Many reasons why Microsoft is Not Doomed

Many reasons why Microsoft is Not Doomed

Dan Morrill (Security Project Manager)

We are not Microsoft fanboys, nor are we Linux fanboys, so there is no particular stake here at all, yet we just have to rebut the idea of "7 reasons Microsoft is doomed", and look at the Channel 9 answers on the "7 reasons Microsoft is not doomed".

We all love to hate the big lad on the street, and there is no doubt that Microsoft has its issues just like any other big company, pick one at random, IBM (who was going to die in the 1980's), Sun (who was going to die in 2000), Yahoo (who is supposed to die this year), Coke (who is always going to die because Pepsi is cleaning their clocks), Nintendo (because their new box was not hard core enough, we are sure there are people laughing at that one), Sony (because the PS3 is in 3rd place and they love root kits), there are a million ways that a company can die, and there are a million groups that will secretly rejoice in their death.

This is why we have the techcrunch dead pool

Microsoft is not about to join them any time soon, yes they are big, yes they are increasingly slow to respond, yes they make mistakes, and yes they seem arbitrary and capricious at times. This is just the lay of the land in a big company. Companies need to take risk, Xbox, Zune, surface, IIS, yes they are all risks, but they also have their fans and adherents. Yes the products could be better, and yes apache still wins in the web server market, but they also don't own the whole market, there is room for more than one player.

They might have only a couple of cash cows, but they have more than one, and they still have a lot of cash, and like all good companies see the need to experiment and take risk to make more cash cows. No one can fault Microsoft for the level of experimentation they are willing to go to. When the surface computer debuted, many people wanted it, and wanted it in a tablet or PC format. It will probably happen, because risk is good, change happens, and Microsoft still thrives on change.

Most blue chip companies get to a point where their stock stays static; the stability of the stock price goes along with a certain girth of company, and frankly a certain age of company. While it would be great to harkens back to a smaller more nimble Microsoft where their stock split and growth was at double digits, you don't and cannot get that kind of growth in a multi billion dollar company, economics does not work that way.

Dell, HP, and others are struggling, they are in trouble in many ways, as margins get razor thin on computers, they need to sell more to make up in volume for what they are not making on each PC. This is the reality of the commodity market; commodity goods never have great margins. Vista is just one way to sell a PC, so is XP, so is Ubuntu, they have to sell lots to make money, they are also going to experiment to see what sells.

Realistically it is far too easy to poke holes in the argument presented by Geeks and Technology, we recommend more college, some real look at economics of the computer industry, and a better understanding of the computer industry around them.