Question: has Microsoft ever been second to the product party by more than 3 years, and won? What about on sever and tools?
Bing, windowsphone, Zune, ie, are all end-user facing failures—none of which were based initially on in-house innovation.
My concern is with Azure, and I want to believe 1) that cloud is not winner take all and 2) that microsoft won’t fatally trip over itself as it tries to learn what the market wants.
Please help me with fodder to form my own opinion on whether Azure can ever be more than a bundled tie-in (Azure sales ~= Azure utilization) like our old friend Sharepoint.
Back when I was still a cool kid, the biggest worry for a lot of companies was Microsoft deciding to enter your space. Bottomless war chest, an army of programmers and a finely tuned sales channel meant that all their new initiatives started at +20 points.
SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc. If they didn't have it, they bought a company that did have it - and then used their 800lbs of brute market muscle to make it into the dominant offering.
Excel started on Mac and as ported to Windows afterwards.
Visicalc was never ported to Windows, while Lotus never managed the transition in a good way.
WordPerfect was the king of wordprocessors in text based OSes, took too long to accept the world had gone GUI and was quite arrogant to their customers. There is even a book about its downfall, " Almost Perfect".
Sometimes Microsoft does not need to make too much effort, when their competition is good killing their own jewels.
Bing, windowsphone, Zune, ie, are all end-user facing failures—none of which were based initially on in-house innovation.
My concern is with Azure, and I want to believe 1) that cloud is not winner take all and 2) that microsoft won’t fatally trip over itself as it tries to learn what the market wants.
Please help me with fodder to form my own opinion on whether Azure can ever be more than a bundled tie-in (Azure sales ~= Azure utilization) like our old friend Sharepoint.