The Gathering Storm: Waiting For the Microsoft Beat Down

by Chris Seibold May 25, 2005

If you’ve ever moved away from your hometown and delayed your return for ten or so years there is a little apprehension when you finally make the long homecoming trip. Your high school friends have long since become mostly vague memories and, honestly, you’ve become a stranger. Inevitably you’ll be milling around marveling at either the rapid pace or lack of changes when you’ll spot one of the few people you remember, the golden boy. Every high school has one, all star athlete, wildly popular musician, what have you. He won’t recognize you but his face is indelibly etched in your memory so you’ll spot him right away. Oddly enough he’ll start the conversation, asking questions positively dripping with forced sincerity. When you give your answer you might decide to let him know that you recognize him from the old days, why not rub the old boy’s ego? So you’ll say “Hi Jimbo, man I remember you from high school! Oh, and yes, I would like fries with that.”

Microsoft seems like that fallen high school idol right about now. Longhorn has been denuded, delayed and derided, MSN search is a pitiful attempt to capture a small wedge of the search market, the iPod and iTunes still reign supreme in the online music arena, Intel bigwigs are saying odd things and the public regards the company as a whole with disdain usually reserved for cable providers (a necessary evil to be tolerated). All this adds up to a tense Redmond campus where corporate Officers deviate from their presentations to take worthless swipes at the competition and employees post less than enthusiastic blogs about working at Microsoft.

The negative feelings about Microsoft and within Microsoft have many people thinking that this is the moment in time where the giant will finally crumble. Apple will own the media market, Google will become synonymous with the internet, Linux will power all servers and the Xbox 360 will be stillborn in anticipation of the more powerful PS3. Microsoft will be left collecting scraps, eking out a few billion here and there, still profitable, but no longer the ultra powerful corporate monolith it once was.

If we revisit our friend Jimbo from earlier we note that things look fairly bleak for him as well. Yet this is the moment when Jimbo looks up and says: “Oh, hey man, were you in my high school or something?…That’s been a while, I haven’t had much sleep since I started this chain of restaurants, we’re up to four hundred stores. I never would have had the capital if I hadn’t invented a new open heart surgery protocol.” Microsoft is at the same moment in time. Everybody may be scoffing at the ineptness that typifies Microsoft of late but they are making a mistake when they expect that trend to continue. Microsoft has far too large of a head start, too many resources and a market position that is so advantageous that it is just a matter of time before every little thing starts breaking Microsoft’s way again.

Taking the operating system arena first we’ll note that the only two semi viable challengers are Linux and OS X. Linux, one supposes, will rule the computing world when the average citizen in India and China are computer owners but that day is still in the future. For first world residents paying the “Microsoft tax” is not considered a burden. You get to keep your old software, the interface retains some familiarity with each new upgrade and your peripherals just keep chugging along. Switching from Windows to Linux, for most people, seems ridiculously wasteful (what about all that software they pirat…errr purchased) and hopelessly difficult. Making the move to the Mac is less difficult technically but more costly in terms of hardware and software. And, truth be told, even if people started switching en masse to the Macintosh Apple wouldn’t be able to make enough computers to make a serious dent in the Windows for quite some time.

Of course OSes aren’t the only story, Microsoft would like to dominate the ‘net and Google is standing in their way. The easy thing to say is that Google has beaten Microsoft by being everything Microsoft isn’t. Google seems public friendly (they never ask for a dime directly), is a stock market darling and seems to come up with something radically cool and new every third Tuesday of the month. Unfortunately it just isn’t quite enough. While Google has become a verb computer users are a fickle lot and will gladly abandon Google like rats off a sinking ship if something a little better or more convenient rolls around. So displacing Google will be no real trick for Microsoft, make MSN search very accessible in IE 7 and Longhorn, improve the algorithms so the results are roughly equivalent to Google’s and suddenly Microsoft is moving customers from Google to their services with record speed. If we remember that Google is very heavily tied to advertising revenue and lacks the monster cash reserves of Microsoft it is easy to see how quickly Google can be significantly damaged with a seemingly small change in search patterns.

