Microsoft Mission Impossible

But they're getting trounced in the consumer market so handily, and by so many other competitors, that it seems impossible they'll see ever see meaningful growth there. A lot of that is because of the legacy freight they're forced to carry wrt their PC and enterprise concerns...and because of the memories of everyone who had to deal with crappy MS systems in the 90's and early 00's.

I've often said it wouldn't be a terrible thing for MS to spin off a consumer division. It could integrate fully into MS's current services, but it would be free of the psychic burden of the "Microsoft" brand, with all of the stodgy uncoolness that that entails. Not to mention a separate company would be free to move more quickly in the face of the rapidly changing consumer market. However, the board would probably consider this to be a "hail mary" play.

I will be very interested in seeing how the new CEO handles the consumer side.

World class, amazing, top of the industry with no true peers.

For example, despite all of the good ideas and theory and philosophy, open source, after 13 years of effort, (while there's definitely been good work done in the area) has yet to produce an office suite that's at least as good as MS-Office is in all areas.

I'm sure the MS-Office codebase is a horrible mess, but the end user bits are good enough for nearly all of the weird edge-cases that 99% of users want and 99% of users can learn to use it to some level of effectiveness in a couple afternoons.

That's amazing.

The story talks about 2000 report with 19.3 billion from windows and 23 billion total revenue. On the other hand, Microsoft made 19.9 billion in revenue just last quarter, with 5 Billion in net profit. 6 Billion operating income because of the surface writeoff.

Are other companies doing better? Yes. Could Microsoft have done better? Yes. Have they done badly? Not at all. They have grown revenues and profits at huge and absurd levels over several different divisions. They are also not going to die any time soon, and I don't think there are too many options to take a company this big private.

It does not work that way since neither Apple nor Google can beat Microsoft Office with big budgets. Beyond talking about the technical aspects of Office what also matters is the marketing/sales machine. For example, I was present in negotiations between Microsoft and big (non US) state agencies, and you know what? The Microsoft guy was surely at more than 6 degress in the Microsoft organizational chart to Bill Gates but he could negotiate as if he was Bill Gates, he had that freedom.

The agency was pushing open source and the guy said something like: the Office $ XXX price does not work for you? What about $ 5 per license?