Blog Post: Ballmer is on record saying he wants Microsoft to be the world's best online media company.Here's Microsoft's situation right now:
Troublesome.
The company has been facing significant competition from Google via Web
advertising,
online office applications, and
embedded software on the
desktop. Vista has been delayed
several times. Microsoft
stock is down about 25% from a 52-week high of $28.38. But the company still earns
revenue of about $1 billion per month on quarterly sales of $11 billion.
Some
smart people think that CEO Steve Ballmer is the one
who should really go, and that
Ray Ozzie is the real driving force for Windows Live and Microsoft's software as a service initiatives.
So can Microsoft become an online media company? Ballmer certainly
wants the company to go in that direction, as he pushes AdCenter, MSN, and Windows Live.
Personally, I think Microsoft must become a media company. The reason is simple: All software is trending toward online and software-as-service. MS can't cede online dominance to Google, either in terms of applications or ads. (With every app Google releases, they get more data on their users, and thus can personalize those apps better than MS can.) MS doesn't want to be software that simply runs inside the Google shell. So they have to become an online media company.
The rub is that software is rapidly becoming online media. There's going to be very little difference between the two in the future. Every interaction you have online will be one more data point that will influence how other applications and media respond to you. There is no technology without media.
This article originally appeared on Steve Bryant's blog, Intermedia.
Online Media 
