Windows 7 Professional Microsoft's Revenge

Microsoft has become kicked round the block inside the World wide web company for heading on 15 years. Now it's potentially payback time.

While absolutely everyone else hunkers down and fights to survive, Microsoft gets to sit back and make a decision who to buy. When it decides,Office Standard 2010, it can dig into a $20 billion dollars pile that may almost replenish by itself this year with $15 billion of no cost income flow. Nobody else, which includes Google,Windows 7 Professional, will achieve this much of a relative advantage from the global economic collapse.

(Google, additionally, is now hamstrung by alert regulators--thanks,Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise Product Key, in part, to Microsoft's lobbying--and is concentrated on cutting charges and narrowing its ambitions. These ought to preserve it distracted for that next few decades.)

Who could Microsoft acquire? Some obvious names, and many smaller not-so-obvious ones.

But the first thing Microsoft needs to do if it really is to succeed long-term within the World wide web enterprise is build a central consumer brand that it can hang everything else off of. (Alternatively, it might focus on the again end, via search and other technologies, but this likely won't be as profitable. The vast majority of Google's immense profit comes from searches on its own site, not third-party sites,Genuine Office 2007, and the same will hold true for Microsoft).

The big consumer Web brands other than Google include:
Yahoo AOL Facebook MSN, et al (Microsoft needs to consolidate ALL its World wide web brands into 1. This one's probably the most prominent).
Microsoft could probably purchase Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook today for $20 billion of dollars. It could then consolidate them under a single brand and build a strong alternative for advertisers vis a vis Google. (Vastly easier said than done, but possible.)

If Microsoft isn't willing to put all its weight behind a single brand,Win 7 X64, it will probably fail regardless of what it buys. This has become Microsoft's Achilles heel for that past fifteen years--an unwillingness to commit to a single Web brand and strategy--and we're not optimistic that it will be able to get out of its own way this time either.

We still think the smart play here would be for Microsoft to spin its Web operations OUT of Microsoft and INTO Yahoo and then build everything about that brand as a separate public company. We think Steve Ballmer is congenitally predisposed against this approach, however, even though it would likely be a great move for Microsoft shareholders (who would own most of the new Yahoo AND the original Microsoft).

But, in any event, as the Valley goes into the fetal position, Microsoft's relative position is growing stronger. And we imagine this is not lost on the folks in Redmond.