Microsoft has been at the heart of computer science for half a century, becoming a technological pillar almost taken for granted while lifestyles kissed the Internet.
As a company, founded with a vision of putting computers in each house and office, celebrates its 50th anniversary on Friday, it seeks to stimulate its fortune by being a leader in the field of artificial intelligence in rapid development (AI).
“From the point of view of the narration, they were a boring company and a boring stock,” said Jeremy Goldman, Emarketer analyst, about the Richmond giant, based in Washington.
“It’s funny because they have a market capitalization of 2.9 billions of dollars, and it is enormous,” he continued, referring to the value of Microsoft as a function of the course of his action.
The only company with higher market capitalization is the iPhone Maker Apple.
Cloud computing feeds Microsoft’s income with the help of its omnipresent office software, now hosted online and is no longer published in boxes of floppy or CD.
“It is not a very sexy infrastructure, but it is very precious,” said Goldman about Microsoft data centers and software at the base of his composes Cloud platform.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google are Rivaux composed in Cloud from Microsoft.
‘Micro-Soft’
The clouds were weather forecasts rather than calculating when Bill Gates and the childhood friend Paul Allen founded what was called “Micro-Soft” in 1975.
They launched the MS-DOS operating system which became known as “Windows” and continued to execute most of the computers in the world.
Microsoft Office’s programs, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, have become standard commercial tools, which repels free Google Docs software.
“Microsoft had a lot of lower and disputed companies – the perfect example is an office,” said Goldman.
“This office is always a company so significant for them, says something about how they were able to innovate.”
Current Director General Satya Nadella defended a Microsoft change to make her software available on almost any device as a subscription services hosted in the cloud.
This decision probably prevented Microsoft from seeing free services like Google Docs reduces their market share to zero, said the analyst.
‘Achille Talon’
Microsoft remains in the shadow of other giants of American technology with regard to offers such as social networks, smartphones and digital assistants infused at AI who have woven in people’s lives, but it is not for lack of effort.
Microsoft introduced Xbox video game consoles in 2001, regularly building its studios stable, purchasing Activision Blizzard Activision two years ago and adding an online subscription service for players.
And despite its launch of the Bing search engine in 2009, Google still dominates this market.
Microsoft in 2016 bought a LinkedIn career social network, which has experienced regular growth. But he still does not have the scope of Facebook or Instagram by Meta, or the influence of the X of Elon Musk (formerly Twitter).
Microsoft is one of the people in the running to buy Tiktok, which faces a ban in the United States if it is not sold by Bytedance based in China.
While Apple and Google have excelled in ease, even fun, for users to engage with products, it was an “Achilles heel” for Microsoft, according to Goldman.
“It was never one of their own,” said the analyst.
Miss
Known for emphasizing sales rather than innovation, Steve Ballmer, who followed Gates as Microsoft chief from 2000 to 2013, was for lack of missing smartphones and other mobile computer devices.
His successor, Nadella, took over with a wish to make Microsoft a “mobile-first, cloud-rate” company and Microsoft has since invested massively in AI, by taking a participation in Chatgpt-Maker Openai and by building technology in offers, including Bing, although.
Behind in AI?
Independent analyst Jack Gold believes that despite these investments and efforts, Microsoft is late in AI because he does not have his own chips or foundation model.
“They are not as advanced in this as Wes and Google, so they still play a little catch -up in this space,” said Gold about Microsoft.
Google Cloud’s income growth is about to exceed Microsoft Azure for second place on the market in two years, the analyst said.
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