The same factors hold true with digital media delivery. Right now the iPod and iTunes hold the top spot. It is easy to see why: the two integrate seamlessly, the DRM is nearly translucent and the whole package offers consumer’s a great deal of convenience.  Add to those advantages the cachet that the iPod is simply cool and you’ve got a hard to beat combination. Still when Longhorn rolls out (at this rate it will be right around the time the iPod’s cool has worn off) and Microsoft makes other players easier and more convenient to use than the iPod and iTunes one might expect the market to begin slowly shifting. iPod sales will likely always represent a significant chunk of the .mp3 player market but others will start getting a bigger slice of the pie.

Which leaves us with console gaming. Here it is easy to think that Microsoft has lost the war. The PS3 seems more impressive than the Xbox 360 so one would expect Microsoft to get soundly thumped in this arena. That will probably be the case for this generation of consoles but expecting Microsoft to lose the consoles wars long term is wishful thinking by the Microsoft haters out there. Consider how incredibly fast console makers can rise and fade, Atari once ruled that particular domain but they fell swiftly when Nintendo offered a superior product. Nintendo battled Sega for quite some time and then both were suddenly trumped by Sony. Clearly, in the console market, all it takes is one system and a few exclusive must have games for a console maker to dethrone the current king of the hill. Microsoft is still honing their game (so to speak) in this area and one supposes that it will be only a matter of persistence until they rule this market (however briefly).

None of this is written in stone (it is actually written Microsoft Word for interested parties). Microsoft may live in perpetual fear of another anti trust lawsuit and thus eschew using any of their inherent advantages to try and dismantle iTunes and Google. They may tire of the console wars and choose to get back to their core businesses. One suspects it will be more like an all out zombie attack. Sure one zombie is no problem, you can either take three steps to the left to avoid the thing or bash it in the head (or jog a block) but when they just keep coming sooner or later the zombies get what they want (brains if movies are to be believed). In short Apple, Sony, and Google might be able to dodge and club a few zombies but one suspects there is no way they can jog long enough to lose 37.5 billion of them.

Comments

  • Kind of pessimistic :(

    tangoman had this to say on May 26, 2005 Posts: 1
  • So all it requires is the MSN search improve it’s algorithms so the results are roughly equivalent to Google. So far competing with Google circa 2000 appears to be too difficult for MS. Search has long been integrated with IE and people still use Google. Your problem is that Google isn’t in the search business. Google is in the knowledge business. People make that mistake all the time. As far as Google goes, the game is theirs to lose. MS is competing on too many fronts to be effective at any one of them. And many of the fronts they now compete in their monopolies in Office and the OS do them no good as they cannot link access to the OS to the success in the marketplace.(See XBOX, Internet Search etc)

    BdeSpain had this to say on May 26, 2005 Posts: 1
  • I think you paint Microsoft’s future as much to bright. Granted they have billions in the bank but what do they do with it? They certainly aren’t using it to fuel innovation. Two areas that they should have dominated—internet search and online music—they totally missed. What exactly were they doing during the years it took Google to rise to the top? Why wasn’t Microsoft spending some of those billions developing competative online search capabilities back when Alta Vista was king? The same can be said for online music. How can a company with virtually unlimited resources and a 90% market share be forced into a position of reacting to current market trends rather then defining them?

    When a company like Microsoft loses it’s ability to define markets and trends bad things can happen. Imagine telling Stanley Kubrick in 1968 that by 2001 PanAm would not only be irrelevant, it’d be out of business. I’m not suggesting MS will follow PanAm into oblivion any time soon but I do believe it’s market dominace and relevance to the industry will start to wane.

    vallette had this to say on May 26, 2005 Posts: 1
  • “...and Microsoft makes other players easier and more convenient to use than the iPod and iTunes…”

    And I’ll be quite wealthy shortly after discovering a cure for the common cold.

    You’re kidding, right? Talk about oversimplification. If this is so easy, why hasn’t it been done already… by Microsoft… or anyone else?

    lot88 had this to say on May 26, 2005 Posts: 1
  • while all the scenarios you describe above are plausible and somewhat likely , there is one scenario that you have not investigated . people , companies , nations - everyone runs out of steam at some point . the (western) roman empire did fall . GM and IBM did falter . sooner all later , the dominant force yields , either to a new rome or a dozen barbarian tribes .

    there is an argument to be made here that microsoft has already peaked and is at the beginning of what is likely a long and more or less graceful decline in power and influence . perhaps the fate of IE is an indicator , as are the interminable longhorn delays and functionality amputations . what is clear at the moment is that google and apple are -right now- at the top of their game , and MS is not .

    things can happen . hit the couch and grab some popcorn .

    xbasque had this to say on May 26, 2005 Posts: 1
  • I don’t consider myself unusual, but one day I said enough and switched.  If I’m not unusual then one day many, many others will do the same thing and Microsoft be, well you know.

    fuzfire had this to say on May 26, 2005 Posts: 2
  • You are definitely a glass half full kind of guy or you bought thousands of shares of MS 4 years ago and it’s just wishful thinking.

