From September 2008 article by Robert Scoble:
“Being tethered to its Windows cash cow limits Microsoft from competing effectively against Google in online advertising. Sky is just one of dozens of Google services — social networking, docs and spreadsheets, maps, and video, to name a few — that can be linked to and embedded in your own Web site. Google collects data from millions of sites that are running one or more of its services and that’s the big prize. Google Sky opens up yet another universe of potential customers for it to learn more about and then make smarter contextual advertising offers. Microsoft’s software? You can’t embed it anywhere, so what’s the advertising opportunity with it? There’s isn’t one. That is why MSFT is going to have a tough time competing with Google…MSFT is a beautiful piece of software…too bad it isn’t a harbinger of a beautiful business model for the future.”
“Not a harbinger of the future”. Yepadoodle.
As if we needed yet another example of how a traditional company keeps trying to keep things the same as they always did it while new business models of this era skip by towards a new future.
The traditional companies like Adobe, Symantec, Intuit, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc have to buy a clue. It’s not about doing a sprinkling of this web stuff into their existing model but to think of how to transform the business model while staying true to your vision and DNA. Not easy of course, but necessary for staying viable.
