【经济学人 20150404】微软到中年

满仓

【中文标题】微软到中年
【原文标题】Microsoft at middle age Opening Windows
【登载媒体】经济学人
【原文链接】http://www.economist.com/news/business/21647612-once-dominant-software-giant-determined-prove-life-begins-again-40-opening


一度主宰一切的软件巨人决定证明，人生从40岁开始。



“你在干什么？这是‘弄死Windows’策略吗？”早在90年代末，当比尔•盖茨还是微软大老板的时候，任何鲁莽的员工试图提一些有可能削弱这家公司的旗舰操作系统地位的建议时，都会得到这样狂暴的回复。即使在2000年史蒂夫•鲍尔默取代盖茨的位置之后，这依然是这家公司位于华盛顿州雷德蒙德的总部中不可触犯的天条。微软所做的所有事情，必须要强化Windows的地位，让它可以占据更高的统治地位。公司内很多最好的创新都因为这种“策略税”而被扼杀。

今天，雷德蒙德的规则发生了变化。去年执掌帅印的新老板萨帝亚•纳德拉（上图中，左为盖茨，右为鲍尔默）在听到“策略税”这个词时给予了回应，他说现在他告诉员工“去做那些人们喜欢的东西”。现在他做的某些事情在他的两位前任看来一定会属于“弄死Windows”策略。这家公司最受欢迎的文字、电子表格和其它工具处理软件Office，现在可以在移动设备上基于竞争对手的操作系统运行。公司开对免费、“开源”的软件张开怀抱，这些事物一度被认为是诅咒。去年10月在旧金山的一次会议中，纳德拉展示了一张页面，上面写着“微软爱Linux”。与此相同，鲍尔默曾经说开源操作系统是“癌症”。

微软在4月4日庆祝了它40岁生日，它的高层和股东忧愁地回望这家公司所失去的青春。它诞生的那一年，恰逢Captain & Tennille（译者注：美国夫妻歌手组合）的《爱让我们在一起》荣登流行歌曲榜首。它20岁的时候就已经超越了步履蹒跚的科技行业巨无霸IBM，到了30岁才被老对手苹果超过，后者的年龄仅比它小一岁。

纳德拉让微软重新焕发青春的秘方是尽快、尽可能地远离一个仅仅基于Windows的公司，成为一个全球巨型数据中心网络，为公司和个人提供广泛的在线服务。到目前为止，他有了一个好的开端，拥有12.3万名员工和年收入达870亿美元的巨型油轮已经开始调头。

微软的转型被其它科技巨擘密切关注，因为它们也在经历着类似的痛苦改变，或者在担心未来有一天也必须创造一个新的自我。思科、易安信、惠普、甲骨文、IBM和思爱普，它们都必须确保自己可以从一个计算机停留在人们的桌面上和公司的地下室中这样的世界，跨越到基于“云端”的大数据处理环境中，也就是利用人们的双手和移动设备可以读取的远程数据中心。



亚马逊、苹果、脸书、谷歌和其它公司都在警惕地关注新科技“平台”的发展，以防竞争对手利用新兴平台挖走它们的客户。这就是为什么11岁的脸书最近斥资220亿美元收购蓬勃发展的短信服务WhatsApp，以及花费20亿美元收购虚拟现实头戴设备制造商Oculus VR。

微软就是Windows，这种说法过于简单化了。更准确的描述应该是：操作系统是这家公司多年来创造的一系列紧密整合的软件的核心平台。当Windows在80年代霸占了个人桌面电脑的操作系统之后，它与Office捆绑在一起，从而确保了它的普及。当高性能的PC机——也就是服务器——成为公司内部数据中心的标准设备之后，微软故计重施：它开发了一系列的服务器软件，包括电子邮件系统、数据库和其它类型的商业软件，与Windows捆绑在一起。这种捆绑策略在90年代中期帮助微软取代了IBM的地位，成为最有价值的科技公司。



所有这些软件都可以在竞争对手的产品上运行，但是整合在一起运行效果最好。这提升了微软的市场占有率（也让它陷入反垄断危机），但也让客户有所受益。但是，鉴于电脑已经逐渐开始向云端演化，这种模式无法持久。软件变成了一种可以通过网络传递的服务，大部分都基于一个开放的标准。一家咨询公司TechAlpha Partners的乔治•吉尔伯特说：“同时使用多个开发商的软件变得越来越容易，操作系统的概念逐渐淡化了。”

