Depending on what matters to you, it's been a tough decade for Microsoft. The company's stock price has stagnated as it matured from a quickly-growing upstart into a slow-moving, comfortable, behemoth. But in recent years, faster-moving companies such as Apple and Google have stolen the limelight, thanks to innovative and exciting consumer products. And despite the fact that these companies are behemoths themselves, they've generated significant excitement with shareholders as well.
The consensus, it seems, is that Microsoft simply doesn't move quickly enough. It no longer sets the tech agenda, but instead follows other companies into new markets. Critics have called on the company to pick up the pace, to move with more alacrity, and demonstrate that its hierarchical corporate sprawl hasn't choked out the lifeblood of the company quite yet. I've been pretty vocal along these lines myself.
But during a recent briefing about Microsoft's cloud computing and virtualization strategy, a sudden contrary thought hit me. Here's this company that's so often criticized for not moving quickly enough. But when it comes to the business market, Microsoft isn't just providing a unique set of products and services that the competition can't match, it's doing so in an aggressive fashion. Put another way, Microsoft is leading in the business desktop, servers, and services markets in ways that generally elude it with consumers.
There are exceptions, of course, with the Xbox portion of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division being perhaps the only meaningful one from a revenue perspective. Assuming that all of the revenues that the E&D division makes are consumer oriented (and they're not), that division was responsible for just 10 percent of the company's overall revenues in CY 2010. (Note that Microsoft's fiscal year runs from July to June; this calculation is based on January to December 2010.)
Of the remainder of the company, only the Windows and Windows Live division also generates revenues from individuals, though as I'll argue in a moment, we shouldn't confuse "consumers" with "individuals." It's hard to gauge an exact figure, but the entire division earned about 31 percent of Microsoft's revenues in CY 2010. If fully half of that came from individuals (and it did not), then all of Microsoft's "consumer"-oriented revenues represented just one quarter of the company's overall revenues for the year. The other 75 percent came from businesses.
There's just one thing. It's not that high. My estimate is that less than 15 percent of Microsoft's revenues come purely from consumer purchasers. And that's because I draw a distinction between consumers—that is, people who organize and enjoy digital media collections, play video games, and engage in other non-productive tasks—and individuals, which are those people who use technology to communicate via email and IM, generate and edit business- and education-oriented documents with Microsoft Office solutions, and so on. Yes, there is crossover between these groups, though one might make the argument that people are increasingly turning to non-Microsoft solutions for their non-productivity technology use. But when you look at people who purely use Microsoft products as true consumers, it's a comparatively small group from a revenue perspective.
Let's define these groups further by comparing people who lean toward Microsoft and Apple products, with Microsoft being the typical supplier of business solutions and Apple serving the consumer market.