MicrosoftRyan Landay

Selected products• Biggest products by revenue and profit:

• Windows

• Office

• Server software

• Other well-known products:

• Xbox

• Surface

Annual revenue by division

Annual profit by division

Very brief history of Microsoft

• Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to sell BASIC interpreters

• Entered OS business in 1980, bought a CP/M clone in 1981 and rebranded it as MS-DOS

• Released first version of Windows in 1985

• Microsoft Office introduced in 1990

• Steve Ballmer took over from Bill Gates as CEO in 2000

• New CEO to take over in 2014, rumored to be either Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai

What’s hot• Windows 7

• Windows XP

• Microsoft Office

• Server business

• Xbox 360

What Microsoft wishes were hot

• Windows Phone

• Windows 8

• Surface

• Xbox One

Secret sauce• Extreme backwards compatibility with old desktop

applications (unfortunately, no traction on mobile)

• Proprietary file formats none of their competitors can open properly

• History of anticompetitive behavior, including restrictive licensing agreements with OEMs and the ability to make competitors’ software not work as well

• Creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) through shameless deceptive advertising campaigns

• “No one ever got fired for buying IBM Microsoft”

Not in the secret sauce

• Creating consumer devices with easy to use interfaces that people actually want to use

• Taking over industries Apple and Google are successful in

Interesting story• Late 1990s: Microsoft obtained a monopoly in the web browser

market by

• Bundling Internet Explorer with Windows

• Restricting OEMs from offering Netscape as an alternative

• Adding proprietary features for web authors to use so sites would only work in Internet Explorer

• Creating secret Windows APIs so Internet Explorer would work better than competing browsers

• District Court in 2000 ordered breakup of Microsoft as a remedy for its monopolization actions, overturned by a Court of Appeals

Interesting story

• Internet Explorer 6 was released on August 27, 2001, not replaced until October 2006

• Web technology development stagnated

• Many web developers never tested their websites in any other browser

Interesting story• September 2013: Ballmer

said:“They have this incredible, amazing, dare I say monopoly that we are the only person left on the planet trying to compete with…I do believe that Google's practices are worthy of discussion with competition authority, and we have certainly discussed them with competition authorities”

Competition• Windows on desktop: Linux, Mac OS X, mobile

computing

• Microsoft Office: cloud-based services like Google Docs, iWork, OpenOffice.org

• Server software: Linux-based servers

• Cloud computing: Google, Amazon

• Consumer mobile products: iPhone, iPad

• Xbox: Sony PlayStation 4, Wii U

My prediction• Windows Phone and Surface will be discontinued

within five years

• Xbox will become less relevant in future, Xbox One probably either last or second-to-last Xbox model

• Will probably be main player for a while in desktop computing and office software and a player in cloud computing to some extent

• Probably facing a slow and steady decline overall