Rise and fall of Microsoft
by AxelS • January 2, 2012 • General • 0 Comments
In the late 90′s Microsoft killed Netscape by simply giving the browser away for free. Back then it was very hard to compete against free. By end of 2003 Microsoft’s Internet Explorer reached 85% market share for two reasons: 1) There was no contender in the field wanting to compete with Microsoft. 2) Microsoft tried to make people believe they take the Internet serious.
In 2005 FireFox started to compete with Microsoft on “Free”. That was clearly a game changer. Firefox was faster and better but most importantly it was not Microsoft. That was the beginning of the end of the Microsoft era. Microsoft never took the Internet serious. Today January 2012 Microsoft dropped from 85% market share in the browser business to an insignificant 20% market share and rapidly declining. See details at w3cSchool
The Microsoft executive team never understood to harness the power of the Internet. And by loosing that connection to the market they couldn’t pickup the next big evolution: Social Media. Even with the 8 Billion $ Skype acquisition where Microsoft had at least a theoretic opportunity to enter the social web, but they didn’t do anything. And whether Microsoft buys Yahoo or not, there is no way to stop Google growing further and continuing to dominate the search business. Whether Google’s G+ will make it or not is not so important as Google has a very solid position in the Internet industry. Google’s market share in the search market is 65% and still counting. Bing remains below 15% in accordance to comScore.
I’m sure Microsoft Windows, some parts of Office and maybe some of the other MS utilities will remain in the market for a few more decades. Corporations build all their office infrastructure around Microsoft and the maintenance alone is a good business to keep 20,000 engineers busy. Microsoft (MSFT) will not go away, but in the end it became a commodity no different than a GE, Ford, GM… that has lost it’s glamor.
