SNS: Microsoft's Pivot Moment

 

In This Issue Week of 6/6/2016    Vol. 21 Issue 20

FEATURE: Microsoft's Pivot Moment o    What Went Wrong o    What Business Is Microsoft In? o    Browser Issues o    Losing the Web o    Losing the Box Revs o    What's Left? o    Office 365 o    What's Really Scary? o    What's Exciting? o    Summary Quotes of the Week Takeout Window o    A New Kind of Spacecraft Ethermail Inside SNS Upcoming SNS Events o    FiRe 2016 o    Where's Mark?

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Microsoft's Pivot Moment

 

There is an often-told joke among entrepreneurs, in which the startup experience is described as jumping off a cliff and "assembling the airplane on the way down." Now change this to "disassemble the 747, and then remake it into an Airbus 350," and you have Microsoft's current state.

We wrote about Microsoft in March, giving a 90k-foot view of the company as it has tried to find a path between consumer and enterprise (SNS: "Microsoft: From Enterprise  to Consumer to Enterprise," March 3, 2016). Since then, the company has faced additional write-downs and seen its smartphone market share drop below the 1% mark, a number too small to see on any normal charts.

With the embers from this crash scene still smoldering, the company released earnings on April 21 for the period ending March 31, revealing Q3 revenues down YTY from $21.7B to $20.5B, operating income down YTY from $6.6B to $5.3B, and net income down YTY from $4.98B to $3.75B.

Ouch.