Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?
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In 15 years MS is a desiccated rotting husk of its former self, with revenues less than 50% of what they were in 2010. Most of those revenues will be 5-10 employee SMBs who "need Office" as the enterprise customers will be leaving in droves by 2025. And they'll still be trying to sell their mobile OS, only it will be on its 30th iteration and 30th name since 2006, and still have less than 1% market share. Their CEO will constantly be having press conferences about how relevant they are, esp in mobile space. You will see all sorts of expensive commercials showing people how cool their new stuff is, but nobody in the real world will actually use it.
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@momurda said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
In 15 years MS is a desiccated rotting husk of its former self, with revenues less than 50% of what they were in 2010. Most of those revenues will be 5-10 employee SMBs who "need Office" as the enterprise customers will be leaving in droves by 2025. And they'll still be trying to sell their mobile OS, only it will be on its 30th iteration and 30th name since 2006, and still have less than 1% market share. Their CEO will constantly be having press conferences about how relevant they are, esp in mobile space. You will see all sorts of expensive commercials showing people how cool their new stuff is, but nobody in the real world will actually use it.
That is pretty much what I was thinking
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@DustinB3403 said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@IRJ said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@DustinB3403 said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
I think microsoft will still have a foot in the door for a lot of places, especially as they move to a pay per service function. Like office365 is a continual monthly cost.
Which a lot of businesses see as reasonable.
Of course monthly or perpetual is a better business model, but there are plenty of alternatives offering the same service.
The trouble with the alternatives is name recognition. Microsoft is an easy name to remember.
I think Google is becoming a bigger name than Microsoft if it hasn't already become bigger.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@NerdyDad said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@NerdyDad said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@DustinB3403 said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
I think microsoft will still have a foot in the door for a lot of places, especially as they move to a pay per service function. Like office365 is a continual monthly cost.
Which a lot of businesses see as reasonable.
This is seen as reasonable because companies don't have to spend money on a dedicated IT person for email, nor the costs of licensing, hardware, storage, backups, etc. If you were to cost compare O365 to 4-8 years of Exchange with CALs for mailboxes, Office licenses, hardware, storage, backups, and training (at least) for the current IT staff, then you're going to see that O365 is significantly cheaper than hosting your own Exchange on-prem.
However, there are a few caveats to this as well. O365 does distribute your data geographically, but does not maintain backups of the data. You will have to consider backing it up somehow, either via PS or Veeam.
Are you sure that they do not back it up? Not giving you access to backups is not the same as not having them.
This is about the only reference that I could find involving backups.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn440734(v=exchg.150).aspx
Even that is not crystal clear as to how they handle backups, unless they are not handling backups but just copying the data geographically.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@Kelly said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
I'd love to see Active Directory for Linux.
We've had it for years. It's not MS' own AD, but you can manage it with the MS tools as if it were.
I meant Microsoft Active Directory for Linux. I would love to see their core server services licensed individually and platform agnostic.
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@Kelly said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@Kelly said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
I'd love to see Active Directory for Linux.
We've had it for years. It's not MS' own AD, but you can manage it with the MS tools as if it were.
I meant Microsoft Active Directory for Linux. I would love to see their core server services licensed individually and platform agnostic.
They might. I wonder if they'll find any value in it at that point. If you are willing to run Linux under the hood how much benefit is the MS AD bringing?
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SQL Server is the crown jewel. Exchange would be a big deal.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
SQL Server is the crown jewel. Exchange would be a big deal.
SQL is definitely their best product.
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@IRJ said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
SQL Server is the crown jewel. Exchange would be a big deal.
SQL is definitely their best product.
And the one you really can't host. Exchange isn't bad but it tends to be hosted. So porting it isn't a big deal.
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I anticipate Office getting ported soon. I think that they've been working on it. It's too much revenue to lose.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
I anticipate Office getting ported soon. I think that they've been working on it. It's too much revenue to lose.
I could see customer backlash. I mean look at OWA, it does nearly all the tasks outlook does already. For some reason people think they NEED outlook. When all they do is send email and use the calendar.
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@IRJ said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
I anticipate Office getting ported soon. I think that they've been working on it. It's too much revenue to lose.
