There is a wide spectrum between "absolute domination" (your strawman) and "desperately trying to stay relevant" (your argument).
> Microsoft is another IBM now
Only someone with very little actual experience of the business software market would make such a claim.
I said that Microsoft is fighting to stay relevant, which is most certainly in contrast to their once position of domination. These statements are supporting, not in conflict. There is no fallacy.
>Only someone with very little actual experience of the business software market would make such a claim.
I guess.
They're the worlds largest software company by both sales and profit.
They're also the world's most valuable software company and the third most valuable company period.
If this is what qualifies as fighting to stay relevant, there are only a few companies in world history that have ever been relevant.
Microsoft certainly has potential. Their AI research and offerings are right up there next to Google's. Combining AI with SQL and Office could enable some real productivity advances. Microsoft is also top notch at PC gaming, a significant consumer niche.
But I think Microsoft also has one rather big problem that is currently masked by their Azure growth rates. That problem is Windows. I think Windows may be in permanent decline.
I know this sounds far fetched given the seemingly unassailable dominance of Windows on corporate desktops. It's indispensible for a very wide array of tasks right now. No need to reiterate all of them.
But Windows has largely lost personal computing to Android and iOS (as well as some Mac and Chrome OS in the US). Where it's still being used for personal computing it's often as a mere host for a web browser with the added benefit of a physical keyboard.
Windows has effectively lost the generation that will shape corporate environments in the years and decades to come, and that has the potential to erode both Office and their server-side offerings. Windows is losing share everywhere, even on Azure.
It's one thing to talk an entreched Windows shop into using Azure. They certainly get some impressive growth numbers out of it. But it's quite a different challenge for Microsoft to sell to people who went from school through university using iOS or Android, collaborating via Google Docs and Google Drive for free. It's going to be a very hard sell for Microsoft.
There is an avalanche of these folks that's going to hit corporate environments in the coming years. They have no attachment to Microsoft and they have zero tolerance for Microsoft's obscure sales language and licensing terms.
No they haven't. As evidence - there is an avalanche of young gamers and streamers using Windows. Almost every streamer and gamer using Twitch.tv are on Windows. Watch the programming streams - it's almost exclusively done on Windows.
Those "entrenched Windows shops" are everywhere as well. Throw a stone and you'll hit one. I bought a car the other day and everyone on the sales floor and in their finance office is running Windows. My wife is a teacher and guess what they use in their administrative offices and guess what every teacher uses to get email?
Every insurance shop I've seen runs Windows. Every call center I've ever seen runs Windows. Every sales office I've ever seen runs Windows, even in industries such as publishing where the Mac is popular.
> But Windows has largely lost personal computing to Android and iOS.
I wouldn't call this computing...it's more like consumption. People who need to work at home aren't using Android and iOS. My brother in law works for a big financial house. When he works at home, he isn't using Android or iOS. Same with my sister in law who works for a big insurance company.
> They have no attachment to Microsoft [people who went from school through university using iOS or Android]...
New employees don't start off by being able to change whatever they want. Furthermore, they will learn more on the job than they did in school. If they simply cannot find alternatives to things that need to be done on Windows, they'll use Windows and other Microsoft tools. And finally, I doubt anyone makes it through university using only iOS and Android.
I'd like to see some evidence for your claims.
That's a niche. Most games are played on mobile these days. Just look at the sales numbers of gaming PCs. I did mention gaming by the way, so yes that is an area of hope for Microsoft, but it's small.
>Those "entrenched Windows shops" are everywhere as well.
Absolutely, and I said as much. But being entrenched doesn't necessarily make you relevant.
It's not a safe bet that anyone would choose to build anything new on Microsoft tech just because the insurance sales guy still has his Windows laptop or because everyone logs into the corporate network via AD.
Microsoft knows that. It's why they scramble to diversify away from Windows. They want us to use Azure. They want us to use their AI. They want us to use Office. They don't want to get dragged down by Windows, and I think Satya Nadella is doing a great job executing this strategy. But I also think the most difficult phase in this transition away from Windows is still ahead of us and it's not going to be easy.
>I wouldn't call this computing...it's more like consumption.
You do have a point there, but the things we do with computers and networks have changed. Even consumption requires a lot of computing, just not on the end user's device.
When I do research as part of my work I use Google and sometimes Duckduckgo. There's a lot of computing going on, but it's mostly done on some Linux server.
Even most line of business apps are now web based (with important exceptions). As a share of all computing that is done to keep a business running, I bet that even the most entrenched Windows shops now use less Windows specific tech than they used to.
Microsoft IIS has maintained close to 30% of public Web servers and that’s not even counting intranet servers where IIS likely has a majority market share.
https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2016/02/22/february-2016-...
Microsoft is relevant. They are fighting to stay relevant because the future is, in every way, moving against them. Yes, they are fantastically profitable on the inertia they achieved in prior decades, exactly like IBM was. If Microsoft doesn't gain a lot of relevance they going to eventually hit exactly the same sort of curve.
I mean...their revenue has stagnated for half a decade now.
Have you ever been to Twitch.tv? It's perhaps the biggest thing in gaming right now and guess what desktop OS everybody runs there if they're not running a console?
Oh and if they are running a console, guess what half of those consoles are?
But yes, lots of people game on Windows. Lots of people have Windows installed. You seem to think that is a counterpoint, and I daresay it comes from a terribly naive perspective.
That one of the top three companies in the world is struggling to stay relevant is ridiculous really.
You strangely follow this by essentially supporting my comment.
This whole conversation is a bit surreal, in a way, because we've been having it for literally a decade while Microsoft stagnates and becomes less and less important in this industry, a bit like IBM. The absolutely domination that Microsoft held in the late-90s to early-00s is something that is seems many in here are blissfully unaware. I remember desperately getting those technet early release discs to try to get a headstart on whatever Microsoft was doing next. Now...who cares? Like literally, Microsoft initiatives that are anything more than "yup, still selling that thing we got some entrenchment in a decade ago...and if we go outside of the lines even a bit it will spell doom" just fizzles. Remember when Exchange/MAPI integration was Microsoft's beachhead? BOOM. Then it was Office, but Microsoft had to rebuild Office to work on virtually every device or they would have had a mass exodus. Windows CE/Windows Mobile...all the Microsoft pull in the world was worth exactly nothing.
Now, astonishingly few shops are actually making Windows apps. In-house development is overwhelmingly web apps, or even Android/iOS. People have mentioned contact management, scheduling, etc -- all overwhelmingly web and mobile apps, or at a minimum cross-platform.
In the financial world the entire next generation of platforms are cross-platform or web-based. No one is pinning anything on Microsoft.
I'm not anti-Microsoft by any measure -- I'm typing this on Windows 10 right now -- and the various fanboy "boooo, stop hating on M$" type replies are boorish. It's just a completely different world, and Microsoft is another IBM now.