Here is an interesting article from Business Week about why Microsoft is not so scary anymore. While I do not necessarily buy the argument that a company with billions of dollars of cash on its balance sheet is not scary, the article does raise some interesting questions about Microsoft's growth, particularly on the enterprise side. A quote from Merrill Lynch software analyst, Jason Maynard, sums it up:
"Microsoft still has the critical mass and the franchise of Windows and Office, but there are fundamental changes going on in how we computer and how businesses get value out of IT," says Merrill's Maynard. He further points out that many of these trends, including the rise of on-demand computing models, and software as a service, putting more computing power into the networks, are somewhat antithetical to the Microsoft model."
That quote definitely resonates with me. In fact, I recently had lunch with a friend who is heading up the Enterprise Architecture group for one of the largest health companies. His goal is to move the company to a service oriented architecture in the next 4-5 years. At the end of the day for him and his organization it is all about having better capacity utilization. Instead of having to roll out a new server with a new database and new storage for every new application, his company wants to deploy the app in a grid and increase the capacity utilization from 30% to 80%. During this 2 hour conversation about architecture and technology, Microsoft was never mentioned until I brought it up. When I prodded him further about this he mentioned that he recently spent time with Microsoft and was less than convinced of how Microsoft was going to help him realize his goal. He said the products are nice, tell a good story, but it still seems disjointed. In addition they are not moving fast enough for him. Just look at the delays in getting the monolithic Longhorn out as an example. Increasingly his organization is relying more and more on an open source, commodity stack, which, by the way, is delivering product on a much more rapid pace. In his view, Microsoft cannot tell the same story that an IBM or HP can in helping his company move to a service-oriented world. While this is one data point, I do believe that there will be challenges ahead for Microsoft in the enterprise. The commoditization of technology is definitely a strong force.
