Microsoft Has a PR Mountain to Climb

February 12, 2009

Fast Forward 09 zipped right on by. Not too much excitement in the blogosphere. Then Joe Wilcox, writing in the eWeek Microsoft Watch publication, dropped the hammer on Microsoft in “Windows 7 Enterprise Asks Too Much” here. The main point of his interesting article was:

Software sales are slowing with global economies, and Microsoft executives must hope that annuity license contract conversions will smooth out Windows Client division revenues and ensure they will continue. Problem with the reasoning: If businesses are buying less, there’s no reason for them to spend more for Windows’ licenses. Microsoft’s Software Assurance priority and its customers budget-constrained spending objectives are contradictory.

In short, bad economy and Microsoft is trying to take money out of organizations like it was 1999.

But the killer analysis was Preston Gralla’s “Microsoft 10,000 Patents, $9 Billion Annually in Research and We Get Vista” here. Ouch. The write up drags fingernails down the whiteboard. The issue for me was the comment section to this article. One example: anonymous (of course) wrote:

Microsoft could spend twice the amount on R&D and it would make little difference. We got Vista and Win7 because of gross management incompetence starting with Ballmer.

No comment from the goose.

Stephen Arnold, February 12, 2009

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