Yahoo Should Buy Microsoft

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My last column was all about the culture of Microsoft and how it makes real change difficult for the company.  It’s not just at Microsoft that these things happen, by the way: nearly all mature organizations get into similar ruts.  And if, like Microsoft, they are spectacularly profitable ruts, well then it isn’t surprising that things stay more or less permanently dysfunctional.

I said last time that a second column would follow with my specific suggestions for restructuring Microsoft, but now that I am really into it I think we might be looking at a total of three columns, not two.  But then I’ll be finished with Microsoft for a few months.

Setting out […]

Microsoft Has PMS

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Program Manager Syndrome, that is.

A few days ago I called for Microsoft to slash not 5,000 jobs but 50,000 to make the company lean and focused once more. Readers responded by asking which 50,000 Microsoft heads I’d like to see cut off? Wow, what a great question! So great, in fact, that it inspired this column and probably the one after. Because it’s not that simple to just fire half a company. It’s remarkably easy, in fact, to fire the WRONG half.

Restructuring Microsoft has to have a point beyond simply improving profitability, which was pretty darned good to start with. It requires first identifying the systemic problems inside the company that ought […]

Surviving 2009

Microsoft

Microsoft may or may not make a deal for Yahoo’s search service.  What neither firm realizes yet is there is a better way to do searches with value advertising.  It will be easier than what Google is doing and can produce more tangible results.  Right now both firms are in the mind set of “competing with Google” instead of being creative and innovative.  When they start thinking independently and start tuning into what the customer needs, Google will have some competition.

Apple

If Apple would port its Mac software (iWork, iLife, Final Cut, etc) to Windows it could quickly OWN the software market.  Microsoft’s competitive advantage is not Windows — it is Office.  Apple could take them out if it chose to.  They won’t in 2009.  […]