I wish Microsoft had decided to separate into several companies way back during the US v. Microsoft case.
Office is actually a great product and Excel in particular still is the best available spreadsheet around. But Office has been hamstrung by being part of Microsoft; in particular by not supporting iOS or Android or online (until being forced to). If Office was its own company, I'm sure these platforms would have been supported years ago.
I feel like Microsoft is one of the rare cases where the whole is actually less than the sum of its parts.
Office would do well without the rest of Microsoft (in fact possibly even better), but I'm not sure the rest of Microsoft would do well without Office. Office is a huge stable cash-cow that allows Microsoft to experiment on things like Kinect without having to worry if they aren't always profitable.
You could argue the same thing with Apple and iOS. iOS would be better if it weren't so tied to OS X, but I'm not sure the rest of Apple would be in anywhere near the same position (or even still around) if it weren't for the big iOS and iPod cashcows.
They bought Kinect. And if Office is the cash cow, why are its limitations then defined by other Microsofts interest?
Apple and iOS isnt really comparable because the integration between the two is possible only because they are both from the same vendor. In that particular example, its adds value to both products, which is the opposite of the dynamic between Office and Windows, where the value is decreased.
1. If people could develop for it on other platforms it would significantly increase the number of people able to write iOS apps globally, particularly people from lower socio-economic groups. In the short term it doesn't make a big difference, but there are millions of people in India and China that can't afford even an entry level Mac, and I think in the long run this is detrimental to the ecosystem.
2. Many iOS services are tied into the Apple ecosystem, such as messages, notes, facetime etc. If they weren't using iOS to try to get people onto OSX then these services would be more likely to be cross platform and therefore far more useful.
It's the same problem with Office. MS are using Office to help keep big business on a full MS stack - Windows, Sharepoint, Windows Server etc. And it's business that really matters to Microsoft. If Office were to be split off, they would be more likely put it on all smartphones, Linux, write a better OSX version etc, but it could weaken Microsoft's position wrt its other products.
It would probably be great for consumers if these companies took the attitude of making their products work best in a full stack, but still play nicely with everyone else's products, but they seem believe (rightly or wrongly) that it is in their own best interest to push for vertical integration and implicit or explicit lock-in.
Absolutely. I have nothing to go on other than gut feelings for this, but it almost seems like if Microsoft had been broken up, all of the individual companies that would have been created would not only have ended up shipping better products, but may have been collectively even more profitable than Microsoft is now.
Usually when a company offers a wide range of products that work especially well together, that's a good thing, but somehow Microsoft has ended up crippling themselves. Even from a purely nontechnical marketing perspective, it seems like every single thing that they've made that has had "Windows" in the product name that was not the OS itself (Windows Phone being a prime example), has suffered from the association.
I feel like Windows Phone could have been much more successful if they had just called it something else. It also seems like Xbox may have been much less successful if they were required to call it Windows Box or WindowsTV or whatever. It's just a dumb marketing thing that has nothing to do with technical details of the product, but it makes a huge different in how potential customers view that product.
Would Xbox even exist? The Xbox 360 certainly wouldn't, because the 'Entertainment' division was subsidised by the rest of Microsoft. It was only 3 years into the war against Wii and PS3 that the Xbox 360 started to win and then Kinect blew all else out of the water.
The cash helped make that possible.
On the downside, it's a shame the Microsoft Courier tablet was killed just before the iPad was released.
The cash is still doing that. Its not like its profitable. But it could have been, Ballmer just does the same dumb thing over and over again. He attacks a competitor and tries to poison the profitability in a market, with no plan or intent to make a profit. He was going to kill Sony and spend a lot money trying to do that. He was going to kill Google, yet fails to realize that Bing heavy resource consumption is simple too expensive to be price competitive.
They dont innovate, they attack and poison the well. I really dont understand why stockholders put up with jungle boy acting out like that. I whish Nicrosoft would just focus on its wn products and profitability, but i doubt Ballmer will ever be a big enough man to take that road.
Very true. A similar case would be Adobe, who relied way too much on flash for so much time and started working on html5 tools only once iOS got entranched.
Office is actually a great product and Excel in particular still is the best available spreadsheet around. But Office has been hamstrung by being part of Microsoft; in particular by not supporting iOS or Android or online (until being forced to). If Office was its own company, I'm sure these platforms would have been supported years ago.
I feel like Microsoft is one of the rare cases where the whole is actually less than the sum of its parts.