"They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools."
IBM did exactly the same thing.
And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise sales of Office and Windows. They make money on exactly the same things they made money on 20 years ago, but the pie is so much bigger they make a lot more of it.
Depends. In corporate environments, which is still a massive market, they are the central vendor. At it seems they're actually making even more headway there. Microsoft hasn't really lost influence, it's just the market is so much bigger now that influence isn't total. And they're making in-roads in those other markets.
Microsoft missed out on mobile but that's a new market rather than a loss of their existing market. And now that's a growth opportunity for them.
> IBM did exactly the same thing.
I think you're point is to say that Microsoft is the new IBM but I don't think that follows. IBM has always been IBM even when they owned much more of the market. Even Microsoft hated working with them.
> And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise sales of Office and Windows.
Less than 50% now (see my other comment).
Most of their dysfunction seems to be driven by monetizing legacy products, but there was a time when they didn't have any legacy products.
And about the overwhelming bulk of their revenue veing from the same sources as 20 years ago, it seems their operating revenue is 60% cloud services, admittedly a lot of that is office 365 but let's not forget azure revenue which although lumped together in statements must be huge.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/azure-revenue-continues-to...
Must be nice having 64% growth be a worrying number.
Microsoft went all in marketing Azure, this isn't too surprising to me. They don't mess around when they launch products/services. Their marketing to corporate CTO/CIOs is a well tuned machine.
They even tried to hit up startup devs which didn't go over as well.
I think Amazon is probably far more diversified than Microsoft. Unless they are so diversified that they aren't even considered a "tech" company anymore.
And none of those make significant amounts of profit besides cloud, Office, and Windows
Bing and gaming alone makes almost as much as Windows. Devices and LinkedIn makes half as much as Windows and a 1/3 the revenue of Office. These aren't peanuts.
Anyone can sell $1.00 for $0.95 as long as they have a means of getting money from other sources.
Microsoft is the most diversified tech company of the top tech companies. They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools.
> if you're a Linux or Mac developer who never touches a single Microsoft product, and pays no heed to whatever Microsoft is talking about or doing, you're probably perfectly fine doing that.
The interesting thing now is that you can be a Linux or Mac developer and actually be able to use many Microsoft products. VS code is my favorite editor or any platform (actually I use it more on Linux than on Windows). I'm working on a project right now in .NET that will run as well on a Raspberry Pi as it does on Windows.
I think that the market grown so significantly that no company is ever going to have the tech leadership that Microsoft had in the 90's and early 2000's. But I think Microsoft is positioning themselves to great things after fumbling though the last 5-10 years.