讽刺的是，微软是最早一批意识到云计算能力的企业之一，但是它的愿景被痴迷于保护现有产品线的情绪所扭曲。于是，从2006年开始与它的云计算服务商Azure合作以来，它所做的主要是在线复制微软的捆绑专利程序。这给其它云计算服务供应商留下了市场空间，尤其是亚马逊，它向企业出售原始的计算工具，人们可以在上面随心所欲地运行各种混合的程序。同样，微软最早发现了手持电脑——一度被称为智能手机——的潜力，但它试图强迫用户在上面运行Windows，而不是像苹果那样专门开发适合移动设备的操作系统。

在成为首席执行官之前，纳德拉曾经掌管Azure，他通过降低云服务价格，让用户选择自己的软件等方式，让委顿的业务重新焕发青春。荣登大老板职位之后，他除了让Office可以在苹果和安卓手机上运行之外，还开启了“免费增值”模式：也就是个人用户可以免费使用基础版本的软件，高级应用需要支付费用。在纳德拉的带领下，公司在其它方面还展现出足够的弹性，比如与竞争对手达成协议。例如，使用网络版本Office——叫做Office 365——的用户，可以在Box服务器上储存文件。这是一家企业软件公司，老板艾伦•李维说：“他们曾经把我们当作是魔鬼。”

纳德拉还试图重新焕发微软内部的企业文化，让它退回到那个喇叭裤、翻领外套的创业时代。微软人的创意不会再被钉到耻辱柱上，而是被鼓励在一个叫做“车库”的公共网站上分享天马行空的主意。只要有想法，就先推出一个测试版本的产品，让客户来试用，帮助修改bug。微软还吸纳了一些富有激情的年轻创业者，包括热门网络游戏《我的世界》开发商Mojang。还有Acompli，它的电子邮件应用已经被改名为Outlook，现在是微软在苹果和安卓移动设备上的电子邮件服务应用。

但是纳德拉到目前为止最大的成就是，在步入第50个年头时给微软未来设定了一个明确、连贯的目标。他把这个目标总结为两句格言。第一句是“移动第一，云端第一”：这是未来业务的增长点，所有新产品都需要为它们而开发。第二句是“平台和生产力”。Windows依然是一个重要的平台，Office也是一个重要的生产力工具。但是Azure是一个发展迅速、更加灵活的平台。在一系列新的生产力应用中，微软提供的是Cortana服务。这个个人智能助理软件类似于苹果的Siri和谷歌的Now，它已经可以识别自然语言、回答问题、发布提醒。未来，它还可以预测用户的需求，比如为即将开始的会议汇总相关文件。

人才竞争

尽管业内观察人士对纳德拉到目前为止的工作表示赞赏，但依然存在一些令人不安的问题。一个是有关人才，哈佛商学院的马可•伊安斯蒂说：“微软失去了大批优秀的人才。”尽管它通过并购吸纳了新鲜血液，但还需要寻找更好的办法聘请最优秀的程序员。另一个问题是软件的质量。来自一家研究公司“微软方向”的罗伯•海尔姆说，在以往，微软努力向商业客户证明它们的程序是最可靠的。现在它摆出一副创业者的姿态，更早、更频繁地发布产品，或许它们会变得不那么“值得信任”——这也是微软的另一句格言。

微软的其它业务未来命运如何也是一个问题，分析人士认为应该把它们剥离出去。必应，这家公司的搜索引擎，在数十亿美元打水漂之后，开始有赚钱的迹象，而且为Cortana和其它服务提供了重要的数据来源。Xbox，游戏产业的一剂良药，在放弃了把它作为家庭数据中心的念头之后，业绩在稳步上升。但是诺基亚的手机部门，在微软去年将其买下，以图挽救这个Windows平台产业之后，现在看来是个错误的战略。

微软最大的问题在于财务状况。企业和个人越来越少采购PC机，购买成本越来越低，Windows在这部分的收益逐年下降。在截止到12月31日的那个季度，与去年同期相比销量下降了13％。而云端商业服务，包括Office 365，年增长超过百分之百，去年达到55亿美元。但这仅仅是总利润中很小的一部分，而且依然有亏损的风险。野村证券分析师里奇•谢罗德说，我们尚不明了像Cortana这样的新应用如何存活下来，“新的商业模式还没有出现”。

这些产品不大可能会成为像Windows和Office那样的摇钱树，这两个产品依然贡献了公司44％的收入和58％的利润。标准Office软件的利润率是90％，Office 365的利润率只有53％。其它云端商业产品的利润难以估算，主要原因是来自亚马逊、谷歌和IBM的激烈竞争。花旗集团最近估算，亚马逊云端服务的利润率在-2%到-3%之间。亚马逊在其它服务方面也展现出令人难难以置信的亏损耐力，其主要目标是增长。

