#Apple os x server market share 2014 android#
They can do that by being successful with Windows Phone except that won’t happen or they can embrace Android and do whatever it takes to make Android work beautifully in a Microsoft environment. This probably sounds odd to some, but Microsoft is fully entrenched in enterprise and the future success of enterprise will depend on the company’s ability to seamlessly integrate all its data center offerings with mobile clients. What Microsoft should do with Windows Phone is kill it and embrace Android. No devices, then - at least not inherently mobile ones - for that devices and services strategy. I think Nokia will eventually be resold much as Motorola Mobility was sold by Google. Microsoft can’t afford to be number three and losing money, especially while they are making $2 billion per year already from Android royalties. Nokia is a crap shoot tied to the success of Windows Phone, which I don’t think is even possible. I’m not saying Microsoft doesn’t belong there because the cloud has become vital in different ways to every part of its business, but I am saying that Microsoft will not survive as mainly a cloud company. Nadella was Microsoft’s cloud guy and has to know that business is a quagmire of low margins and dubious returns. Readers should understand this is me speaking not as a consumer but as a pundit, so this is as much about Microsoft’s corporate health and anything else. Rather than chase a waning market it is better to stand firm on consumer and chase the still-growing enterprise. Pundits who have been suggesting Microsoft drop consumer Windows to $20 don’t understand that doing so would undermine the larger enterprise market at $100. Speaking of enterprise, that’s where the money is, as IBM has been showing for the last 15 years. xBox qualifies there and so the company can’t and won’t sell the division even if Nadella transforms the rest of the company into enterprise software. What Microsoft needs more than anything else is to be in markets where it can be first or second in market share. Those who have suggested Microsoft sell its console game platform aren’t thinking that process through very far. What should those be? I’m not going to give the guy advice here but I will say what I expect to happen. Let’s assume, then, that Nadella comes into his new job with some immunity to Ballmer so he can make at least a few dramatic changes. Ballmer wouldn’t budge (with $12+ billion in Microsoft shares I might not have budged either) and so Mulally wisely walked. Why should he? Mulally’s price for returning to Seattle, I’ve been told, was for Gates to give up the chairmanship and Ballmer to leave the board entirely. But Mulally didn’t want to have to deal with either Gates or Ballmer. My understanding is that the Microsoft board really wanted Alan Mulally from Ford to come in and clean house for a couple years before handing a much leaner company over to a younger successor.
#Apple os x server market share 2014 software#
If Nadella wants to veer very far from that path by, for example, getting rid of Nokia or making Microsoft an enterprise software company, only Gates will be able to stand between the two men and, frankly, spare Nadella’s job. You might ask why Nadella, whose technical chops are easily the equal of BillG’s (and a lot more recent, too) would even need Gates in that advisory role? I believe the answer lies in my recent column where I argued that the best new Microsoft CEO would be Gates, himself, because only he could stand up to departing CEO Steve Ballmer.īallmer still owns 333 million Microsoft shares, has a huge ego, and that ego is likely to be invested at first in bullying Nadella toward following line-for-line the devices and services strategy Ballmer came up with last year that so far isn’t working too well. Whether it works out well or not probably comes down to Bill Gates, who leaves his job as chairman to become Nadella’s top technical advisor. Microsoft has a new CEO in former cloud and server chief Satya Nadella and readers have been asking me what this means? Certainly Nadella was the least bad of the internal candidates but an external selection would have been better.