Microsoft: Prelude to breakup - No Way

The news about Microsoft's radical reorganizationrings as a prelude to either splitting the company into three separate corporations or perhaps selling off one or two pieces of the company. The new organization looks too much like three separate companies that are designed to all survive alone, writes John C.Dvorak. As the stock has not reacted so much to new announcements & a general dullness pervades the company with good talent rotinely leaving, John sees that Microsoft is relatively moribund with the exception of the Xbox team that has attracted the best within the company. And with $60 billion or so in the coffers Microsoft is essentially sitting on two cash cows - the Windows Operating System and the Office Suite. The Xbox group has the potential to be a cash cow. Too many cash cows makes a lazy company. These three entities could easily be spun into new companies . John notes that this concept is nothing new - Motorola, HP & IBM have done it in the past. He extends his thinking and sees that the Windows part of the company will retain the name Microsoft and sell Windows XP, Vista and anything related to operating systems and OS development,the Office suite folks and all the applications will be spun off into a new corporation with a new name & a third company which will be the Xbox Corporation will be a stand-alone game and hardware company selling all sorts of hardware and all the games for the Xbox. Since it is the most dynamic and exciting of the three new corporations it may be presented to the public as an IPO with the current owners of Microsoft ending up with some sort of preferred stock. When can these happen - in a year or two as the new divisions must first settle in as independent entities, speculates John.

My Take: Read for fun - Have a hearty laugh and think how crazy can people can go - Forget sales - who wants the money, too much of it is anyway available. No voluntary spin-off of this size can ever happen - particularly when competition is so disspirited to fight Microsoft in a concerted way - if Microsoft is seen to be lazy - its head-to-head competition in the desktop market ( if one exists) looks stillborn - with no one ever having come forward to proclaim that they are competing against Microsoft head-on. Microsoft's strength is precisely this - where someone has taken it head-on - it has always lost the game/play a run up game - SQL Server, Portal Platform, Enteprise Platforms, Hotmail, Blogging, MSN portal (the only exception could be MS Outlook/Exchange - IBM surrendered its leadership almost without a fight) all prove this. Till a powerhouse comes and declares that it is competing directly with Microsoft in the desktop Windows/Offfice market and lauches an eyeball-to-eyeball competition, or till a time arrives when Fortune 500 companies decide to retire all desktops - Microsoft will not be under any pressure to take such radical steps within - there can be resuffles, there can be movements but there can not be spinoffs of massive scale -Microsoft's laziness is combatted by invisible streaks of competition with no defined endgame. The party shall go on..

Category :Microsoft