Investors want Microsoft’s new CEO to kill Xbox, Bing and Surface
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Seriously, those investors are morons. MS has never been a a company that fits the adjective: "lean". MS is practically a post-secondary institution unto itself! MS' far-reaching speculative research is the stuff of legend, and far too infrequently translated into the commercial sphere. Anyone who thinks they should narrow their focus and ignore more of the fruits of their labor instead of less is an idiot.
None of that is good for Microsoft, but the investors are potentially behaving quite rationally. (if a bit destructively...)
Microsoft started as business software company, then switched to be a OS company, when this happened, their dev software divisions for example were assigned to support Windows, not develop on their own.
After Bill Gates left, that Ballmer tried to do several things at the same time, resulting specially into a Windows division detached from everything else, MS stopped making good games for windows, stopped making tools specially geared to windows (tools obviously still work, and depend on windows, but Visual Studio team is not a "windows API" team anymore, and a team on its own, with its own profits and vision), and so on.
Then they alienated windows costumers with a insistence in driver changes and creating shitty drivers (like... Xinput, instead of using the still much better Direct Input). And the destruction of some of their most popular services (ie: MSN Messenger, in Brazil people used solely the MSN Messenger to communicate, and mostly on windows, MS killed it in favour of Skype, and shot themselves in the foot HARD, because Skype is crap, and so people use other stuff)
Then they alienated Xbox costumers with the shitty Xbox one (less power than PS4, more expensive, and their headless chicken policy decision making).
They don't have a choice now, the only stuff that they are STILL making right is the business software side, everything else (costumer facing windows, xbox, mobile, games, etc...) became a sort of trainwreck.
Going "lean" on the business side, and later rebuilding the other side is possible, but trying to fix everything at once I think is much harder.
The fact that they turned the product in to horrific ad-riddled bloatware killed MSN Messenger. Facebook chat and instant messaging in mobile, where MS may as well not exist, twisted the knife.
I am actually considering uninstalling Skype until I need it again for a job or something, because it makes the boot process MUCH slower, and I don't even log on it ever (I just wait it to launch, and then close it again)
Seriously though, the ergo 4000 is the best keyboard I've ever owned and I'd hate to see it gone by the hand of somebody who just doesn't care enough.
Computing devices are no longer bought in large numbers by exclusively big businesses. The iPhone has shown that business customers go home, buy consumer products, love how much better it works than what they use at the office and want to bring it to work. The recent data on mobile device sales compared to Windows PCs is especially damning.
Secondly, Google, Facebook and the rest of "new tech" industry is not built on MS tech. What is actually enterprise? Size? If a gigantic company like Google can crunch all that data and have such amazing uptime without MS tech, then who needs MS? Every year a new generation create their own startup and they choose anything but MS. To me, enterprise means established, old and slow. If all the old guards will be disrupted and die out like I think they will, then MS will have no one left to sell to! Increasingly even the old guard is messing around with Linux and OSS in order to be more agile.
Consumer is the future and MS needs to embrace it or die. They just have to stop making mistakes like Windows 8.
Google and Facebook may be huge, but as a percentage of the global economy they are still pretty small (e.g. look at the Forbes Global 2000) - the enterprise world is everything all those other companies need to operate and it's the world of IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and thousands of specialized ISVs.
I'd be rather surprised if Google or Facebook wrote their own consolidated financial reporting or payroll software (indeed Google seems to use Oracle Hyperion FM for consolidated reporting and planning, as does Facebook).
At the moment, Microsoft has some pretty decent enterprise products, but they only sell them through partners - one possibility for growth and really focusing on the enterprise space would be to emulate IBM and focus on services and products - either by greatly increasing the size of their existing consulting arm and/or buying a few of the existing large service partners.
Bing and Surface I can understand to a degree, but they want Microsoft to kill Xbox, one of their strongest brands, and one of Microsoft's only hopes for differentiation? For what, to chase the smartphone game or something?
