But what could be the future of MS look like a strategic perspective? I am pondering a bit about that. They are somewhat squeezed in between closed system and open source. How can they position themselves for a solid path for the future in that middle-ground.
But what could be the future of MS look like a strategic perspective?
I'm voting for private cloud.
1. They have a strong presence in businesses in both the desktop and server spaces.
2. They have the cash in the bank and plenty of good people to throw into a serious push to move the market.
3. They'd be playing to their established strengths, instead of trying to challenge the likes of Apple and Google in areas where the latter are already far ahead.
4. They'd be playing to today's cloud-happy market sentiment, but also able to avoid some of the inescapable flaws that have been starting to show as more businesses have gained experience with the reality of outsourcing too much.
5. This strategy is compatible with almost any serious strategy for the home user/entertainment market. In fact, with the rise of practices like remote working via VPNs and mobile working with BYOD, there is a lot of potential to bridge the two, again in ways their competitors simply aren't geared up for.
I can't talk from a consumer perspective, but from a developer perspective, they need to open source everything .NET-related if they want to remain relevant.
With Ballmer gone, if people like Hanselman and ScottGu gain more influence within the company, I'm sure we'll see great things being open sourced.
It's hard to shift the company to open source with someone like Ballmer at the top, it would be like admitting defeat to the open source movement, and people in such positions of power never like to admit they were wrong in their strategy. It's human nature, I almost don't blame him.
A lot of developers don't trust MS even if they have some really nice tools and a huge platform. Microsoft has a reputation for killing off development platforms when they start thrashing around seeking relevance in some new way. With the shift to Win 8 for example, Silverlight and XNA were axed with little more than the promise that critical bugs and security issues will be fixed. If the platforms were open sourced the community could pick up the slack. The Mono project did that for XNA care of Mono Game. No such luck for Silverlight as Moonlight is dead as well.
A non-crappy enterprise mobile option alone (basically Blackberry 2013) would be a $100b business. Neither Android nor iOS is that out of the box, and the bolt-on ecosystem of crap doesn't turn either into as good a system as RIM was in its heyday.
Look what phone DIRNSA uses today: a Blackberry.
I'd sell non-core assets (Xbox, Bing, hotmail, consumer stuff in general, etc.), and focus on the core OS/mobile/Azure/Office/MSDN systems.
I think you might be underselling the enterprise features of iOS, particularly with all of the Exchange support built in, ability to manage profiles with OS X server, the remote wipe, encryption, etc. It's what I use for work, and a Blackberry 2013 wouldn't get me to switch.
I would grant that there are specialized markets that MS could serve well in the enterprise market, but what do you think the typical enterprise deployment needs out of the box that iOS can't provide right now?
iOS devices themselves offer most of the hardware security features Blackberry (old) offers (I actually know zero about BB X; it seemed unlikely to live to adulthood, so I've ignored it). I love iOS for that.
iOS is undeniably a better web browser experience than Blackberry. It also has a viable app ecosystem, but that mostly doesn't matter for enterprise.
The only large OS X Server-managed deployment I've heard of is Apple internally. In Silicon Valley, I'd probably go with iOS-only (I don't believe in BYOD, and crossplatform means LCD and pain) with either a third-party MDM or maybe try OS X server. No way I'd do that in a 100k seat enterprise with high security requirements -- 30-50 person shops aren't really "enterprise".
I am excited about iOS 7, but not at all excited about Apple's lack of any real focus on enterprise. The only reason Apple has stuff like Kerberos support in OSX is that Apple uses it internally.
Apple focuses on consumer (primarily), with iCloud, etc. as the main management tool. There is a little bit more for small businesses and some smaller education deployments, but aside from Apple.com, there isn't much attention given to the enterprise market.
(If I got to pick a job, I'd rather be HHIC of Apple Enterprise Products/Enterprise Security rather than CEO of Microsoft, personally. Either would be a turnaround.)
Flag staff in DoD use blackberry because their IT goons are scared shitless of telling their dyed-in-the-wool-msft-fan bosses that a UNIX-like operating system is good business.
It's that Blackberry with BES has actually decent management and security, unlike a cobbled-on-Android MDM, and the Blackberry keyboard.
The underlying OS on the Exchange server doesn't matter. That DoD is (I'm pretty sure) the world's biggest MS deployment does matter, though -- even though I prefer UNIX, if I'm in an environment where 99% of systems are Windows based, I'd build my ancillary systems on Windows, too.
I've always felt MS is two businesses, an enterprise systems (Office, SQL Server, Project, Dynamics, Azure) business and a consumer devices business (Windows, Xbox, Phone, Bing) which should have started building hardware sooner than it did.
They really need to either spin off a separate business, sell some divisions or just stop trying to compete in some areas. Experience shows their OS dominance doesn't count for much in the phone, tablet, search or cloud markets.
Yes, Azure. It's developed into a good offering and I'm pleased for them that they're doing well.
But, there was a time when Microsoft entering a market would send all the existing players running for the hills. They used their OS dominance to control what software OEMs installed and killed off every desktop software competitor they ever had. Your best hope was to sell your company to them. But they couldn't do that with the phone, tablet, search or cloud markets. They've built some good products and some of them are doing ok, but they haven't had the kind of automatic win in those markets that those of us around in the 90s remember.
Their dominance over Netscape scared a lot of people. "What if Microsoft comes in and gives everything away for free to keep the OS monopoly?" was a legit fear. Gates was simultaneously a product master, and very competitive. Sometime between then and now people stopped fearing them.
Maybe it was the delays in getting products out? Or false starts? Or that they just started playing nicer?
Nobody is close to unseating them on the desktop, but the excitement is everywhere else.
I was thinking there wasn't much synergy if you're just using the profits of one business as a VC pool for the rest. Better to give the cash back to shareholders and let the market decide which to fund.
