Absolutely. I have nothing to go on other than gut feelings for this, but it almost seems like if Microsoft had been broken up, all of the individual companies that would have been created would not only have ended up shipping better products, but may have been collectively even more profitable than Microsoft is now.
Usually when a company offers a wide range of products that work especially well together, that's a good thing, but somehow Microsoft has ended up crippling themselves. Even from a purely nontechnical marketing perspective, it seems like every single thing that they've made that has had "Windows" in the product name that was not the OS itself (Windows Phone being a prime example), has suffered from the association.
I feel like Windows Phone could have been much more successful if they had just called it something else. It also seems like Xbox may have been much less successful if they were required to call it Windows Box or WindowsTV or whatever. It's just a dumb marketing thing that has nothing to do with technical details of the product, but it makes a huge different in how potential customers view that product.
Would Xbox even exist? The Xbox 360 certainly wouldn't, because the 'Entertainment' division was subsidised by the rest of Microsoft. It was only 3 years into the war against Wii and PS3 that the Xbox 360 started to win and then Kinect blew all else out of the water.
The cash helped make that possible.
On the downside, it's a shame the Microsoft Courier tablet was killed just before the iPad was released.
The cash is still doing that. Its not like its profitable. But it could have been, Ballmer just does the same dumb thing over and over again. He attacks a competitor and tries to poison the profitability in a market, with no plan or intent to make a profit. He was going to kill Sony and spend a lot money trying to do that. He was going to kill Google, yet fails to realize that Bing heavy resource consumption is simple too expensive to be price competitive.
They dont innovate, they attack and poison the well. I really dont understand why stockholders put up with jungle boy acting out like that. I whish Nicrosoft would just focus on its wn products and profitability, but i doubt Ballmer will ever be a big enough man to take that road.
Usually when a company offers a wide range of products that work especially well together, that's a good thing, but somehow Microsoft has ended up crippling themselves. Even from a purely nontechnical marketing perspective, it seems like every single thing that they've made that has had "Windows" in the product name that was not the OS itself (Windows Phone being a prime example), has suffered from the association.
I feel like Windows Phone could have been much more successful if they had just called it something else. It also seems like Xbox may have been much less successful if they were required to call it Windows Box or WindowsTV or whatever. It's just a dumb marketing thing that has nothing to do with technical details of the product, but it makes a huge different in how potential customers view that product.