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Strengths:
- Talented Development Team
- Gained significant mind/market share and revenues from the recent block-buster product "Kinect"
| Opportunities:
- Kinect is a camera based gesture recognition technology. Extending the technology to other software divisions could prove to be huge!
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Weaknesses:
| Threats:
- Industry has been subject to wild swings amongst competitors with Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft being at the top at different times.
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Analysis SummaryYour Verdict? :
Right off the bat, the business doesn't So does the above business look like it is planning going to die anytime soon -
today, tomorrow,
day after or the day after that. Four out of five business divisions are clearly hugely profitable on a phenomenal revenue base and Online Services Division is also gradually gaining market share from competitors. The question becomesmay be day after? If not, why is there a distinct market pessimism around the company?
I think the answer lies in not what the company is but what it was positioned to become ten years back, failure to identify disruptive technologies in time and execute on them over the years and retaining long product cycles in what seems to be an industry that changes every month. Company products like Windows Vista, phone Kin and Zune were subpar to what was available in the market and were duly received as such. Today, the market consensus seems to be that the future of computing is mobile. Microsoft acknowledges this but failed to come up with a credible competitor to the iPhone and the Android products till 2010 (three years late). Even after release, the software update process has fumbled irking the early adopters of the platform. From market sources, it looks like a credible competitor to the iPad and Android tablets will not hit the market till late 2012. The company has received similar knocks for lagging in execution in its cloud strategy. My sense is that the above p| Anchor |
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_GoBack | _GoBack | roblems are not the cause but the effect of the company's real problem - the sense of security and complacency that the company management got into sitting, on the ivory towers of Windows and Business divisions. They downplayed the threats from their competitors and were slow to react with subpar products. Of course, they see it now and the CEO, Mr. Steve Ballmer has commenced a major re-organization of the company from the top-down, replacing and even firing a large number of very senior executives over the past two years. The company has started taking big bets again. 2012 promises to be a big year for Microsoft as the company prepares to launch major new products in all core divisions - Windows, Business Division, Phone and Servers. As a devout follower of the technology business, I personally, would be looking at the year closely as it would largely speak to whether the company has been able to get over its internal execution and complacency problems, trimmed down the fat and prepared itself to go head to head with some very worthy competitors.If Microsoft is doing "just fine", how do you see it competing in the emerging world of tablets, smartphones and cloud computing? What is the company's REAL problem, if any?
