Marketing Ninja

Microsoft evangelists like myself have had to put up with our fair share of criticism and obnoxiousness from open-source users and smug Apple owners. Today I’m going to debunk Rea Maor’s 7 Reasons Why Microsoft is DOOMED; the article is so absurd that I’m half-convinced that it’s a satire piece written by a Microsoft employee with a sense of humor.

I do not love every single Microsoft product out there; I just recently wrote an article explaining my favorite Firefox web browser extensions and I have been comparing my current open-source PHP-based blog platform, Wordpress, to the new open-source ASP.NET BlogEngine.NET.

I even wrote a post explaining why I’m moving away from the Microsoft-endorsed Facebook Developer’s Toolkit to the open-source Facebook.NET alternative.

Even if I don’t like all of Microsoft’s products, I still think they’re a visionary company and I think ASP.NET is the best thing to happen to web development. Without further adieu, my debunking of Rea Maor’s 7 Reasons Why Microsoft is DOOMED:

1. Any company that makes $14 billion in net income in a fiscal year (F2007) does not have a “dead-end” business model – Rea Maor claims that since Microsoft’s model is based on commodity software (COTS – Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software) and not service and maintenance, that it’s going to be doomed. I guess that explains why Microsoft’s net income increased by 10.4% between F2006 and F2007. In addition modern software maintenance has been a facet of software engineering since the mid 1970s. Between 1976-1981 over 67% of the cost of software projects run by Hewlett-Packard was “post-delivery” maintenance. Between 1992 and 1998 this figure rose to 75%. If Microsoft’s maintenance was poor, then we wouldn’t see too many of their products in the marketplace; products that are too expensive to maintain are destroyed, because as I pointed out, the majority of the cost is in the maintenance itself. Good products are maintained and kept for years because it’s more economical to do so than create a new product from scratch. An example of a crappy modern software product that got thrown onto the trash heap of history is Apple’s OS 9. Microsoft’s NT platform has not gone off and died in the same spectacular fashion that Apple’s OS 9 did.
2. Web 2.0 is not going to make or break the high tech economy – Rea knocks Microsoft for “flunking” at Web 2.0. I’m not entirely sure what he’s talking about; I know some of the most popular Web 2.0 services on the planet are powered by ASP.NET frameworks, but maybe he missed that. One thing he notes is that Web 2.0 browser-based operating systems are going to be the wave of the future. Unfortunately until web-based operating systems can provide benefits that are greater than their drawbacks they’re nothing more than CSS/JS/PHP gimmicks.
3. You don’t get into business to make friends; you get into business to make money – Another reason why Microsoft is “doomed,” according to Rea, is that they are running out of friends. He goes on to cite all of the various lawsuits against Microsoft, as though there weren’t any lawsuits against Google. Lawsuits are one of the costs of being the best in the business and they haven’t stopped Microsoft from growing by leaps and bounds. In addition, Adobe is not “competing” with Microsoft. Microsoft is competing with Adobe; Microsoft entered Adobe’s market, not the other way around!
4. If you have “cash cows” to begin with, you have a successful business – Rea faults Microsoft for only having a couple of “cash cows,” namely the Windows and Office product lines. If one of my cash cows included an operating system line that is installed 96.7% of computers world wide then I’d call it a day. Microsoft made $11 billion in net income for F2007 from the sales of Windows, Office, and other pieces of client software, true. It also made $10 billion from its line of business and enterprise products as well as another $4 billion in net income from its line of servers. It did indeed lose money in other areas, namely the Xbox campaign, but what I’m demonstrating is that having a cash cow PERIOD means your business IS NOT doomed!
5. People are hating on Vista – yet they’re still buying it in droves – Who cares what the average blogger thinks when Vista has already over taken Apple’s Tiger OS and every known distribution of Linux as the world’s 2nd most popular operating system; Vista is second only to Windows XP in market share and it has only been on the market for 6 months.
6. Many tech companies didn’t survive past the year 2000, let alone have their stock stabilize – Rea goes onto suggest that since Microsoft’s stock price hasn’t rocketed skyward since the year 2000 that it must be stagnating and dying. I guess those investors who got a piece of a $32 billion dollar dividend from Microsoft in 2004 must be pretty upset that their stock price hasn’t gone up to $400 a share.



Credits to Tryst with Linux and Other Alternatives.

7. PC manufacturers are still selling Microsoft products like hot cakes, last I checked – Rea points out that Dell and HP’s recent decisions to sell Ubuntu products are indicators that computer hardware suppliers are turning their backs on Microsoft. Last I checked, Dell and HP are selling a hell of a lot more Windows systems than Ubuntu ones, and I don’t care what Paul Graham thinks.

The sheer amount of factual errors and obliviousness to the facts, like sales figures, in Rea Maor’s post is astounding to me. I could write a novel debunking his article.

If he’s dooming Microsoft then let’s hear him answer this: why has Microsoft’s net income risen by 10% in the past year if they’re doomed?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!