Depicting the world without Microsoft and without its added value to the world of software and technology, would be at least a very hard task or somehow impossible. Regardless of the angle from which we tackle the matter, we absolutely can’t ignore its contribution. It pushed the related industry to elevate its quality to be able to cope up with it from one side, and from another side the normal consumers were witnessing the biggest change and improvements of the century.

In June 2008 in the article “A future without Microsoft” http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/future_without_microsoft the IT giant was supposed to run out of business in 2010 and fall as hard as a meteorite and hit the ground with no Mercy. Well it did not. Today Microsoft is a company with $58.43 billion of revenue, and conducting harsh battles against its competitors on several fronts. It finished 2009 with roughly a 92% market share with Windows, as well as an 80% market share among enterprise customers and a 63% market share in web browsing through Internet Explorer.

First of all, Microsoft is generating the major part of its profits from “office” which is the company’s winning horse, despite the failure with Vista. However, its ability to change and rapidly develop a new product allowed recovering its downturn.
Moreover, Microsoft is competing in the Music and phone sector. It launched in 2006 the Zune, Microsoft’s Media player. It holds phones and portable music. The Zune 80 was launched to compete with Apple’s Ipod Nano mainly.

They also launched in May 2010, the KIN, that’s a part of the larger Microsoft Phone family. Yet, its performance is still to be questioned, given its drop in market share in the Smartphone category while that same category was growing by 27% in 2009.
The software giant also entered the gaming sector and competed with its X-box, however discontinued it in 2006.

Today, Microsoft is attacking the search engine. It partnered with Yahoo and the 90% market share holder, Google, can’t feel at ease with such a scoop.

These practices show us several aspects: First of all Microsoft still have a lot of room to grow and to introduce new products besides its mainstream, and also it still has a major ability to finance it. Despite all its failures, its success stories are still accounting for more and are rendering more growth and profits, and covering the negative impact overall.

At the moment, its share price is flat and doesn’t encourage investors to pump in their money. Yet its stability and long term sustainability would do for risk adverse investors. But, we can definitely count on a Microsoft’s innovations and it will definitely boost the whole package to rise up again.

A good recommendation would be to move out of the comfort zone and lead the market by distancing itself from the followers. A good start would be opening to the public the software programming, and building more consistency when competing in existing fields.