Live data from Hacker News

Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface

washingtonpost.com

1–10 of 78 posts

Re: Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface

#2
I feel like making a u-turn to be "all in" on enterprise is the wrong move and just delaying the inevitable.

Computing devices are no longer bought in large numbers by exclusively big businesses. The iPhone has shown that business customers go home, buy consumer products, love how much better it works than what they use at the office and want to bring it to work. The recent data on mobile device sales compared to Windows PCs is especially damning.

Secondly, Google, Facebook and the rest of "new tech" industry is not built on MS tech. What is actually enterprise? Size? If a gigantic company like Google can crunch all that data and have such amazing uptime without MS tech, then who needs MS? Every year a new generation create their own startup and they choose anything but MS. To me, enterprise means established, old and slow. If all the old guards will be disrupted and die out like I think they will, then MS will have no one left to sell to! Increasingly even the old guard is messing around with Linux and OSS in order to be more agile.

Consumer is the future and MS needs to embrace it or die. They just have to stop making mistakes like Windows 8.

Re: Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface

#4
Listen, I'm no fan of Microsoft, but those investors better keep their hands of the ergonomic keyboard product line, or I'll... I'll... probably have to stockpile them?

Seriously though, the ergo 4000 is the best keyboard I've ever owned and I'd hate to see it gone by the hand of somebody who just doesn't care enough.

Re: Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface

#6

I feel like making a u-turn to be "all in" on enterprise is the wrong move and just delaying the inevitable. Computing devices are no longer bought in large numbers by exclusively big businesses. The iPhone has shown that business customers go home, buy consumer products, love how much better it works than what they use at the office and want to bring it to work. The recent data on mobile device sales compared to Win…

The decline of the desktop and rise of the tablet / smartphone / wearable computers forces enterprises to have heterogenous systems that can support these platforms. It no longer makes sense to have a Microsoft only solution in the longer term.

Re: Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface

#8
That's not going to happen anytime soon. Especially for Bing which powers not only the search website but many other Windows infrastructure in the background. With the Surface, even if it doesn't make any money, it serves the purpose of showing OEMs what they could/should be doing (much like with Google Nexus devices). And Xbox... they will be holding on there for as long as the whole console industry can (same for PS4).

We are going to see all Microsoft stakeholders (from investors to employees to managers) try their hand at the new CEO. No surprise the first movers are some investors, they're greedy and in just for the money.

Re: Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface

#9
It doesn't make a lot of sense for Microsoft to kill XBox. Killing XBox would mean throwing away a successful line of business that is finally generating substantial profit after nearly a decade of investment. It would also be terrible for morale at the company. Here is a scrappy part of the business that went into a market where Microsoft was laughed off when it entered: game consoles. And after a dozen years, they've gone from last-place losers to a dominant, #1 position with the XBox 360. If the reward for this victory was dissolution and abandonment, then what motivation would there be for anyone to do any kind of innovative or disruptive work at Microsoft?

Re: Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface

#10

I feel like making a u-turn to be "all in" on enterprise is the wrong move and just delaying the inevitable. Computing devices are no longer bought in large numbers by exclusively big businesses. The iPhone has shown that business customers go home, buy consumer products, love how much better it works than what they use at the office and want to bring it to work. The recent data on mobile device sales compared to Win…

"Consumer is the future and MS needs to embrace it or die"

Google and Facebook may be huge, but as a percentage of the global economy they are still pretty small (e.g. look at the Forbes Global 2000) - the enterprise world is everything all those other companies need to operate and it's the world of IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and thousands of specialized ISVs.

I'd be rather surprised if Google or Facebook wrote their own consolidated financial reporting or payroll software (indeed Google seems to use Oracle Hyperion FM for consolidated reporting and planning, as does Facebook).

At the moment, Microsoft has some pretty decent enterprise products, but they only sell them through partners - one possibility for growth and really focusing on the enterprise space would be to emulate IBM and focus on services and products - either by greatly increasing the size of their existing consulting arm and/or buying a few of the existing large service partners.

Post reply on HN