Current Position: Home > IP News > Before Apple and then Google, Microsoft's 2022 is still "under great pressure"

Ten years ago, in May 2011, Steve blank, known as the innovation master of Silicon Valley, predicted that Microsoft would decline after six quarters, and proposed a solution: acquire Nokia and appoint Stephen elop, then Nokia CEO, to replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO.

Later, Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone business in 2013 failed, but now a decade later, Microsoft is still the second company in the world by market value.

Although Steve blank's prediction has not been fulfilled, this does not mean that Microsoft will "rest assured". In the coming 2022, it still needs to face two major competitors: Apple's M1 and Google's browser.

Mac with apple M1 in front

For many years, apple and Microsoft have been competing with each other on the desktop, and the overall situation has not changed much: the sales of windows computers are generally 8-10 times that of MAC.

Of course, this relatively stable data is based on both Intel chips - the situation has changed to a certain extent since Apple launched its self-developed M1 chip last year and the new Mac with upgraded M1 pro and M1 Max this year.

Foreign media ZDNet believes that there are two main reasons why M1 series chips are popular with users:

One is the change of architecture. Apple abandoned the x86 architecture previously adopted by Intel and made the M1 chip based on the arm architecture with high performance and low power consumption.

Over the past year, arm's market share in PC chips has increased from 2% in the third quarter of 2020 to 8% in the third quarter of this year. In this regard, Dean McCarron, chief analyst of mercury research, speculated that behind the growth of arm market share, Apple's M1 chip based on ARM architecture provides a great driving force.

The second is the improvement of performance. The newly launched M1 pro and M1 Max chips this year not only prolong the battery life, but also provide more superior performance. A large part of these performance improvements is due to Apple's good combination of operating system and chip.

In this regard, some people believe that Microsoft should speed up the transformation to arm architecture like apple, deepen the integration of chip and operating system, and make the performance of Windows PC catch up with M1 Mac.

After the foreign media XDA developers disclosed at the end of November that the secret agreement between Microsoft and Qualcomm was about to expire, the possibility of realizing this idea was gradually increasing.

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Then Google Chrome threatened edge

Back in the early 21st century, Microsoft's IE browser absolutely had an indisputable monopoly: almost all people who used the web at that time used IE browser, and the market share was as high as 95%.

But later, there were more and more competing browsers, and the leading advantage of ie gradually faded. When Google launched chrome in 2008, the deficiency of IE became more and more obvious.

Even if Microsoft woke up halfway and made significant improvements to IE browser, it still failed to recover its decreasing market share. In May this year, Microsoft directly announced that it would stop supporting ie desktop applications on June 15, 2022.

After the decline of IE browser, in order to save its reputation and market share, Microsoft launched Microsoft edge, an alternative to IE browser, and bundled it with windows 10 in 2015.

Unfortunately, this has not shaken Chrome's long-standing advantage.

According to the data found by ED Bott, editor of foreign media ZDNet, in 2019: at that time, Microsoft edge accounted for less than 16% of windows 10 pcs, while Chrome browser accounted for more than 60%.

After that, Microsoft launched a new edge browser in early 2020 - not only based on the same open-source chromium code base as Chrome browser, but also a cross platform product to compete with chrome.

However, from the achievements of more than a year, Microsoft edge still failed to meet Microsoft's expectations: the utilization rate on Windows 10 / 11 PC has increased to more than 20%, but at the same time, the leading advantage of Chrome browser on Windows PC has expanded to 69%.

Even Microsoft edge's cross platform goal has hardly been achieved: it accounts for only about 1% of MacOS, IOS and Android devices.

Perhaps due to improving the market share of edge, Microsoft has increased the difficulty for users to set browsers other than edge as the default browser in the newly released windows 11 this year. Even if it is protested by many third-party browsers, it has not changed.

However, Microsoft's series of moves to push the edge browser to the top have obviously been disgusted by many users, especially when edge recently launched the "buy first and pay later" function, which is not serious, it has been opposed by most users, and some even said they would turn to chrome.

It can be seen that although Microsoft has the second largest market value in the world, it still faces many challenges, and its advantages over apple and Google are probably that Microsoft has not been investigated by government regulators like them.

Reference link:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-2022-redmond-faces-two-old-challengers-in-the-new-year/

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-guru-of-silicon-valley-startups-steve-blank-2011-5


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