That's not to say that everything's rosy, of course, but people have lost perspective on what an impressive money-making machine Microsoft really is.
That's not to say that everything's rosy, of course, but people have lost perspective on what an impressive money-making machine Microsoft really is.
If you read The Innovator's Dilemma, one of the hallmarks of disrupted businesses is that everything's fine until they go out of business. They keep moving up-market, into market segments with higher revenues and higher margins, until they're a mainstay of all giant enterprises. And then those enterprises realize that there's a competitor out there whose product wasn't suitable a couple years ago, but has just barely been able to do the job they need it to do, and switch en-masse. And then the big company, having run out of market segments to expand into, dies rapidly. Happened to IBM in the early 90s, Sun in the early 2000s...and Microsoft is next.
Um. IBM has a $230B market cap. Apple is at $400B, Google is at $300B. Is that really the example you want to give for a "disrupted" dead company?
The same thing could happen at Microsoft, but it's unlikely with Ballmer (or any insider) still at the helm.
MS is at a crossroads. If they push subscriptions like Adobe has, they could see a mass exodus of consumers away from Office.
The future isn't bleak for MS. What the climate has been showing is that MS is at its best when it comes to business.
Also "record financial record" thing can be very misleading for a company. It's not a predictor of success for the next few years. Competitiveness in the current environment is.
RIM fell for the same fallacy for years. RIM actually had a "record quarter" in 2009, and they were still growing into 2010. The problem is they only tried to change when things started getting worse - around late 2010 or early 2011.
They really should've started changing course in 2007, or 2008 at most, after the iPhone came out. But they didn't. Because they also thought their financials are improving, "so they might be doing something right". But all they needed to do to see if they are or aren't doing something right is look if their phones are competitive with the iPhone (and later the Android phones). And they clearly weren't.
Microsoft's biggest problem, as with all companies getting disrupted, is that the new disruptive technology arrives at a significantly lower price. Sure you can buy Windows machines for $300-$400 bucks, but the are nowhere near as good as the Android/iOS ones in terms of performance and what you get for the money in terms of hardware. And the price point is only getting lower.
Benjamin Graham supported the opposite. It may be, in some minority cases, but generally it is not. Companies who consistently delivered generally keep delivering in the equivalent future timeframe.
EDIT It would be nice for you to give some data to support your point.