Gates - A Cat with nine lives?
It was quite interesting to see two of the top magazines echoing the same sentiments about Microsoft in their cover stories. Though the titles may not say the obvious, but if I am reading "between" the lines correctly, it says loud and clear "Doomsday" for Microsoft is near.
Though Lady luck has favored Gates during his most testing times in the past, be it adoption of his OS, as a standard platform by IBM or He introducing the Windows and Office Suites that Killed Apple or Bundling of IE with windows which was a death Knell for Netscape, I am not sure she will be on his side all the time. If I go by the statistics, it’s clear that she is all set to kiss goodbye to Gates...
Microsoft still heavily relies on the two products(Office Suite and Windows) that were introduced roughly a decade back for its "bread and butter" (close to 80% Sales volume and a whopping 140% of profit)
No new product(MSN,Wireless services) has ever come any close to success of Office or Windows (actually they have incurred a loss for past 4 years)
Microsoft's other products like Web servers have lost steam against better performing, low cost variants like Apache.
Its new avatar of Windows, Vista aka Longhorn has run in to serious problems and the release is delayed by almost 2 years now.
A largely unhappy population of programmers( Names like Erwin, Kai-Fu Lee come to my mind immediately)
With stock hovering at around $26 and a cool 40 Billion cash reserves, Gates has nothing to worry about in the near future, but I cant say the same for " not so near" future nor I need to be an 'Oracle' to profess that "Doomsday" for Microsoft is near.
