Is Microsoft a Winner or a Loser?

With any small or large businesses; winning and losing are part of the game. It is really hard to find one company that either steadily grows or steadily decays in growth; there always will be bit of ups and downs on the path. But we are not either worried or talking about all those companies out there, but Microsoft. Why? Because it is one of the biggies that influences our day to day lives and also is an important part of our business and personal lives.

Microsoft had recently released many products of which some of them got great applaud from the crowd, but some others didn’t make it. You know, it is with all business, when you launch a product not everyone likes it. And not every product you launch goes viral and talked by people.

Let’s see a few flops from Microsoft.

Windows Phone 7

A great flop that kept Microsoft’s mouth shut about sales since December ‘10. Even though 1.5 million devices had been shipped, no news on how much sold out. Some of the drawbacks reported with the phone are update problems, bugs in hardware and a reported delay in carrier distribution. The major reason for the failure is that Microsoft did not catch up with the market by releasing any updates; indeed there were zero updates in the first three months while at the same time Apple released six updates in the first three months after the release of iOS.

Tablets

Microsoft is struggling to make it since the tablet market is topped by Mac and Android, as preferred by peeps while Microsoft is not willing to go beyond Windows. Can you believe Microsoft trying to put a mouse pointer based interface on a touch device? Yes, it did it, with the Windows 7 based HP 500 Slate.

Bing

This one is mainly a financial loss, but is still popular among people. The latest quarterly earnings report of Microsoft reveals that the company has spent an extra $292 million to earn $84 million. Pathetic!

Let’s talk some sweet successes too.

Bing

Yes, Bing is turning out to be a success offlate. The loss is with money, but people seem to love Bing a lot more than earlier. It is slowing creeping high to contribute about 30% of US searches; it was just 10% in 2010. Google seems to have been a little bit disturbed by Bing’s growth that it has made some vital changes to its own algorithms.

Internet Explorer 9

The old days of complaints about the reliability and speed of IE browser is gone and IE 9 is quick, light and has evolved with great HTML standards far better than ever. A couple of exciting features are (a) dynamic jumps where you can navigate directly to specific pages inside a site and (b) the option to save web app launch icons in the taskbar.

Kinect

Oh this one is seriously viral. When Microsoft revealed the Q3 2011 earnings in April; it said that there were 2.4 million sales of Kinect. This is just the tip of the iceberg. During this same period the company has sold 2.7 million Xbox 360 consoles. You see?

So, I roll the ball over to you – Is Microsoft a Winner or a Loser?