If things continue like this, the chances are high

Apr 3, 2006 06:07 GMT  ·  By

Over the last months, numerous IT articles have talked about Vista, Internet Explorer, Xbox and other Microsoft products, most of them being also covered on Softpedia.

Why is Vista late, why does Internet Explorer have so many bugs, what did Gates and Ballmer say, what are the chances of the new OS against Apple's OS X, which console will win the battle, Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, and other dilemmas.

In one of our articles from 2005, we even imagined what it would be like to have a world where Microsoft has the best OS, the best gaming console, the best MP3 player, the best search engine, the best graphics suite, the best server applications, the best online music store, the best television, the smartest cell phones and so on.

In 2005, although except for Xbox 360, there weren't any other great products coming from Microsoft, most users felt that there was still hope for the Redmond company. The software behemoth had been defeated by Google on the online battlefield, by Apple on the OS and entertainment battlefields, but was expected to recover miraculously in 2006 and to reconsolidate its position after its competitors' successes.

But surprise! 2006 didn't start quite well for the company of William Henry "Bill" Gates III, in fact, it was quite disastrous.

I'm not going to talk about all the problems faced by the Redmond company during the fist months of 2006, but I do have a challenge for you.

The idea is rather simple. What would happen if Microsoft failed with all of its products, or almost all of them, that are scheduled for release and in a few years, companies like Google, Apple, or IBM would invade the increasingly lower market share of the Redmond giant until the company went into bankruptcy?

Yes, I know. It's difficult for such a large corporation to go bankrupt. Difficult, but not impossible.

Within this mental exercise, we will leave aside the Xbox 360 console, which seems to be one of the few Microsoft products that have been successful lately.

Let's start with operating systems, where Microsoft was and still is leader. An increasing number of users, even those who stood by Vista, former Longhorn, in the most difficult moments of its existence, have started to doubt the success and reliability of the new OS, and when Microsoft announced the latest delay, the kernel hit the fan. The news that Vista will be available to users in 2007 was preceded by another one, that it will not have EFI booting support, another long-awaited feature that was dropped.

If we take a look at the competitors' solutions, we can see a healthy, safe, with extremely few bugs, on time OS X, crammed with features.

Let's say that you are not planning to buy a Mac, thus unable to run Mac OS X, what alternative do you have? Well, Linux, of course, the operating system whose popularity is growing, despite the predictions made by the Redmond leaders. And speaking of Linux, I don't know if you had the chance to see Kororaa Xgl, whose graphical user interface easily competes with the one promised by Vista and that already included in OS X. If not, you can take a look at some screenshots here.

The second domain of interest for Microsoft is the Internet, where considerable effort is put into developing a package of services able to rival with Google's. The company's engineers are working hard to release as many Live services as possible, which will replace some of the MSN ones. The most important of them is Windows Live Search, which is not necessarily bad, but it's not something innovative or powerful either. In this case, Microsoft has once again forgotten the basic rule of Internet services, that of providing users with a fast search engine, which short loading times. It's true that the idea of a continuous page with search results is good, but it won't be enough.

But OSs and the Internet are the only targets for the software behemoth, digital entertainment and portable devices being equally appealing. Although it shrouded its latest creation, the UMPC, in a publicity veil which bore a striking resemblance to Apple's, unlike the latter, the ultra mobile PC didn't enjoy too many enthusiastic comments and it's unlikely that things will change too much over the next months.

No doubt there will be other attempts to launch a device able to take iPod's crown away and to prevent other high storage phone with multimedia functions to become too popular. Ballmer himself confirmed that there will be a new "all-in-one" device coming over the next 12 months.

On the server solution market, Microsoft currently has a good position, but the threat of Linux backed by giants like Novell and IBM is increasing, and the strategies used to convince the enterprise clients to switch from Windows to Linux are slowly eating away the Redmond company's market share.

Microsoft is also involved in other fields, but those mentioned above are the most important and represent the largest part of the income.

Ok, now that you've read about each and every one, try to project this trend over a 10 year period. If Vista is a failure, the company will slowly, but surely lose even more ground on the OS market, if Microsoft will continue to release product like the UMPC, the portable devices will only stay in pockets of people like Gates, Ballmer and other fanatic users, and the Linux coalition will end up as leader of the server market.

Xbox 360 has had an excellent evolution, it's true, but Playstation 3 hasn't been launched yet, and console and game sales are not enough to fuel a company like Microsoft, with approximately 60,000 employees.

Another thing that shouldn't be forgotten is that while Microsoft keeps failing with every product it launches, Apple, Google, IBM and others are becoming increasingly popular and are strengthening their position.

In these circumstances, I don't believe it's farfetched to say that if Microsoft doesn't start making original products, that set a new trend instead of following one, the software giant should think about the possibility of going bankrupt.

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