Daniel Eran at RoughlyDrafted performs surgery on the idea that MS is actually as strong a player as we all think they are. He focuses on two aspects of their business that can be considered failures — Windows Mobile and WMA — and kind of shows that the Zune is doomed to failure, or worse, the bargain bin at Odd Lots.
The big secret they missed is that Microsoft hasn’t ever earned significant profits in the consumer hardware business, nor has its executives proven any business acumen in delivering what consumers want in hardware or creative entertainment, excluding, of course, Microsoft’s impressive and highly sophisticated keyboard and mouse division.
Take that pie chart over there, for example. It shows the market shares of the major players in the smartphone OS space. See that big hunk? That’s Symbian. See those two 5% chunks? That’s Palm and Microsoft. MS can’t even beat Linux AND a defanged Palm in a game it should have wrapped up years ago. Read on for more examples of Microsoft’s secret shame.
The Secret Failures of Microsoft [RoughlyDrafted]
Just thought I should point out something that seems odd with this guys (from roughlydrafted – how ironic) statistics.
Symbian OS has approximately 50% market share according to zdnet and a few other places.
This is interesting because such places claim windows mobile is around 17% in that particular area.
What i’m (guessing) this guy did is find stats on how many Nokia S40 devices are out there and tack them onto some of his own statistics.
Nokia S40 devices do run a sort of symbian OS. But in this case his comparison is entirely unfair. Smartphones are sold no where near as often as normal handsets.
Also, I beg to differ regarding Microsofts “big secret”. What other OS are people supposed to use? Like seriously – Apple won’t sell OSX and linux isn’t a viable alternative for many people.
It makes sense for PC manufacturers to package XP with a device they manufacture. If Apple decided it would let other manufacturers use OSX then maybe we’d see something interesting… Then again… Maybe not.
That being said apple needs to focus. I hope they’re seriously making a shift to a more media centric company – They do media stuff *really* well. If they aren’t I don’t think they’ll ever achieve significant market share in the computer domain as it currently stands. Their ITV thing and the ipod is where its all at for them now. There computers are nice but not all that commonly used. People say they’re popular in media centric businesses/industries but from my experience there is plenty of sound/video people that use both platforms.
Microsoft is making a shift too – all this “Live” junk. Microsoft wants to destroy the need for things like myspace. They’re building bits and pieces of software (and hardware – zune and xbox) that are letting people do this whole obsessive social networking thing. One big umbrella for all my friends sure is tempting… Tempting and not very likely from where I stand… But one big umbrella kind of does already exist for microsoft, and if they leverage what they’ve got well, then there is an interesting opportunity for them.