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CEO Concerns at Apple and Microsoft Illustrate the Need for Succession Plans

The future of MSFT is going to be turbulent at best. Ballmer may be hopeless, though it's not entirely his own fault. It was only a matter of time until they found themselves in this position given their dependence on Windows and Office.

For the longest time MSFT exploited the commoditization of their products through strict licensing and high per-PC license prices, and now that those days are coming to a close their inability to truly innovate is coming to light. Vista is a bloated and unstable OS which was clearly pushed to market too early, their Xbox brand has been saddled with poor hardware quality and customer service issues from the beginning (in addition to the connectivity problems people have been experiencing on Xbox Live), their attempts to gain an online presence with Live.com and then the Yahoo! takeover bid have BOTH failed, and many institutions are reluctant to upgrade to Office 07 in an effort to stave off high training costs and lost productivity from workers who won't know how to use it. Just look at how thriving the market is for third party plug ins designed to make Office 07 more accessible...

Add to that AAPL's gain in momentum (with many people actually rallying behind the company, as if it is some sort of social movement), the number of home users who are sticking with XP and Office 03, and a growing number of dissatisfied Vista owners (many of whom spent large amounts of money for the privilege) - and you have a pretty clear case for a serious crash in MSFT's share price in the next several years.

Also, I firmly believe the open source community is going to give MSFT's price models a huge kick in the face in the fairly near term. If the Linux community can ever adopt a single standard, throwing all of their support behind it, Windows will lose its dominance in very short order.

I owned stock in MSFT up until last fall. I do not regret selling, and don't believe I ever will.