In addition, Google and Yahoo will likely beat them (MS) to the punch by either buying these companies or developing the online version themselves. In the future we will not buy any software. It will all be free or very near free!
Trust me, MS is really in trouble here. Probably a great stock short but not for the faint hearted. It will take years to play out, but MS may well have finally met their match. It's called the Web!
It is easy to predict something when it is so obvious. Google buying Upstartle, the makers of the soon coming Writerly, a web based word processor is an obvious thing for Google to do. What is MS going to do when all the Office apps are available on the web for free from Google? Microsoft, became a monopoly by including FOR FREE, one application after another. Now the tables are being turned as Google and others will give to us free applications that we now pay MS for.
I have been thinking lately that my rants about MS being a monopoly are really irrelevant. MS really has serious competition that actually do threaten their ultimate dominant position. That is what you have to love about American capitalism. Give it enough time and it usually self corrects!
Take AT&T. In hindsight, it was a big mistake for the US to break up that monopoly. But who could have imagined what would happen to the telecom industry. Forces bigger than the US government were at work that would have inevitably broken AT&T's monopoly. Capitalism usually works!
Will the same thing happen to MS? There are really smart people at MS, but tremendous market forces are at work which they really have great difficulty responding to. It will be fascinating to watch!
I am sometimes good at predicting that something could happen. Here is an example.
In this post from Nov of 2005 I said,
It is easy to predict something when it is so obvious. Google buying Upstartle, the makers of the soon coming Writerly, a web based word processor is an obvious thing for Google to do. What is MS going to do when all the Office apps are available on the web for free from Google? Microsoft, became a monopoly by including FOR FREE, one application after another. Now the tables are being turned as Google and others will give to us free applications that we now pay MS for.
I have been thinking lately that my rants about MS being a monopoly are really irrelevant. MS really has serious competition that actually do threaten their ultimate dominant position. That is what you have to love about American capitalism. Give it enough time and it usually self corrects!
Take AT&T. In hindsight, it was a big mistake for the US to break up that monopoly. But who could have imagined what would happen to the telecom industry. Forces bigger than the US government were at work that would have inevitably broken AT&T's monopoly. Capitalism usually works!
Will the same thing happen to MS? There are really smart people at MS, but tremendous market forces are at work which they really have great difficulty responding to. It will be fascinating to watch!