Some sources say the 360 lost about 3 billion[1] while others that it lost 2.5 billion PER year[2].
The Xbone lost about 1 billion dollars so far (was expected to lose 2)[3]
And it's not just Microsoft that is losing money on these consoles, Sony is in the read as well. [4]
[1]: http://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-xbox-division-h...
[2]: http://www.destructoid.com/analyst-microsoft-losing-2-billio...
[3]: http://bgr.com/2013/11/26/xbox-one-profit-estimate/
[4]: http://www.vg247.com/2013/01/07/xbox-360-and-ps3-losses-tota...
$3 billion in losses over eight or nine years is irrelevant, literally, to Microsoft's fiscal picture. They have $84 billion in cash, and are compiling another $25 billion every year. Their ability to stay in the game financially, has helped result in the death of Nintendo when it comes to hardware, eliminating a big competitor. Microsoft can fund these losses forever so long as there is a good strategic reason for it (Sony on the other hand cannot).
Most likely in the future, MS will do something similar to steam - just sell software for so called "consoles", and have hardware partners. That will help with the losses issues.
MS don't need to make the consumer device everyone has they just have to force OEMs to not make piles of crap. In a way I think intel kind of own how well MS can perform with hardware. If they didn't push utlrabooks I don't know if we would have gotten anything in the pc space as well built as some apple kit.
Slightly OT, but how does owning < 1% of a company's shares qualify for a board seat? Can someone who knows about these things enlighten me?
That's easy to explain:
1. Corporate boards should show a fair representation of the largest stockholders.
2. For a board with 100 members, it should be apparent that anyone with more than 1% of the corporation's stock must be given a place on the board. But this only makes a point and isn't a typical board -- 100 members is unwieldy.
3. Another case is one in which the majority of the corporation stock is held by many small investors and there are only a few majority stockholders. In this case, someone holding more than an individual investor but less than the majority investors may still earn a place, even on a relatively small board.
4. Another way to describe this is to take the number of board seats and distribute them among those individuals who hold the largest stock holdings, in declining order. For example, let's say there are ten board positions, five majority stockholders and a pool of smaller investors with quickly declining stock percentages. In this case, a stockholder with a very small stake might acquire a position on the board simply by being counted among the ten largest stockholders.
Read this article for details: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732332490...
This is about the myopic quarter to quarter focus on profits by the market, the stock market in the last 30 years has been increasingly unable to to focus on the long game - if it does generate income or profit by the next quarter, its rubbish.
This attitude has wormed its way all through the economy, its part of why its hard to get a company to promote from within - they expect their employees to come from the outside with all the tool/skills/knowledge to hit the road running - even if they are at a significant disadvantage in actually understanding a companies operations. It used to be you could get an entry level job and company X, and expect a regular set of promotions up the chain, now, to get that promotion, you need to go work some place else almost.
I've seen this sentiment about the market like, forever. Yes, I've been investing in the market for 30 years.
But I seriously doubt that investors are so stupid. If they were pushing up stock prices based on quarterly results and the long game be damned, then where are all the smart investors shorting those companies? Are you making money on shorts?
And, why are there companies like Amazon with enormous P/E's? Clearly, investors are playing the long game with them.
Truck Stops Utilities Tire Companies Banks Insurance
My argument is before the mid 80's - the focus was on the dividend not on the stock price itself, IMO, buying and selling based on stock price, rather than earning disbursed to shareholders, is merely speculation, rather than investing.
Saying stock purchasing anticipating future growth in the stock price as "mere" speculation is very incorrect. A company can choose to issue a dividend or repurchase stock (thereby pushing up the price), these are economically equivalent. The choice is made based usually on tax treatment.
We are going to see all Microsoft stakeholders (from investors to employees to managers) try their hand at the new CEO. No surprise the first movers are some investors, they're greedy and in just for the money.
