Las dificultades de Microsoft

Interesante (y largo) el artículo de Business Week sobre las dificultades de Microsoft y que citan en slashdot.

• Peores resultados bajo la dirección de Ballmer - 'The stock price has dropped over 40% during his tenure, and the company, whose revenue grew at an average annual clip of 36% through the 1990s, rose just 8% in the fiscal year that ended on June 30. That's good for a company of Microsoft's size, but it is the first time the software giant has had single-digit growth'.
  
• Empleados que dejan la empresa - 'there's no doubt that Microsoft is losing some of its most creative managers, marketers, and software developers'.
  
• Los grandes éxitos de la empresa (Windows y Office) son también su lastre - 'One reason some employees say Microsoft isn't innovating enough: It's too busy upgrading Windows ... Those are needed improvements, and there's no doubt that hundreds of millions of copies will be sold as people upgrade to new PCs. But the changes are hardly the stuff of cutting-edge software engineering. "So much of what Microsoft is doing right now is maintenance," ... Some workers express frustration that Microsoft is so busy protecting its PC-based businesses that it comes up short when competing on the Web'.
  
• Empleados desmotivados - 'But top-flight engineers want to tackle the next great challenge. "They want to create new worlds, not defend old ones,". Incluso descontentos por detalles - ' Even the cuts that seem trivial have dampened morale. Just whisper the word "towels" to any Microsoft employee, and eyes roll. Last year, Microsoft stopped providing a towel service for workers who used company locker rooms after bike rides or workouts. Employees who helped the company build its huge cash stockpile were furious.'.
• Sobre la estrategia en el campo de los CRMs - 'Microsoft targeted it 2 1/2 years ago with a traditional software package, Microsoft CRM. Today roughly 4,000 companies run the software for nearly 100,000 staff. Not bad, but Microsoft hasn't been nearly as successful as Salesforce.com Inc., a trailblazer of Web-based CRM software, with 308,000 users at 17,000 companies'.
  
• Aumento de las diferencias en las ganacias de los empleados más antiguos o con puestos más altos en la jerarquía de la empresa con respecto al resto.
• Los titulados universitarios de las universidades en las que tradicionalmente se buscan los nuevos talentos, muestran claramente sus preferencias por trabajar en Google o Yahoo antes que en Microsoft.
  

El artículo se centra en los aspectos negativos de la situación actual. La cual creo que no es muy diferente de la que se da tarde o temprano, incluso más de una vez, en cualquier empresa líder en su sector (IBM por ejemplo). Se trata de hacer frente a los cambios en el entorno, a los nuevos competidores, ..., en definitiva y recurriendo al tópico, renovarse o morir.

Los próximos meses, y el lanzamiento de Vista y el nuevo Office pueden ser los más cruciales para Microsoft hasta la fecha.