I could see customer backlash. I mean look at OWA, it does nearly all the tasks outlook does already. For some reason people think they NEED outlook. When all they do is send email and use the calendar.
Right, the only part of Office people "need" is Outlook. And most of them dont need it they just think they do. Really all the others from libreoffice are identical or better than their MS counterparts in fucntionality and form. If there were an email client that looked nearly identical to Outlook and could do calendars and tasks, they'd have zero Office revenue within a few quarters.
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@scottalanmiller
Isnt it already basically ported? You can get the online version today, which seems to be platform neutral as it is a web application. -
@momurda said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@IRJ said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
I anticipate Office getting ported soon. I think that they've been working on it. It's too much revenue to lose.
I could see customer backlash. I mean look at OWA, it does nearly all the tasks outlook does already. For some reason people think they NEED outlook. When all they do is send email and use the calendar.
Right, the only part of Office people "need" is Outlook. And most of them dont need it they just think they do. Really all the others from libreoffice are identical or better than their MS counterparts in fucntionality and form. If there were an email client that looked nearly identical to Outlook and could do calendars and tasks, they'd have zero Office revenue within a few quarters.
Excel does offer some additional functionality over Calc, but most users would never notice.
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@momurda said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
Really all the others from libreoffice are identical or better than their MS counterparts in fucntionality and form. If there were an email client that looked nearly identical to Outlook and could do calendars and tasks, they'd have zero Office revenue within a few quarters.
I really wonder if this is true. Granted it's been 7+ years since I looked at Open Office, but back then most of our old Word documents where completely messed up formatting wise so it was a non starter for management. If the formatting issues are gone (when opening files from 2005 and today), then I'll agree that Office could be replaced.
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@momurda said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@IRJ said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@scottalanmiller said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
I anticipate Office getting ported soon. I think that they've been working on it. It's too much revenue to lose.
I could see customer backlash. I mean look at OWA, it does nearly all the tasks outlook does already. For some reason people think they NEED outlook. When all they do is send email and use the calendar.
Right, the only part of Office people "need" is Outlook. And most of them dont need it they just think they do. Really all the others from libreoffice are identical or better than their MS counterparts in fucntionality and form. If there were an email client that looked nearly identical to Outlook and could do calendars and tasks, they'd have zero Office revenue within a few quarters.
It doesn't sound like you've worked with any government entities. The number of weird things they do with Word is amazing. And there is no way that they would redo all their forms just to save money.
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@Dashrender OpenOffice is falling apart(thanks Oracle). libreoffice has been and will be what orgs use going forward if they want open source office document creation.
@Kelly I'd rather not work at all than work with government entities though there are exceptions.
I would think making form documents for the peons to fill out would be a task best suited for Adobe or Foxit line of products.I should add to my original post that in 15 years the only customers for ms will be 5-10 person SMBs and monolithic dinosaur orgs like government entities.
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@momurda said in Where do you see Microsoft in 5, 10, and 15 years?:
@Dashrender OpenOffice is falling apart(thanks Oracle). libreoffice has been and will be what orgs use going forward if they want open source office document creation.
Same question still applies - does LibreOffice displace the old documents I have the way I expect them to be displayed, i.e. as they were created 10+ years ago.
LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice (I think - and if not, it's a fork of something).. So I'm asking if they have solved the problem of displaying things created in MS Office.
Like Kelly, we don't want to spend the time/money/effort in converting everything. Even worse, the hospitals and lawyers we deal with still only submit things to us in MS Office format, so again, it needs to look the same on screen/print as originally created to even remotely be considered usable.
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In Word everything is fine when opening in LibreOffice.
Excel not so much. There are things that just get wonky (like pretty much everything).
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I think they will sell software apps and appliances with windows on it. I think they will move to the SaaS/Cloud model when it fits, while proposing "bundles" with windows for other apps on the client side - say surface-like stuff.
Server side they are already exporting their applications to other platforms where they can't offer a cloud alternative.
In the end I think they will be less the windows company and more an application company. They are going really strong in certain enviroments, think about SQL, NAV, Office and the so...
Still curious about their involvement in the IoT.
