clicky

Microsoft has fallen from the second biggest IT company (in market cap) to the third. The two companies ahead of it? Apple and IBM. God, it appears, does have a sense of humour.

Jon

It seemed to me at one point that MS had a lot of markets all to their own (or more accurately a higher market share) in many home and business segments. When consumer tech and iGadgets like media players phones and tablets boomed though they seemed to be playing catch-up and still as far as I can tell haven't.

Microsoft have been lacklustre under Ballmer so maybe that is a big part of the problem? Though they had their fingers in too many pies to be good at them all.

I think most of MS's customers are quite content with their "lacklustre" performance. We all love Windows 7 and MS Office is still the world's defacto standard office suite. Their games console also seems to be doing quite well.

The only market they're lagging in is the phone / media player. We're still waiting to see what Nokia can do about that, but I doubt there will be a game changing hit release this year.

In the mean time, lower profits simply reflect the fact that Windows is better value than ever.

BBC Three (? If only I could remember the title, and their search function's sh1te ) has an ongoing show about brands, it's amazing how little 'Microsoft' is on Xbox packaging - I came to the same conclusion as the show, they know how 'uncool' they are

The show also looked at the cult of Apple, briefly how IBM let Bill have his cake and eat it... There's even some truly cringe worthy MS PR blundering from the inside

Or that other costs have gone up, and they're scared of raising the price of their products.

Is market capitalisation really a good measure? We all know how flaky the stock market can be, not to mention how it tends to overvalue companies sometimes.

What's MS's net revenue & profit compared to the others?

To be honest I know very few people who are actually happy with Office. Most people just accept it exists as it does. It's like rain and inflation. Nobody really likes it but there's a sense it's inevitable.


Not bad, but they've been thumped by Nintendo this generation. I'm not sure MS's shareholders would consider the humungous pile of cash they've burned through to get to second place to be an acceptable return.


Online services. They've tried desperately to compete with Google in all sorts of areas and been pretty much whooped in all of them.


Actually, it reflects the facts they've diversified their business into areas in which the don't enjoy an overall dominant position. When you do that, your profits are bound to take a hit - you're sacrificing profitability for flexibility in effect. The pertinent point is that without the enormous virtually guaranteed income windows and office licencing gets them, it's doubtable most fo their other projects would have survived. if they'd had to pay their own way, windows mobile would have been long gone and we probably wouldn't have seen a second generation XBox. Windows/Office isn't the be all and end all of MS's business, but they are the bits that are currently subsidising pretty much everything else. Which of course you can equally say is true of Google and advertising. Google are effectively a multibillion dollar ad agency that does some other stuff on the side.

Jon

Office is fine. If Pages and Numbers was as easy to use then I might use it more. I am so used to Excel and Word that new programs are difficult to learn.

Which is probably more the point. Excel and Word are so ubiquitous that anything doing things differently from them is seen to be 'difficult' regardless of whether they're objectively better/easier or not.

It's like... say we came up with a new way to drive cars tomorrow. I suspect a lot of people wouldn't like it, because they're so used to clutch/gearstick/accelerator/brake. It wouldn't actually matter if it was easier to learn or less likely to break down, people wouldn't have the muscle memory and familiarity, so they would find it difficult to cope with. People mostly forget how hard it was when they were learning to drive in the first place or if they do, it just makes them think trying something else is too much hassle...

Jon

I'm very happy with Office, having used OpenOffice for years, I was glad to get back onto MS Office. It is a great product and much better than the competition.

Interestingly, the German Government's Department of Foreign Affairs switched to Linux and OpenOffice a couple of years ago, but are switching back to Windows 7 and Office 2010 this year, because Linux and OpenOffice are not economically viable...

To be honest, I'd rather have MS share than Apple... The Apple shares climb in value rapidly (with the odd dip), but they don't pay very well. MS shares on the other hand pay out quite nicely. Gvien that the share portfolio I inherited is designed for income, MS share would be a much better investment for that portfolio than Apple...

Numbers is a doddle. Funnily enough, it works just like Excel, only nicer (and cheaper). I find I actually look forward to working in Numbers, something I can safely say I never experienced with Excel or the OO equivalent.

I never found Numbers to be very useful. It seems desgined to help people produce good looking results tables that cover a couple of pages (I only used the original version, maybe it has improved). But through a couple of hundred thousand rows of raw data at it to analyse and it seemed lost (if it could even open the file).

Excel can produce some very nice looking tables and Numbers doesn't seem to do anything that Excel can't do. It can do it much more easily, that ease of use comes at a price for power users, who miss a lot of features in Numbers, the same is true for Pages.

Pages and Numbers seem to take the presentation features of Word and Excel and make them easily accessible, whilst removing many of the power user features.

I think that Keynote is the only app that really shines. It shows what PowerPoint could be.

To be honest, for the level of spreadsheet use I need, Numbers rocks. Excel is overkill squared.

Sure, Numbers will fall down if you need the industrial level number crunching, but how many ordinary people need that?

I need nth roots and powers in my calculations so it means I am happy with Excel.