Microsoft has become kicked around the block inside the Internet organization for going on fifteen many years. Now it really is probably payback time.
While everyone else hunkers down and fights to survive, Microsoft gets to sit again and decide who to get. When it decides, it could dig into a $20 billion money pile which will virtually replenish alone this 12 months with $15 billion of free cash flow. Nobody else, such as Google, will gain this a lot of the relative gain from your global financial collapse.
(Google,
Office 2007 Activation Key, furthermore, is now hamstrung by alert regulators--thanks, in part, to Microsoft's lobbying--and is targeted on cutting charges and narrowing its ambitions. These need to retain it distracted for the following couple of many years.)
Who could Microsoft acquire? Some obvious names, and many smaller not-so-obvious ones.
But the first thing Microsoft needs to do if it's to succeed long-term inside the World wide web enterprise is build a central consumer brand that it could hang everything else off of. (Alternatively,
Office Home And Student 2010 Key, it might 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 Internet brands other than Google include:
Yahoo AOL Facebook MSN,
Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2007, et al (Microsoft needs to consolidate ALL its Internet brands into one. This one's probably the most prominent).
Microsoft could probably buy 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, it will probably fail regardless of what it buys. This has become Microsoft's Achilles heel for the past fifteen years--an unwillingness to commit to one 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 World wide web operations OUT of Microsoft and INTO Yahoo and then build everything all around that brand as a separate public company. We think Steve Ballmer is congenitally predisposed against this approach,
Office 2007 Keygen, however, 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,
Office Professional Plus 2010 Key, 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.