"Consumer is the future and MS needs to embrace it or die"
Google and Facebook may be huge, but as a percentage of the global economy they are still pretty small (e.g. look at the Forbes Global 2000) - the enterprise world is everything all those other companies need to operate and it's the world of IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and thousands of specialized ISVs.
I'd be rather surprised if Google or Facebook wrote their own consolidated financial reporting or payroll software (indeed Google seems to use Oracle Hyperion FM for consolidated reporting and planning, as does Facebook).
At the moment, Microsoft has some pretty decent enterprise products, but they only sell them through partners - one possibility for growth and really focusing on the enterprise space would be to emulate IBM and focus on services and products - either by greatly increasing the size of their existing consulting arm and/or buying a few of the existing large service partners.
Google and Facebook may be huge, but as a percentage of the global economy they are still pretty small (e.g. look at the Forbes Global 2000) - the enterprise world is everything all those other companies need to operate and it's the world of IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and thousands of specialized ISVs.
I'd be rather surprised if Google or Facebook wrote their own consolidated financial reporting or payroll software (indeed Google seems to use Oracle Hyperion FM for consolidated reporting and planning, as does Facebook).
At the moment, Microsoft has some pretty decent enterprise products, but they only sell them through partners - one possibility for growth and really focusing on the enterprise space would be to emulate IBM and focus on services and products - either by greatly increasing the size of their existing consulting arm and/or buying a few of the existing large service partners.