Microsoft; on the road to become a DOG or will they remain a CASH COW

Let me begin by giving the Wiki definition of Microsoft. “Microsoft Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Its most profitable products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software”.

Microsoft has been dominating the market over the last two decades and has grown in to a monopolistic giant. On several occasions it faced anti trust lawsuits and in a way the biggest competitor that they have had to deal with, was Microsoft itself.

But lately things are changing. Over the last years Microsoft’s market share has been declining steadily. Having said that, let’s put that in perspective. As per October 2009 the most important product of Microsoft, MS Windows, still had around 91% of the market share for Internet operating systems. Are there serious problems on the horizon, or are we speaking about the fact that they finally have to face some healthy competition? Monopolistic situations are not there to last forever!

According to Yahoo finance the biggest competitors of Microsoft can be considered to be: Apple, Google and Oracle.

In my opinion Apple is by far the biggest competitor Microsoft has to deal with at this point in time. As we speak Apple has had a very good run and has introduced several successful products as MacBook, iPod and iPhone. They have done so with a, relatively speaking, low R&D budget. But success only goes so far. Somewhere in the future Apple might be less successful with their introductions and will need to invest more to sustain or increase their market share in this dynamic market.

At the same time Microsoft has been investing heavily in their R&D and somewhere along the line they are bound to come up with new and innovative ideas, at the least they have the cash to die trying!

My vision is that Microsoft probably has lost their monopoly in the market forever, but unless they fail dramatically to come up with new ideas, they will maintain a large part of the market and will be a determining factor in this market for a long time to come.