Word: marketeers
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...well-chronicled are Microsoft's efforts to compete in the video game and portable multimedia player business. The Xbox has only started to make money recently and the margins are small. It was first introduced in 2001 and Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in development and marketing, money that it may never earn back. It looked at Sony's (SNE) success with the PlayStation and believed it could take away some of that business. Once it started to make some progress Nintento came into the market with its Wii. The global console business cannot support three highly...
...sets as it can, but there is plenty of competition in the field particularly from Symbian, Blackberry, and Apple's software. An alliance with Verizon, which is the largest cellular carrier in the United States, could help Microsoft's efforts to become a significant presence in the mobile software market. Microsoft's problem is that there is no reason to believe that it, or any other company, will be able to launch a phone that will break the chokehold that the Blackberry and iPhone have. Samsung has tried with its Instinct model, and Google (GOOG) provides its Android software...
...phone launch with Verizon will be a failure before the first handset is shipped. This is a case where conventional wisdom is almost certainly true. Microsoft's Zune could not compete with the iPod because it did not offer any important new features and Apple has been in the market long enough to dominate...
...Where does that leave Microsoft? It now endlessly invents new products in the hope of breaking away from its reliance on its original software businesses. The company's forays into hardware have been expensive and have not produced a breakthrough product. Its search engine business ranks No.3 in the market and there is no evidence that is going to improve...
...while Microsoft may not have been successful in its efforts to diversity, it is right to continue to invest billions of dollars a year to keep trying. If it does not, the company will, over a period of many years, lose its dominance in the software market it created and have nothing to replace it with. It may be a long shot for the company to create the next important consumer electronic device or online search tool, but Microsoft has as good a chance, if not a better one, than any other company in the world at success...