The credit crunch is reshaping Microsoft. MS is not going away tomorrow - it probably has a bigger income than the UK at the moment. But it's been affected by the credit crunch and is laying off staff in various divisions.
Microsoft can't make the Internet work for it. MS is still a pre-internet company, still can't shake off its desktop and mis-size enterprise mentality. As a recent post said, MS is a way of thinking not just a company. And despite the elevation of Ray Ozzie there's no sign of MS being able to unshackle itself from its great legacy. I think that will change, but as long as it can make money from basically lame products such as Sharepoint it doesn't have space within the company to innovate.
Microsoft can't make search work. Its 'pay you to search' campaign doesn't seem to have had any impact, and it is struggling to find any useful roles for Powerset and FAST. Unfortunately for MS, every time I use Live search is an advert for Google.
The last few years masked Microsoft's decline from itself. Let's hope MS emerges from the global recession as a leaner, fitter organisation, more able to support the next wave of computing innovation. For the NHS, it will mean a more web based and hopefully more open eco-system.
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