Dina Bass and Adam Ewing report for Bloomberg Business after Microsoft published the next step of the strategy it announced last month:
Nadella is scaling back its mobile ambitions, seeking to tailor Windows devices for a narrower set of customers, instead of trying to sell as many mobile phones as possible in a market dominated by Apple Inc. and Google Inc.
The articles states that the new phones will target three markets:
Peter Bright (usually my “all things Microsoft” reference) criticizes Nadella’s strategy in a long form analysis at Ars Technica, stating that Microsoft is giving up on its ability to influence computing when it is giving up on mobility:
This leaves Windows stuck on the desktop. The desktop will probably never go away, but its ability to influence the computing landscape is clearly diminished. With it, so too is Microsoft’s ability to influence computing. And in time, this is sure to hurt even the cloud and business productivity segments; it leaves developers and users alike less invested in Windows and Windows development, and more willing to look at other platforms for their needs.
I don’t think that Microsoft’s ability to influence computing is tied to its leadership on the desktop. Microsoft is very relevant in the cloud industry. Cloud services are now shaping the business computing industry. It is usually considered good practice in the computing industry to loose coupling between tiers, as it eases maintenance. It allows good competition between suppliers as well, with Microsoft’s customers not getting stuck with Microsoft’s tools. Microsoft already faced this situation in the 90’s, with IDE/languages/compilers from Borland for example.
It is the whole point of Microsoft’s current strategy: focusing on business cloud services instead of wasting time and resources on markets it has already lost. A company will be billed for using Azure services no matter from which platform nor with which tool it is consuming them.
Thursday, July 9, 2015
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