This is certainly a complex situation to analyze.
In the first place,
I don't think there is going to be
any rush to buy W8 tablets and W8 phones.
Sales of W8 phones
will be much like sales for W7 phones - marginal at best.
The tablets will be worse, but Microsoft will soldier on
with them.
They will get heavily discounted and sold at Wall
Mart. Maybe you'll get one
with your Happy Meal at
McDonald's.
Nokia will not have any success
selling tablets. They are
not a tablet maker, and they are starting from zero.
Their
current customer base, the carriers, will not be interested,
and Nokia
will have to develop the market. Nokia will
downsize to a shadow of its former
self, and perhaps survive
that way selling W8 phones, heavily subsidized by
Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft has any interest in buying Nokia, as
has
been well discussed here, but in the end they may have
no choice to prevent
Nokia from going under.
Now we talk about the W8 desktop, and that is a
different
story that has nothing to do with Nokia. The W8 desktop will
not be
any different than any other OS launch for Microsoft.
ie: there will be no
rush to go out and buy it, but at some
point all new PCs will have that
installed by the OEMs and
you will have no choice if you need a need computer
and you
always buy Microsoft. So - it is guaranteed sales at some
level - at
least in the consumer realm. However, consumers
are abandoning desktops in
droves. This trend will only
accelerate with the W8
desktop.
Businesses, however, will bulk at it. In the first place,
they
traditionally wait a few years at least before
upgrading. With the W8 desktop,
there is going to be more
foot dragging than ever before. The W8 desktop is
just not a
platform one would want for serious work. A business doesn't
want
that Metro screen between them and their account apps
or compiler or whatever
it is they need to do. In the end,
Microsoft may have to come out with a
version that puts a
real desktop forward and relegates Metro to the side, out
of
sight.
Several years down the road, when most of the consumers
that
want Microsoft desktops will have W8 desktops, and
businesses will have
reluctantly begun to buy them,
Microsoft's sales will have shrunk in half, but
they will
have easily survived. Now here is where dynamic changes,
because we
begin to run into network effects. At this point,
we will begin to see W8
phones, tablets, and desktop forming
a viable ecosystem, each component
stimulating sales of the
other components. Microsoft will be smaller, but will
have
finally made it to the other side.
However, all the while the
competition won't be standing
still. As I said, W8 tablets will not take off,
and W8
phones will continue to be marginal until we get to the
point discussed
in the paragraph above, so what will
consumers be buying? Of course they will
be buying all
manner of innovative devices from a wide variety of
innovative
manufacturers, and anything can happen to disrupt
that scenario in the
paragraph above. Then, in the end, the
long term is very hard to predict. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|