Re:Amazon, Google employees bullish; 25% of Microsofties say...
by kvb on Friday May 17, 2013 @02:36PM
(#5725986)
All of those examples pose threats, but none of them is guaranteed to overtake the corresponding Microsoft product. Microsoft isn't sitting still, it's rapidly adding features to each of its products (e.g. Office 365 and the Office web apps, adding things like StreamInsight and Hekaton to SQL Server, etc.) Eclipse has been around for a long time and hasn't hurt Visual Studio yet. It's definitely possible that some Microsoft products will be disrupted, but they haven't put all of their eggs in one basket. Besides, Microsoft created enough successful new businesses over the last 10 years that I wouldn't bet against them doing the same in the next 10.
Re:Amazon, Google employees bullish; 25% of Microsofties say...
by daeken on Friday May 17, 2013 @02:05PM
(#5725846)
> And then the big company, having run out of market segments to expand into, dies rapidly. Happened to IBM in the early 90s [...]
Um. IBM has a $230B market cap. Apple is at $400B, Google is at $300B. Is that really the example you want to give for a "disrupted" dead company?
Re:Amazon, Google employees bullish; 25% of Microsofties say...
by nostrademons on Friday May 17, 2013 @02:41PM
(#5726017)
Read "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance", Lou Gerstner's firsthand account of IBM's historic turnaround. IBM was 3 months away from running out of cash when he got there in 1993. It survived largely because he bet the company on a pivot out of tech entirely (the IBM of today is a professional services company) and into a new market where they're not subject to the same Innovator's Dilemma forces.
The same thing could happen at Microsoft, but it's unlikely with Ballmer (or any insider) still at the helm.
If you read The Innovator's Dilemma, one of the hallmarks of disrupted businesses is that everything's fine until they go out of business. They keep moving up-market, into market segments with higher revenues and higher margins, until they're a mainstay of all giant enterprises. And then those enterprises realize that there's a competitor out there whose product wasn't suitable a couple years ago, but has just barely been able to do the job they need it to do, and switch en-masse. And then the big company, having run out of market segments to expand into, dies rapidly. Happened to IBM in the early 90s, Sun in the early 2000s...and Microsoft is next.