{"id":174,"date":"2010-06-04T22:03:51","date_gmt":"2010-06-05T03:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/?p=174"},"modified":"2024-03-27T10:15:57","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T17:15:57","slug":"the-thing-about-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/the-thing-about-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thing About Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Daring Fireball <a title=\"Getting Out While the Getting is Good\" href=\"http:\/\/daringfireball.net\/linked\/2010\/06\/04\/yglesias-gates-ballmer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">linked<\/a> and <a title=\"I wish Microsoft Had Their Evil Genius Back\" href=\"http:\/\/daringfireball.net\/linked\/2010\/06\/04\/ballmer-gates-dhh\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">commented<\/a> on a <a title=\"Bill Gates was out of ideas.\" href=\"http:\/\/yglesias.thinkprogress.org\/archives\/2010\/06\/getting-out-while-the-going-is-good.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">couple<\/a> Microsoft <a title=\"Baller is an inarticulate idiot.\" href=\"http:\/\/37signals.com\/svn\/posts\/2380-you-couldnt-pay-me-to-work-for-ballmer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pieces<\/a> recently, and while I largely agree with them I feel a bit of dog-piling going on. Awkwardly and surprisingly, I find myself wanting to defend Microsoft. This won&#8217;t go over well.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s likely that this recent bout of comparisons was spawned by the\u00a0<a title=\"NYTimes: AAPL surpasses MSFT\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/05\/27\/technology\/27apple.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news<\/a> that Apple&#8217;s Market Capitalization had surpassed Microsoft&#8217;s recently. That&#8217;s a tremendous vote of confidence in Apple&#8217;s potential to make money in the future, but the whims of speculative financial gambling don&#8217;t necessarily prove everything. Steve Jobs was wise enough to downplay the meaning of this, and technology journalists should be wary of giving it too much significance as well.<\/p>\n<p>The elephant in the room that none of these pieces mention is Microsoft&#8217;s consistent ability to make ungodly amounts of money. The $15 Billion that Microsoft is banking every year should not be so quickly dismissed. I would probably argue even more strongly that Microsoft has lost it&#8217;s way, can&#8217;t innovate, and is structured to stay that way- but they are still making a lot of money. If they did get some better leadership, if they did significantly restructure, all that money could make big things possible.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think it will happen, but they&#8217;re a long way from even declining much less failing.<\/p>\n<p>Microsoft&#8217;s Net Income versus Apple&#8217;s over the last 10 years via <a title=\"Microsoft versus Apple Profit\" href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=microsoft+profit+versus+Apple+profit\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wolfram Alpha<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Daring Fireball linked and commented on a couple Microsoft pieces recently, and while I largely agree with them I feel a bit of dog-piling going on. Awkwardly and surprisingly, I find myself wanting to defend Microsoft. This won&#8217;t go over well. It&#8217;s likely that this recent bout of comparisons was spawned by the\u00a0news that Apple&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,50,25,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-business","category-microsoft","category-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffhottinger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}