Microsoft has become kicked around the block in the World wide web organization for heading on fifteen decades. Now it's likely payback time.
While every person else hunkers down and fights to survive, Microsoft will get to sit back again and choose who to purchase. When it decides, it may dig into a $20 billion dollars pile that can practically replenish itself this 12 months with $15 billion of free of charge money flow. Nobody else, including Google,
Windows 7 Home Basic Key Sale, will acquire this significantly of a relative gain in the worldwide financial collapse.
(Google, furthermore, is now hamstrung by alert regulators--thanks,
Windows 7 Ultimate, in component, to Microsoft's lobbying--and is targeted on cutting fees and narrowing its ambitions. These really should preserve it distracted for your up coming few a long time.)
Who could Microsoft purchase? Some obvious names,
Windows 7 Pro Key, and many smaller not-so-obvious ones.
But the first thing Microsoft needs to do if it really is to succeed long-term from the Net enterprise is build a central consumer brand that it can hang everything else off of. (Alternatively, it may focus on the again end, via search and other technologies, but this likely won't be as profitable. The vast majority of Google's immense profit comes from searches on its own site, not third-party sites, and the same will hold true for Microsoft).
The big consumer Web brands other than Google include:
Yahoo AOL Facebook MSN, et al (Microsoft needs to consolidate ALL its Net brands into one. This one's probably the most prominent).
Microsoft could probably get Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook today for $20 billion of cash. It could then consolidate them under a single brand and build a strong alternative for advertisers vis a vis Google. (Vastly easier said than done, but possible.)
If Microsoft isn't willing to put all its weight behind a single brand,
Office Professional 2010 32 Bit, it will probably fail regardless of what it buys. This has been Microsoft's Achilles heel for the past 15 years--an unwillingness to commit to one particular Web brand and strategy--and we're not optimistic that it will be able to get out of its own way this time either.
We still think the smart play here would be for Microsoft to spin its Internet operations OUT of Microsoft and INTO Yahoo and then build everything around that brand as a separate public company. We think Steve Ballmer is congenitally predisposed against this approach, however,
Office 2007 Standard Key, even though it would likely be a great move for Microsoft shareholders (who would own most of the new Yahoo AND the original Microsoft).
But, in any event, as the Valley goes into the fetal position, Microsoft's relative position is growing stronger. And we imagine this is not lost on the folks in Redmond.