microsoft stock has been flat since Dec 2000. It went up when Steve Ballmer said he was leaving.
Windows 7 can be modified so it works ok but there are several annoyances I hate. I have downloaded several free and one paid programs to get Windows 7 to work well enough. Windows 8 comes along and you wonder if they are putting crack in their caffeinated drinks up in Redmond.
They have a desktop tile but there is no icons on that desktop and no start button to get to your files and programs....
Right click and create new folder and call it Computer. Create shortcuts to the desktop from c:\program files was how I got started then found some programs to fix other annoyances like you cannot easily change the font. You have to go into the registry to do that! Get the free Windows 8 font changer instead.
I upgraded to Windows 8.1 and it was get this, it is a 3.6GB download! The start button is next to useless. The Stardock.com version called Start8 is 7.1mb and gives you multiple start menu and options.
Windows 8 has about 1.6gb of updates from Windows update site! The bug fixes are bigger then the original install!
They added a BIG stupid arrow Switch between apps square box that won’t go away. Putting an X on it was to easily close it wasn’t sophisticated enough for them so you have to play a game. Point your mouse in the upper left corner and maybe it will go away. Try Alt + Tab key combination to make it go away...temporarily.
I went back to Windows 7 after a few months of being frustrated with Windows 8.
I installed Windows 8.1 in a virtual window using a free program called VMware Player. I looked at the install size and it was nearly 30gb