Microsoft’s Lost Decade

"<i>In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion."</i><p>In other words, Apple is currently about where Microsoft was when they started paying dividends a little more than a decade ago...i.e. The point where they went from a growth company to a the sort of "blue chip" held by index funds.<p>The past decade has been spent securing their place in enterprise - their core market and one in which Apple, Google, and Facebook offer little competition. With loads of cash, a conucopia of brilliant personnel and Gates and Ballmer as the two largest shareholders, the whims of Wall Street bloggers don't have much effect.

It kills me when people say that MS had a lead on smartphones with Windows Mobile OS, as mentioned in the article. That product sucked hard, along with others that sucked at the time (e.g. Palm, Symbian, etc...). The lead was an illusion because there wasn't anything good to compete against it and consumers barely tolerated it.<p>Once iOS, then Android, appeared on the scene, the house of cards that was Windows Mobile collapsed in no time. Microsoft didn't have any kind of smartphone lead.

While I am a confirmed Microsoft hater, the one place they shine is in providing an environment (.NET + SQL Server + whatever) for the building of medium sized (10 to 1000), internal, pointy-clicky applications. There is no equivalent in Unix or Mac, and this is a <i>massive</i> market -- all the lower level office workers who get some small data thing from somewhere (a customer order, a change order, whatever), enter the data after a little bit of thinking, and move on.<p>I am a data analyst forced to work on MS environments, and it sucks ass (I have a parallel Unix toolchain installed, plus we use SAS (which sucks ass, too, but that is a different story)). It would suck ass if I was building and deploying internet apps. But for pseudo custom form based applications designed for non-programmers to do glorified data entry, it rocks.<p>Also, there are probably 40 million "analysts" who don't even know what scripting is and are utterly dependent on Excel, even though they could probably increase their productivity 100-fold if they got a little bit of command line and R and SQL under their belt. However, they don't even know they have an alternative, so Microsoft is totally safe in this zone for at least a few years.

There are several flaws in this article which was pointed out in a Forbes article [1]. It highlights the failure of a company's strategy against the background of changing macroeconomic factors.<p>Also, here is Ballmer's reaction [2] to this article.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/07/25/the-real-reason-for-microsofts-woes/print/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/07/25/the-real...</a> (print version)<p>[2]: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2012/07/11/microsofts-steve-ballmer-talks-about-windows-8-bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-and-why-microsofts-lost-decade-is-a-myth/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2012/07/11/microso...</a>

"Cool is what tech consumers want. Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.<p>No, really."

As the lone MBA in the comment thread, I want to point out that the "culture" and "incentives" of your company have a lot to do with it's success. Microsoft (and Amazon, which hired a bunch of fucksticks from MSFT) made it impossible to build great new products internally and suffered for it.

Lost decade? No.<p>Microsoft has positions in all the right places. They were in tablets, phones, and other devices early. However, the execution was poor. They did have a good shot at emerging tech markets and they still do.<p>Microsoft still dominates business/enterprise. Apple, the consumer end.<p>Microsoft is just being displaced. They have a limited time to respond before it really starts to erode their profits.

Desktop link: <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer" rel="nofollow">http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mo...</a>

What was the total profit of Microsoft during this "lost decade"?

just...no.<p><a href="http://www.neowin.net/news/what-the-hell-is-microsofts-lost-decade" rel="nofollow">http://www.neowin.net/news/what-the-hell-is-microsofts-lost-...</a>

Repost, OP had to post the mobile link to the article

What I haven't seen discussed is the impact of the anti-trust action against MS back in the Netscape days. I wonder what the effect on the corporate zeitgeist was then and how it all unfurled over time.

Do you remember when startups were terrified that MS would move in and crush them? MS would make them an offer that they couldn't refuse, sell out or be crushed.<p>MS don't inspire fear like they used to.