

Why Microsoft Is A Dying Giant. - macco
http://rockiger.com/en/content/why-microsoft-dying-giant

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alyx
Maybe its just me, but I swear I read the exact same thing year after year.
Only thing different each year is the author(s). Makes you wonder how long it
takes for giants to die.

~~~
jerf
Yeah. I've always thought they'll "die" the way IBM did; still significant,
still profitable, still a force to be reckoned with, just not dominating the
industry anymore. Arguably, that's already come to pass, or we're very close
to it. It gets easier every year to build large companies that simply ignore
them. (It's always been _possible_ , but it continues to get _easier_.)

While predicting their Imminent Demise™ does get old after a while, I would
point out that for years, people have been pointing out that they make all
their money on Windows and Office and have failed to penetrate any other
market. This has remained true. People further point out that sooner or later,
those markets aren't going to be as lucrative as they once were. I think we're
only now beginning to see that, but I also think it'll snowball once "I have a
Linux-based system" is no more weird than "I have a Mac". (Linux and Mac both
legitimize each other.) The arguments that Microsoft are going to "die" (their
dominance if not the actual company) are well-founded in structural arguments
about how they get to their bottom-line, not merely GPL-hippie wish-
fulfillment fantasies. Without a lucrative third-front, Microsoft can not
continue as the force they are today. That the argument is old doesn't mean
it's not true, it simply didn't happen as quickly as some people
anticipated(/wanted).

(I'd actually characterize the XBox as doing better than the article does, but
it's still nowhere near profitable enough to build the company around, nor
does it seem to have prospect of doing so. I can't think of anything else that
could support them, either.)

~~~
light3
Still, Microsoft office remains the supreme software suite for the office, I
don't see anything on the horizon that is challenging this.

After all the hype about open office it still lacks the compatibility and
efficiency of getting things done in ms office, because Windows is such a
juggernaut and whether you like it or not many features are built specifically
for Windows, which gives Microsoft such a gaping advantage which will not
disappear until people stop using Windows, and I don't see that happening
anytime soon.

~~~
jerf
"Still, Microsoft office remains the supreme software suite for the office, I
don't see anything on the horizon that is challenging this."

I do. People realizing that the office suites aren't really contributing that
much to their productivity and learning to use them much less, to the point
where they can be replaced by commodity suites.

The real killer for getting off of Office for BigCorp is that they wrote apps
in Office. This was dumb. (Excepting spreadsheets, which were actually
designed for this to some extent.) These apps are moving to the web, probably
with Microsoft web technologies. This is also not necessarily a brilliant
move, but it's much _less_ dumb that actually trying to write a Word document
that is also an app.

Secretaries passing around press releases don't need Office.

Office suite usage has been very warped by being the only game around, in much
the same way the web is getting warped into an application platform, only more
so. As the Office application platform is eclipsed by the web application
platform, it becomes easier to get off of office.

What Office will be replaced by is simply... not Office. Not OpenOffice per
se, just... not buying Office.

