Microsoft set to become little more than a "holding company":
.----
| Microsoft is on the verge of becoming a holding company in the mold
| of Berkshire Hathaway.
|
| Now, mind you, this is not happening with some announcement
| tomorrow. But the process may have already begun, which I touched
| on in last week's column.
|
| The first trigger to my hypothesis is Microsoft casually letting
| the developers of Halo go their merry way, with Microsoft hanging
| onto a piece of the company both as an equity investment and as a
| development partner.
|
| The second, more important, trigger was a weird, nearly surreal
| interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer printed in London's
| Daily Telegraph. A number of news sources reported on this bizarre
| mournful lament by Steve Ballmer and how he sees himself as a kind
| of Bill Gates as they raise the "kids" together. Some of the kids
| are in high school, and some are still little.
|
| When he talked about kids, he was referring to products sold by the
| company such as Microsoft Office (that one is in high school).
|
| After you read this sappy interview, it was easy to conclude one of
| three things: Ballmer is getting fired, Ballmer or Gates have some
| illness, or the company is going to radically change and things
| won't be the same.
|
| Talk of children and how some are growing mature and in high school
| (he actually said that) immediately gives you a vision of children
| growing up and leaving home. This means spin-offs in the same sense
| as Bungie.
|
| Bungie may not be an anomaly, but a test of the mechanism to break
| up Microsoft.
|
| [...]
|
| Everyone has noticed that Microsoft is most successful at copying
| other people's ideas. This transformation into a holding company is
| a tribute to Warren Buffett.
|
| [...]
|
| I know it galls Microsoft that Google is trading above $640 and the
| company appears as if Google will never split the stock. Microsoft
| looks at its own stock at $30 and it cannot like the comparison.
| It's not about market cap either.
|
| By changing its entire model and way of doing business and adopting
| the Berkshire Hathaway approach, it can get back on a sustainable,
| less-flaky growth track. And over the years Gates, using a team of
| investment experts, has done quite well for himself as an investor
| already.
|
| I suspect that in the next 12 months we will see solid evidence of
| my hypothesis.
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http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/more-evidence-microsofts-going-way/story.aspx?guid={440BADC1-5825-482B-8976-153BEF719233}
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to
| make sure that you don't make any money, either." - Bob Cringely.
| - http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
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Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.1-41.fc7
01:17:51 up 73 days, 12 min, 2 users, load average: 0.16, 0.12, 0.13
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