SNS Subscriber Edition Week of 6/6/2016 Vol. 21 Issue 20
In This Issue
Feature: Microsoft’s Pivot Moment
What Went Wrong
What Business Is Microsoft In?
Browser Issues
Losing the Web
Losing the Box Revs
What’s Left?
Office 365
What’s Really Scary?
What’s Exciting?
Summary
Quotes of the Week
Takeout Window
A New Kind of Spacecraft
Ethermail
There is an often-told joke among entrepreneurs, in which the startup experience is described as jumping off a cliff and “assembling the airplane on the way down.” Now change this to “disassemble the 747, and then remake it into an Airbus 350,” and you have Microsoft’s current state.
We wrote about Microsoft in March, giving a 90k-foot view of the company as it has tried to find a path between consumer and enterprise (SNS: “Microsoft: From Enterprise to Consumer to Enterprise,” March 3, 2016). Since then, the company has faced additional write-downs and seen its smartphone market share drop below the 1% mark, a number too small to see on any normal charts.
With the embers from this crash scene still smoldering, the company released earnings on April 21 for the period ending March 31, revealing Q3 revenues down YTY from $21.7B to $20.5B, operating income down YTY from $6.6B to $5.3B, and net income down YTY from $4.98B to $3.75B.
