quo vadis microsoft?

"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software", Microsoft's original mission statement

Microsoft Corporation (MS) born on the 4th April 1975, Aries, has, like men and women of the same age, reached full grown up status. And like human top achievers of the same age is feeling the pressure and anxiety about what to do in the next 20 years in order to secure its place in immortality.


In men and women this is commonly called "the biological clock" and the prescribed solution is: have children! For companies that may not be so simple but MS seems to be trying to do just that.


For 20 years MS has remained faithful to its origins and grew up to become the largest software company in the world; from 1995 it started experimenting with the internet via IE and MSN but remained in the shadow of other rising internet stars. This was also the period in which it started having problems "with the law", namely the anti-trust regulators; in 2001 it entered the game console business and more recently (2009) it decided to launch own brand retail stores.


MS probably guesses that their core software products and approach are dated and it's only a matter of time until open source software (with continuous product development strategy rather than release based strategy as depicted in the figure below) and other innovations such as cloud computing will erase MS's competitive advantage and slowly but relentless erase its software market share.

Having enjoyed only relative success with its new business units, MS stands at yet another crossroad: will it nurture it's more recent offspring knowing that they will likely never be as successful as their "parent"?; will it invest in other brand new business?; or will it try to get back to its core and reinvent itself to maintain (or even improve) its still dominant position in the software business?


MS's current mission statement "At Microsoft, our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential" could apply to almost any business that sells products and/or services to both people and companies. 


It may be a signal of MS's indecisiveness about what it is or the quiet resignation of a mature company that, like a 35 year old pop star, has decided to make its leaving from "very best" albums and remastered versions of old hits.


More to come on this.


note: this post was done exclusively with wikipedia as reference