I would guess they are trying to build up their cloud business. They have lots of cash, and they want a successful business. It's easy to justify a large buildout in that case, with the belief that the revenue will come. This is a common trap for innovators: you have to spend a lot just to stay in the game, while also preparing for the future. MSFT missed a lot of opportunities over the past few years due to their focus on Windows and Office (as Ballmer admitted recently) and now they have to play catchup.
Yeah Microsoft went all in on the "living room computer" with the Xbox and Xbox 360 which made sense at the time of the original Xbox however the vision they had wasn't what came to fruition. What did we get instead? Well we are still in the middle of the transition but it is most certainly away from super powerful set to boxes and more towards things like the Apple TV and Chromecast with powerful tablet computers doing most of the work and just pushing the output over wireless to the little receiver.
Now obviously MS saw this which is why we have things like Surface now but I am really surprised that they decided to kill off the Media Center Extender platform they had. They could have easily taken that and built a device similar to the Chomecast/Apple TV for dirt cheap and had a decent head start.
Their plans for Xbox One are interesting with all of the TV features and HDMI pass through but the Xbox One is seriously expensive so it still only really appeals to pretty committed console gamers.
With Ballmer leaving in the next year I hope Microsoft bring in a decent tech-oriented CEO although I have a feeling they will go for another business guy who will do similar to what Ballmer did. Not to say Ballmer did a bad job. Sure he had some duds but he wasn't an awful CEO. I am going pretty left field here but I would love to see J Allard come back but I don't know if he is really MS CEO material. He certainly has a good image though and is respected by most of the tech community and I could see him being a Steve Jobs type figure head for MS if they played it right.
Then again I am just some random guy on the internet who hacks code for fun so I am probably totally wrong about it all but you have to agree seeing Allard back would be pretty interesting :)
Comments
I would guess they are trying to build up their cloud business. They have lots of cash, and they want a successful business. It's easy to justify a large buildout in that case, with the belief that the revenue will come. This is a common trap for innovators: you have to spend a lot just to stay in the game, while also preparing for the future. MSFT missed a lot of opportunities over the past few years due to their focus on Windows and Office (as Ballmer admitted recently) and now they have to play catchup.
Yeah Microsoft went all in on the "living room computer" with the Xbox and Xbox 360 which made sense at the time of the original Xbox however the vision they had wasn't what came to fruition. What did we get instead? Well we are still in the middle of the transition but it is most certainly away from super powerful set to boxes and more towards things like the Apple TV and Chromecast with powerful tablet computers doing most of the work and just pushing the output over wireless to the little receiver.
Now obviously MS saw this which is why we have things like Surface now but I am really surprised that they decided to kill off the Media Center Extender platform they had. They could have easily taken that and built a device similar to the Chomecast/Apple TV for dirt cheap and had a decent head start.
Their plans for Xbox One are interesting with all of the TV features and HDMI pass through but the Xbox One is seriously expensive so it still only really appeals to pretty committed console gamers.
With Ballmer leaving in the next year I hope Microsoft bring in a decent tech-oriented CEO although I have a feeling they will go for another business guy who will do similar to what Ballmer did. Not to say Ballmer did a bad job. Sure he had some duds but he wasn't an awful CEO. I am going pretty left field here but I would love to see J Allard come back but I don't know if he is really MS CEO material. He certainly has a good image though and is respected by most of the tech community and I could see him being a Steve Jobs type figure head for MS if they played it right.
Then again I am just some random guy on the internet who hacks code for fun so I am probably totally wrong about it all but you have to agree seeing Allard back would be pretty interesting :)