Businesses to pay the price (fourfold!) of swallowing lock-in

Cause: Burning platform!

Summary: Microsoft is unable to keep Windows monoculture and it raises prices aggressively to make up for it financially

Microsoft is desperately trying to evolve for mobility, but all Vista 8 has done is, it harmed Microsoft's desktop monopoly which is also the common carrier (Office is by far the largest cash cow, but not the common carrier). When Windows collapses Microsoft does too.

Microsoft has begun squeezing the goose, even quadrupling the prices in some cases. We wrote about it only days ago (early UK reports) whilst arguing in favour of ODF. This Slashdot discussion points to this new article which says:

Microsoft is trying to make up for below expected earnings following Windows 8’s and Surface RT’s lack luster adoption rates by increasing the prices of its products by as much as 400 per cent it has been revealed.

Yes, exactly. The platform is just a carrier for expensive lock-in. Here are several points from an article predicting Microsoft's death:

For the last decade, Microsoft's fastest growing business segment has been Server & Tools, which did $7.4 billion in sales last year.

A lot of these sales come because Microsoft business apps — Exchange, SharePoint, and Dynamics — require these products. But as companies stop buying these apps, they will have less reason to buy the Microsoft platform products that run them, and the System Center ($1 billion+) products used to manage them.

Here is the original article. Some Microsoft-friendly sites strike back, which means that the original articles was damaging to Microsoft and thus effective.

For those who wish to know how bad things have become for Microsoft's platform, read this, it's hilarious:

There are eight - EIGHT - sales reps in a very small space. When I get there I am the only customer. Note it is 7pm on a Wednesday night and the place is bustling with holiday shoppers and tourists. I am the only person at their ”store.”

I approach the closest rep and ask for a 32GB Surface and a red keyboard. She asks me if I’d like a demo. ”No”, I tell her. I just want to buy it. She seems lost and does not know what to do. She calls over the “manager” and he unlocks a case and pulls out a Surface and the red keyboard.

He hands them to me and asks me if I want a demo. Seriously WTF is up with the pushing of the demo??? I tell him no and just want to buy it. My original sales rep takes the items over to the register, pulls out a tired old scanner gun and zaps my two items. The Microsoft laptop acting as the register immediately crashes. She looks up at me and says “Sorry my computer crashed. Just give me a second to reboot.”

She reboots, rings me up and asks me if I’d like my receipt. I ask her to email it to me. She says they can’t do that. So I tell her sure, I’ll take the receipt. She hits print, the computer crashes again and I walk out.

This is in part the achievement of many activists who helped make Microsoft widely ridiculed; Microsoft is viewed so negatively because people know about the company's abuses, the company's lack of competence, and even the expensive PR Bill Gates is planting in the media he bribes is not enough to make up for it all. People just feel too shy to step into Microsoft stores. It's very "uncool".

The numbers speak for themselves:

Why is Microsoft being so coy about producing numbers regarding how many Surface tablets have been sold since they hit the shelves? According to one analyst, it is because sales have been, "disappointing."

FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger made the comments, who, in a note to clients, went on to say that sales, have "underwhelmed expectations."

On the OS-only side things are also bad: [via]

IHS iSuppli, a market watcher, has admitted that its expects world PC sales to fall this year even further than it previously thought they would. Whatever the degree of decline, it will mark the first time global personal computer shipments have fallen in 11 years.

In a discussion of world chip sales posted yesterday, iSuppli noted that it is currently anticipating 2012 world PC shipments will fall 7.8 per cent below 2011’s total. Back then, some 352.83 million personal computers shipped worldwide, so that means 325.31m units will do so this year, if iSuppli’s forecast proves correct.

Well done, Microsoft. Go away faster, please. ⬆