Sanjeev Sharma's  Instablog

Unlike IBM (which I recommended as buy in June in my stocktalk and which offers a large and complex set of products), the products offered by Microsoft are few and simple to understand.


For a long time, Microsoft's operating system was the de-facto standard in Personal computers.

Along with the MS Office products, it was the main choice for the consumers.

The MS Office's most popular software are the Wordprocessor, spreadsheet and the presentation software.

Most users hardly need any other MS software besides the Office and browser.

MS's online presence and the remaining products (like X-box) contribute marginally towards the topline.

One strategy of Microsoft was to come up with new versions of these products which were incompatible with previous versions.

This forced users to purchase the new versions if they wanted to read the documents sent by another user using the newer verison
of these softwares.

However, all this could change in the next few years (or earlier).

Recent advances in open source software have created strong alternatives.

Ubuntu, a linux based operating system is now available with a GUI which gives the same look and feel as MS Windows.

Most of windows's shortcuts are available on it and users can hardly find much difference in experience from windows.

Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice based products which allow the users to read, edit or create new documents which are compatible with MS.

In other words, the OpenOffice based wordprocessing software, spreadsheet software and presentation software can not only read and edit MS based documents, but also can create new documents in the format of MS.

A user using MS would never know that the document was created using Ubuntu.

All this software is free and the software keeps itself updated free of cost from internet. Further, most viruses cannot affect Ubuntu as it is based on Linux.

While the later versions of MS office products are not readable on the earlier versions, all of these are readable on the Ubuntu's platform.

Many price conscious companies  have started using Ubuntu now.
 
Out of the total $58 billion revenues of microsoft, $14 Billion comes from PC based software (mostly Windows operating system) and $18 Billion
comes from 'business division' (most of it from MS Office). The server based products give $14 billion which is mostly from
the Windows server and SQL Server (again based on Windows operating system).

Except the entertainment division (with XBox etc) which barely give $8 billion of revenues, Microsoft sales are based on the dominance of Windows and MS Office.

The advances made by open source software has made the dominance of Windows under the most serious threat in the last 2 decades.

I would discuss the main factors:

More »

DLF, India's largest real estate company,  announced last week that it won't be selling many of its real estate holdings, which it had put on the block a few months back.(http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Markets/Real-Estate/DLF-wont-sell-core-assets-as-credit-begins-to-flow/articleshow/4673780.cms )

One reason assigned is the availability of credit now to the company.

I did my own due diligence about the real estate market in India this week.

More »

 

More »

Written from the Streaming Media East Conference in New York on May 11-12, thanks to Seeking Alpha for providing the passes:

Q) What is a content delivery network and why is it required ?

More »

By December 2006,  living in New Jersey started giving me the same feeling as living in an emerging economy (of which I have first hand experience): High Home prices, high interest rates, high gas prices and high property taxes were leading to   low disposable incomes. Poor retail sales were resulting in many retailers barely covering their employee and rental costs.

More »