1. Microsoft
Ryan Landay

2. Selected products
•
Biggest products by revenue and profit:
•
•
Office
•
•
Windows
Server software
Other well-known products:
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Xbox
•
Surface

3. Annual revenue by division

4. Annual profit by division

5. Very brief history of Microsoft
•
Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to sell BASIC
interpreters
•
Entered OS business in 1980, bought a CP/M clone in 1981 and
rebranded it as MS-DOS
•
Released first version of Windows in 1985
•
Microsoft Office introduced in 1990
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Steve Ballmer took over from Bill Gates as CEO in 2000
•
New CEO to take over in 2014, rumored to be either Satya
Nadella or Sundar Pichai

6. What’s hot
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Windows 7
•
Windows XP
•
Microsoft Office
•
Server business
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Xbox 360

7. What Microsoft wishes were hot
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Windows Phone
•
Windows 8
•
Surface
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Xbox One

8. Secret sauce
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Extreme backwards compatibility with old desktop applications
(unfortunately, no traction on mobile)
•
Proprietary file formats none of their competitors can open properly
•
History of anticompetitive behavior, including restrictive licensing
agreements with OEMs and the ability to make competitors’
software not work as well
•
Creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) through shameless
deceptive advertising campaigns
•
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM Microsoft”

9. Not in the secret sauce
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Creating consumer devices with easy to use
interfaces that people actually want to use
•
Taking over industries Apple and Google are
successful in

10. Interesting story
•
Late 1990s: Microsoft obtained a monopoly in the web browser
market by
•
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Restricting OEMs from offering Netscape as an alternative
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Adding proprietary features for web authors to use so sites would
only work in Internet Explorer
•
•
Bundling Internet Explorer with Windows
Creating secret Windows APIs so Internet Explorer would work
better than competing browsers
District Court in 2000 ordered breakup of Microsoft as a remedy for its
monopolization actions, overturned by a Court of Appeals

11. Interesting story
•
Internet Explorer 6 was released on August 27,
2001, not replaced until October 2006
•
Web technology development stagnated
•
Many web developers never tested their
websites in any other browser

12. Interesting story
•
September 2013: Ballmer
said:
“They have this incredible,
amazing, dare I say
monopoly that we are the only
person left on the planet
trying to compete with…I do
believe that Google's
practices are worthy of
discussion with competition
authority, and we have
certainly discussed them with
competition authorities”

13. Competition
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Windows on desktop: Linux, Mac OS X, mobile computing
•
Microsoft Office: cloud-based services like Google Docs,
iWork, OpenOffice.org
•
Server software: Linux-based servers
•
Cloud computing: Google, Amazon
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Consumer mobile products: iPhone, iPad
•
Xbox: Sony PlayStation 4, Wii U

14. My prediction
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Windows Phone and Surface will be discontinued
within five years
•
Xbox will become less relevant in future, Xbox One
probably either last or second-to-last Xbox model
•
Will probably be main player for a while in desktop
computing and office software and a player in cloud
computing to some extent
•
Probably facing a slow and steady decline overall