Around that time there were a bunch of them with some people even trying to make a case for shorting GOOG.
Media convergence is the only reason to keep the Xbone business, but if Microsoft focuses on Enterprise (or at least "work"), that doesn't matter, either.
I went the other way (back to PC gaming, had PS3/360; won't get PS4/Xbone until there's a platform exclusive I must have)
Only in the US. Globally it certainly wasn't dominant and was probably behind the PS3.
Windows RT, I'd be happy to call that one pretty much dead anyway. Unless they can figure out a way to get full windows apps running on ARM devices, I don't see the point. Intel chips are going to improve in performance and battery life to the point where they are nearly comparable with ARM (or at least to a point where it matters). Then, the argument would be mute and we won't be making a decision between RT and Full Windows.
Bing, I'm not so sure. I actually quite like Bing, but I don't see where Microsoft is going to make a huge impact with it.
XBox, I can't believe they're loosing money on it, particularly after the huge success of the kinect. Either way, it's Microsoft's ticket into the livingroom.
Not really.
http://www.nowinstock.net/computers/tablets/microsoft/surfac...
I imagine the next version of Surface being 1/3 lighter, 1/3 less expensive, and I am likely to buy one, even though I don't even own a Windows device right now.
Off topic: the new lighter iPads are awesome. A very light weight bluetooth keyboard cover that is designed by Apple and is extremely thin and light weight would potentially eat the Surface's lunch - for users who don't specifically need Windows applications.
And the "next-generation" doesn't look better either. Console hardware is already outdated right out of the gate, the second half of their generation will be painful.
The majority of professional studios still use C++ based engines.
Unity is the Microsoft's endorsed replacement for XNA, as announced in the Visual Studio 2013 release keynote.
Also it has a lot of warts (nothing is ideal): http://t-machine.org/index.php/2013/12/27/2014-entity-system...
XNA is a good public image making tool, not just an API. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23becauseofXNA&src=hash
MonoGame is unfortunately still lacking an own content pipeline.
I rather use C++ than being stuck in .NET 3.5, without any more modern C# goodies.
As for scripting ready-made chunks, I guess one has to decide if they want to make a game or a game engine.
"I guess one has to decide if they want to make a game or a game engine" - exactly, but there should be a choice. XNA being a framework rather than engine provided such a choice in a high-level way.
The libraries are also important and they are stuck on .NET 3.5 offerings.
Another problem is the old version of Mono they are using, which doesn't not have the JIT and GC improvements of more recent versions.
This is what I was able to gather from online sources, when wondering if it was worth the time and space to install it.
Doesn't matter. Goodwill is important, Microsoft is big enough they can afford to maintain 1 library.
They have a bit of right, though. Bing is just downright horrendous, Xbox is a not-so-good tier compared to other consoles in the sector. They need some optimization with allocating resources and offering services.
Surface is also one of the products Microsoft almost got right - there was real interest on windows on ARM at the time. But full windows.
And Bing - well its only advantage over google is the turned off content filter.
[1] Owned 360 for 5 years, played 5 hours on it.
so because YOU only played 5 hours on YOUR 360, the console was a failure?
Let me counter your anecdote with one of my own: The XBOX was a disappointment and the 360 was a good console. Reason: I played much more on my 360 than the original.
The 360 was around for a much longer time than the original and there were many more games made for the 360 than for the original.
If you don't believe that to be enough, there were 24M original xboxes sold, compared to 80M xbox 360.
But yes - 360 was a failure. We got stratification of the published, ballooning budgets, total homogenization of the games. Every abusive trick ever from publishers on the consoles, red ring of death, needlessly complicated online survives (the whole MS points crap), XBOX live gold subscriptions and the console barely broke even at best from every report I have ever read. The decision for the HDD to be optional was "brilliant". The first few revisions of the hardware were poorly made. Instead of the ugly but perfectly cool able and boring xbox we got something elegant, pretty, noisy and overheating.