I spotted an post from Matt Asayon Steve Ballmer’s comments about the economic turmoil of offline media, and how that could also apply to Microsoft as well. Here’s what Microsoft’s CEO has to say: “There won’t be newspapers, magazines and TV programs. There won’t be personal, social communications offline and separate.”
Matt writes: “But will there be Windows?”, saying that Microsoft is facing a similar menace coming from a totally “cloudy” (networked) environment where everything would run from the web, through a browser.
I can see the parallel that Matt Asay is trying to make, but I’m not sure that I would compare the two. For one, the cloud might be a long term menace for Microsoft, but we’re so far from it that it is a slippery forecast. Secondly, Microsoft’s problems are mainly centered around Vista, not because people are switching to “the cloud”, but because Vista is not a great product. Mac OS X has seen its user base triple in the past few years.
Of course, a Microsoft jump to a cloud environment seems unavoidable, but let’s not forget that most consumer cloud services are still losing money, so going to the cloud is not a salvation in itself and Microsoft made it clear that it would only do it if it makes business sense.
In the end, the parallel between the offline media woes and Microsoft’s seem a little far-fetched. Microsoft will probably be fine for the next decade, and clearly many “offline media” institution will be long done by then. Steve Ballmer’sspeach can be viewed at canneslions.com
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