Microsoft and Windows 7 in 2009
Microsoft really shocked industry observers and investors by confirming the rumored layoff of around 5000 employees around the world. For many it was signs of a tough year for Microsoft, especially with the growing mobile market and shrinking desktop sales – Microsoft’s bread and butter.
However I’d like to put this into perspective for a moment. Microsoft employs nearly 100, 000 people around the globe and considering the nature of this financial crisis these layoffs are prudent, even if not absolutely necessary. Horrible though layoffs are they have the advantage of shocking up the employees who remain and increasing performance and productivity (as long as job security is not so bad it’s all anyone can think about). Balmer pointed out that due to additional hiring for Live Search and other departments these layoffs will be nearly replaced by new employees.
Microsoft has downgraded expectations for the next year or two in terms of revenue and performance, however I would be surprised if Microsoft didn’t surprise investors over the next couple of years. Consider this, Microsoft’s products have nearly completed consolidation, a point that has taken the best part of a decade to achieve:
The Windows Live vision is perhaps 80% complete with integration across the range of services, desktop and online functionality and frequent updates thanks to being detached from the Windows operating system. It offers perhaps the most complete software + services of all the big players including Google, Yahoo and Apple, although Adobe provides a strong contender with Flash + AIR.
Windows 7 looks as though it may be a hit with XP holdouts, Apple fanboys and even Vista-haters who have so far been very impressed by the current public beta of the next OS. Accordingly businesses, perhaps when the financial crises is a little less urgent, will increasingly adopt the OS to replaced nearly a decade old XP.
Sometime this year Windows Azure should either be released in a public beta or as a final product allowing developers to build Software as a Service and web applications with the ease they create desktop software using Visual Basic. A viable and strong competitor to Amazon’s offering and may reduce the threat of Google’s App platform.
A release of Office 14 is looking likely for either 4th quarter 2009, or perhaps early next year. With improvements on the very successful Office 2007 and decent online versions of the software for collaboration should make Google Docs and even Zoho increasingly unlikely to be adopted by businesses over Microsoft Office.
With Microsoft throwing money at their XBox division for years and years without any profit the XBox 360 finally became a success with Microsoft moving around 28 million consoles last year and coming second in the race with the Wii and Playstation 3. The online XBox Live offering has been very popular and offers gaming between XBox consoles and computers (and perhaps even eventually the Zune and Windows Live Messenger) and has a huge marketplace of games, movies and music for download and purchase.
The Zune is not as rosy a picture as the above, although its certainly better than some members of the tech press would have you believe. In essence Microsoft has created a product which is a totally viable alternative to the iPod/iTunes combination and in fact is better in many ways. I ended up purchasing one myself and absolutely love it, however in the time it’s taken Microsoft to create such a great product as this Apple has moved on and produced the iPod Touch which is out of the Zune’s league. I hope Microsoft sticks it out in this market, however I think no one can really predict what’s going to happen here.
Suffice to say, Long Zheng hit the nail on the head with yesterdays tweet:
“I’m willing to bet most people who say MS should kill the Zune don’t own one. If you own one you’d know how good it is. + product – marketing”
Finally Windows Mobile, the ‘weakest link’ in the Windows ecosystem and another which I would make no predictions on. Microsoft has a product which is failing to resonate with consumers and developers like the iPhone OS, Palm Web OS and even Google Android are managing to do. Everyone has a suggestion for what Microsoft should do here, but as I said, I would make no predictions. The only thing that’s certain is that Microsoft doesn’t have much time.
Related posts:
To discuss this topic, head on over to our forums!
5 Responses to “Microsoft and Windows 7 in 2009”
Leave a Reply
To discuss this topic, head on over to our forums!
Loading ...
It’s definitely been a big hit with those Apple users. For some reason they actually like this one…perhaps they aren’t mindless zombies who only use products with an Apple on them after all!
Windows Mobile….the reason it’s not very successful, is that it really isn’t one single OS….there are many phones that run Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1, and none of them look like they are running the same thing. People like an OS they can IDENTIFY!
Would someone please improve the readability of the text on this page. It is so dim, lacks contrast, and too smail to read, even on my 26″ monitor. Even View/Text Size/Largest has no impact.
Have you tried ctrl + scroll?
[...] Microsoft and Windows 7 in 2009 Microsoft reall [...]
I think I enjoyed nearly everything that was released last year. Only a few were a bit of a let down but on the whole most of the big ones lived up to expectations. I think this year is going to be good too and I think there will be some more that will make us gasp. Avatar was great.