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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, July 02 2013 @ 12:31 AM EDT
The cloud is just the latest buzz-word. At MS it's not the product, it's the licence. They don't mind licensing Linux or Windows or whatever as long as the fee is paid.

People aren't buying licenses for emerging markets from Microsoft though, and why would they? Microsoft is like the mainframe vendors were at the start of the PC era. The mainframe vendors didn't care if they failed in the PC business, because they "knew" that PCs weren't any use unless they could be connected to mainframes and they "knew" that mainframes weren't going away. The mainframe vendors didn't care if anyone bought their PCs as long as they still sold mainframes. And then people stopped buying mainframes. Mainframe profits were fantastic up until near the end, and they they fell off a cliff. IBM is still selling mainframes, but there's no long term future in it.

Microsoft's problem is that selling shrink-wrap software licenses is starting to look like selling buggy whips. Their core product lines are becoming zero margin commodities (operating systems, databases) or are becoming anachronisms (such as word processors). Their biggest competitors are companies that don't sell (significant amounts of) software. The market is changing out from under them. They're a legacy vendor and all their attempts to find a new market have been flops. They can milk their legacy customers for a while and locked in customers can be quite profitable while they last, but sooner or later Microsoft will face the same fate as the mainframe vendors.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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