OTOTOT
Yes, the enterprise area, which was one of msft three tiers (desktop apps, OS, enterprise) has declined in mkt share, this has been documented by forrester and others but the gist of it is, 1) Oracle 8i killing msft sql-server at the "storefront app" level (my term) which includes bvsn and vign, secondly BEA systems taking the "middleware app server" space almost entirely, every b2b that I know of uses BEA in their core platform (C1, Arba, some startups) - this is reflected in the BEAS stock price as of late.
I once worked at Dell, 3 years ago and we did one of the first b2b/e-commerce applications - this was based *entirely* on msft products, custom. At that time it looked like msft would take this entire emerging area as its own, using things like visual interdev, visual basic (? if I recall correctly)... msft stock was reflecting this potential. Now its all java now and not msft java either.
As far as desktop OS and apps, losing the enterprise crosses over there too, since corporate desktop OSes were used to deploy the old client/server model, this is now marginalized.
On the bright side msft has some new initiatives, .net the biztalk server and all and could dominate there.... this would be a hook into the corporate software information-protocol area where a standard is being called for, msft is good at that, right now all there is is a bunch of consortiums. Of course ariba might want that too, or I2 or some others.
I'm sure the cisco people don't want to read much more about msft on their thread so I don't have too much more to say about this... just one opinion of many... one issue that is related to cisco though is the issue with msft and stock options, now that msft stock is declining you have an unwinding of all that funny money and it isn't pretty. |
