Microsoft continues to be kicked across the block in the World wide web enterprise for going on 15 decades. Now it's potentially payback time.
While everybody else hunkers down and fights to survive, Microsoft will get to sit back and make a decision who to purchase. When it decides,
Windows 7 Activation, it could dig right into a $20 billion money pile that will practically replenish by itself this 12 months with $15 billion of no cost cash flow. No one else, including Google, will acquire this much of the relative benefit in the worldwide economic collapse.
(Google,
Microsoft Office 2007 Product Key, additionally,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, is now hamstrung by alert regulators--thanks, in component, to Microsoft's lobbying--and is centered on cutting expenses and narrowing its ambitions. These ought to retain it distracted for that next few decades.)
Who could Microsoft buy? Some obvious names, and many smaller not-so-obvious ones.
But the first thing Microsoft needs to do if it is to succeed long-term in the Internet company is build a central consumer brand that it can hang everything else off of. (Alternatively, it can focus on the back 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 Internet brands into one particular. This one's probably the most prominent).
Microsoft could probably purchase Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook today for $20 billion of money. 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, it will probably fail regardless of what it buys. This has been Microsoft's Achilles heel for that past 15 years--an unwillingness to commit to a single Net 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,
Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, 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,
Windows 7 Key, 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.