Microsoft Continues Its Decline into Becoming IBM

Recently I was watching CNN Money online, and an advisor was actually suggesting investors to invest in Microsoft since it is at almost $20 a share due to the drop in global markets. Microsoft’s operating system competitor on the other hand is up 7%.

I then went to ArsTechnica.com to look up news, this article says: “Washington DC latest to drop Microsoft for web apps” (link: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081012-washington-dc-latest-to-drop-microsoft-for-web-apps.html).

Apparently the city of Washington DC has signed an agreement with Google to migrate the district’s 38,000 employees to Google Apps. With this move Washington DC has joined more that 500,000+ businesses and organizations in moving from the Office Desktop lockdown of Windows, to tools in the clouds.

In my opinion this is going to hurt Microsoft severely. Their two strongest points are their Office suite and their now lackluster operating system, which as mentioned before is being chipped away by Apple.

I believe that the only reason Google got into doing docs is because of Microsoft’s public declaration of war on Google, due to their dominance as the premiere search engine. This isn’t really a win for Google, as they don’t make any significant money on Google Apps from my understanding but they give a way for people to feel they are no longer under the dark hand of Microsoft.

As for the analysts who think it is good idea to buy Microsoft in hopes of the company one day returning to their dominant position, what unique product do they have left to offer?

1.    Operating system? Apple and Linux are surprisingly growing faster than they would have hoped.

2.    Office products? Apple has their version of Office as well as a pretty nice replacement for it. There has always been the Open Office Suite, and now Google is taking entire government departments away with web-based apps, that can run on ANY operating system.

Read Microsoft’s Many Competitors (link: http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/new-articles-content/microsofts-many-competitors.html).

Microsoft is a dying company, and it will never regain dominance as it once was in the 1990s; I doubt that it will ever see soaring stock numbers again. I’m going to call it, I predict within 10 years, Microsoft is going to merge with another big dying or dead company, probably like IBM, in a last ditch effort to revive themselves, and they will cease to exist. Their name will still be around, but like IBM is today, just around, but not really doing anything.

Adelard Gasana

October 14, 2008