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Comment by clarky07 | Hacker News Reader

I think the people who say Microsoft has been a huge failure for the last decade should take a better look at the numbers that matter. The stock price doesn't matter. In 2000, we were at the top of the tech bubble. Bubble means valuations were stupid.

The story talks about 2000 report with 19.3 billion from windows and 23 billion total revenue. On the other hand, Microsoft made 19.9 billion in revenue just last quarter, with 5 Billion in net profit. 6 Billion operating income because of the surface writeoff.

Are other companies doing better? Yes. Could Microsoft have done better? Yes. Have they done badly? Not at all. They have grown revenues and profits at huge and absurd levels over several different divisions. They are also not going to die any time soon, and I don't think there are too many options to take a company this big private.

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I think that the main reason for this is that even thought the numbers are comparable in absolute terms, the market has grown in the mean time and the same number does not seem as impressive anymore.

Microsoft has done quite well financially, but where they look bad is when you see how much Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc. have grown in the same period.

One thing I learned in business school is the measure of a CEO is not whether or not they did a good job, but rather if they did a better job than someone else in the same position. It's hard to look at Microsoft in the last 10 years and think that they have done as well as they could.

That's silly. Google, Facebook, and Amazon barely existed at the beginning of this timeframe, and Apple was near death. Microsoft on the other hand was a several hundred billion dollar company. To expect similar growth rates is absurd, and only one of these companies is actually a direct competitor.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon? That is a woefully inadequate list of competitors. Here's a slightly more (but by no means fully) complete list, including some companies that are no longer around:

Oracle

Salesforce

Mozilla

Sony

Nintendo

Samsung

Blackberry

IBM

Heroku

Rackspace

Sun

Novell

Red Hat

Jetbrains

Not to mention, open source projects like Apache, Linux, Open Office, etc that attempt to commoditize their products.

That is an incredibly huge list by any standard, and many on that list are giants themselves. Now, given that Microsoft has competed, on average, successfully against all these rivals, many of whom give away competing products for free, would you still consider their lack of success against a select few to be a huge shortcoming?

(Edit: typos, fixes, adding more rivals as I think of them)

It's a false premise to think that Microsoft could have owned everything (such that they could have had all that other growth too).

They were going to do $60 billion in retail revenue (Amazon.com)? Why? They were going to run a social network? Why?

Indeed many of Microsoft's mistakes were to fire off far too many arrows mindlessly (from Slate to Expedia). Even those that produced a return likely diverted attention away from better results at their core. They have no business being in social as one example.

And why would anybody presume that an operating systems and productivity software company would dominate Web search? Or that they could have even if they had wanted to and had seen it all coming.

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