    While people are confused by MS’ market share, its market cap and BillG’s wealth - the facts of the last 10 years do not offer much solace.

    A couple things first - obviously MS throws off a lot of cash so they can give bull runs at things no matter if there’s a profit or not ($6 BILLION for Xbox and ZERO profit but buying market share is no point at all.

    Ms’ obvious strength in I.T. does not translate well into other market particularly consumers - MS is good when selling to I.T. types but not so much to anyone else.

    MS poured billions into MSN to defeat AOL - for pete’s sake, when you can’t even defeat AOL and their troubles for 2-3 years sold (before stabilizing now), that should tell you something - even when MS offered people $400 “rebate,” they still could not take down AOL.

    When MS decided to sell home networking gear - seemed like a natural, right? MS fared so poorly against Linksys they folded the division within the year.

    WebTV, the watch OS, tablet PC’s - the list goes on. Other than spending $6 billion dollars to be third worldwide (out of three console companies), in XBox, even that is a qualified success.

    Basically once broadband gained ground, MS lost their control of the leverage - unlike Netscape who could not out manuever MS legally and illegally with I.T. & OEM’s (Put Netscape on the desktop, sure - we won’t sell you Windows to install or we raise the price of Windows 5% - you still want to install Netscape? Or switch the corporate browser to IE and we’ll knock off 10% off your MS server contract this year ...)

    So, while I.T. still kisses their feet and other body parts, conusmers can pick & choose and they rarely choose MS - call it corporate culture, call it whatever but they don’t really get consumers.

    Look at music - they had a 10 year head start on WMA and there were WMA music stores for at least 3 yers before itunes but they were poorly conceived - why? MS simply designed a digital format that could wrap around music (that’s why WMA’s don’t even cache & fast forward) unlike Apple which figured out how to design a AUDIO digital format first and then wrapped a DRM around it - crucial but to MS, they don’t get it - look at their solution to all the spyware, malware, virii on their system. A system upgrade that will take YEARS to come out - meanwhile, buy the virii maintance contract - that’s MS’s thinking - they think we’ll respond like I.T. and when we don’t, they are confused.

    That’s why they missed the boat on everything since 1995 including the internet (when the internet started to get large, MS first plan was to say that the internet was nice but MSN was better) before finally catching up (using illegal & legal) means ... they missed out on Yahoo’s Directory, Google, Picassa, and of course, Apple’s ipod.

    Of course, they are your opinions but MS is a hothouse flower that cannotv really cope in the outside messy world of consumers.

    jbelkin had this to say on May 26, 2005 Posts: 41
  • So, while I.T. still kisses their feet and other body parts, conusmers can pick & choose and they rarely choose MS - call it corporate culture, call it whatever but they don’t really get consumers.

    While MS has certainly had its share of product failures, it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest they don’t get customers at all or that consumers rarely choose them.  Windows still controls 95% of the OS market, compared to roughly 3% for Apple.  They also have 37% of the game console market with the X-box, which isn’t too shabby considering they are a relatively new player.  They also have a number of widely used software titles.

    Apple has also had its share of successes and failures.  While Apple now dominates the portable music player market, they haven’t had a double-digit share of the OS market for years.

    But pointing to any single product or focusing solely on the failures doesn’t really paint any sort of accurate picture of whether or not MS can get customers.  Clearly they can, no matter how much the Mac fanatics don’t want to believe that.

    Chris’s article reminds of the old “3.0 law” about Bill Gates.  When MS releases a brand new product, they flail about and struggle to gain market share, but the product is met with derision and/or disinterest.  By version 3, however, the product pretty much dominates whatever industry it’s part of.

    Beeblebrox had this to say on May 27, 2005 Posts: 2220
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