Challenges Microsoft Faces

Microsoft’s Midlife Crisis from Forbes looks at challenges ahead for
Microsoft as sales for the first time show less than double-digit growth and
threats in the search arena from Google and Yahoo grow. What’s up? Among other
things, fewer employees are becoming millionaires and Google seems more cool,
apparently. The story also looks at internal problems and bureaucracy between
departments over who gets to run and develop ideas, such as how it took a month
for MSN to get the go ahead to unbundle desktop search from being offered only
within the new Vista operating system. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is positive
there’s plenty good at Microsoft now and to come, and most of this piece
revolves around him. For more on the "it’s over for Yahoo" theme, see Steve
Gillmor’s Beep beep post
about how Google among others will kill Microsoft by moving all applications off
the desktop. Microsoft’s Robert Scoble fires back
here.