Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The third business model that Ballmer articulated was monetizing
software through hardware. Once again, Microsoft couldn't get away
from using a major competitor as an example, directly naming Apple's
phenomenally successful iPod. Ballmer said that all the cool things
that its upcoming Zune player can do will be enabled by software but
the payoff will be built into the margin in the hardware sales.
The interview didn't get into the emerging threat
in the business space from software as a service delivery companies
such as Sales Force.
So what we can surmise from Ballmer's musings is that Microsoft is
going to have to keep producing software so much better than what's
available from the open source crowd that people are willing to pay
hard cash for what they could otherwise get for free.
While the software company struggles with that, it is somehow going to
introduce an advertising driven model without sabotaging its legacy
business.
Finally, Microsoft is going to leverage software to make money out of
hardware, against a competitor which has 80% market share and well over
20 years of experience making money off leveraging software to make
money out of hardware.
Microsoft has exceptionally deep pockets thanks to its legacy monopoly
desktop software business. That's good because, based on the three
challenges just mentioned, Microsoft is going to need to spend a lot of
that money to maintain its position as an IT market leader.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