对于其它那些年轻和不大年轻的科技公司来说，在微软的中年期综合症中可以吸取的教训主要是，它对于自己的主营业务长时间采取过于保守的态度，导致其忽视了一些在目前看来已经无法再忽视的威胁。盖茨是罪魁祸首，鲍尔默在Windows这棵摇钱树上攀附得太久，没有及时向移动和云端服务转型。现在，纳德拉不得不快速驱散客户、分析人士和专业技术人才头脑中那种微软的辉煌已经一去不返的坏印象。




原文：

A once-dominant software giant is determined to prove that life begins again at 40

“WHAT are you on? The ‘fuck Windows’ strategy?” Back in the late 1990s, when Bill Gates was still Microsoft’s boss, any employee who had the temerity to suggest something that could possibly weaken the firm’s flagship operating system was sure to earn his wrath. Even after Steve Ballmer took over from Mr Gates in 2000, that remained the incontestable law at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, in Washington state. Everything Microsoft did had to strengthen Windows, to make it ever more crushingly dominant. Many of the company’s best innovations were killed because of this “strategy tax”, as it was known internally.  

Today the rules are different in Redmond. The new boss who took over last year, Satya Nadella (pictured, centre, with Mr Gates to the left and Mr Ballmer on the right), recoils when he hears the term “strategy tax” and says he now tells his staff simply to “build stuff that people like”. Some of the things he has done would surely have been seen by his two predecessors as “fuck Windows” strategies. Office, the company’s popular suite of word-processing, spreadsheet and other applications, now runs on mobile devices that use competing operating systems. The company is embracing free, “open-source” software, which it used to regard as anathema. At an event in San Francisco last October Mr Nadella showed a slide that read: “Microsoft loves Linux”. In contrast, Mr Ballmer once called the open-source operating system a “cancer”.

As Microsoft celebrates its 40th birthday on April 4th, its executives and shareholders will be looking back wistfully to their company’s lost youth. Born in the year that Captain & Tennille topped the American charts with “Love Will Keep Us Together”, by its 20s it had leapt ahead of the stumbling behemoth of information technology, IBM, only to slow in its 30s and be overtaken by its eternal arch-rival, Apple, a company barely a year younger than itself (see charts).

Mr Nadella’s formula for reinvigorating Microsoft is to move as quickly and as far as possible away from being a Windows-only company to be a global network of giant data centres that provide a broad range of online services for companies and individuals. So far he has done well in beginning to turn round a supertanker of a company, with 123,000 employees and $87 billion in annual revenues.

Microsoft’s transition is being watched by other tech giants, old and new—because they are either going through similarly wrenching changes or worry that they may have to reinvent themselves in the future. Cisco, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, IBM and SAP—all these have to navigate the shift from a world where computers lived on people’s desks or in companies’ basements to one in which number-crunching mostly resides in the “cloud”, meaning remote data centres, and in people’s hands, in the form of mobile devices.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and others like them are constantly on guard for the emergence of a new technology “platform” that allows rival businesses to build applications that lure away their customers. That is why the 11-year-old Facebook recently spent $22 billion on WhatsApp, a fast-growing messaging service, and $2 billion on Oculus VR, a maker of virtual-reality headsets.

That Microsoft is just about Windows has always been somewhat of a simplification. A more accurate image is that the operating system was the core of a tight bundle of programs the firm built over the years. After Windows had achieved dominance of desktop personal computers in the 1980s, it was packaged with Office, which became just as ubiquitous. As high-powered PCs, called servers, became standard equipment in companies’ internal data centres, Microsoft repeated the trick: it created a suite of server software, including e-mail systems, databases and all manner of other business applications, that were tightly integrated with Windows. It was this bundling that helped Microsoft overtake IBM as the most valuable tech company in the mid-1990s.

All the programs can be made to work with rival products, but work best together. That boosted Microsoft’s business (and got it into antitrust troubles)—but has also been a benefit for customers. Yet as computing is moving into the cloud, this model is breaking down. Software is becoming a service delivered over the internet and mostly based on open standards. “It is easier than it has ever been to use programs from multiple vendors,” explains George Gilbert of TechAlpha Partners, a consulting firm. “And the idea of an operating system is much less relevant.”

Ironically, Microsoft was among the first software firms to recognise the potential of cloud computing. But its vision was distorted by its obsession with protecting its existing product line. So from 2006, when it began working on Azure, its cloud-computing service, it was mainly an online replication of Microsoft’s bundle of proprietary programs. That left open a market for other cloud providers—in particular Amazon—to sell businesses raw computing power, on which they could run whatever mix of programs they wished. Likewise, Microsoft was among the first to see the promise of hand-held computers, as smartphones were once called. But it tried to force users to run Windows on them, rather than developing a new operating system better suited to mobiles, as Apple did.

Before becoming chief executive Mr Nadella had been in charge of Azure, and he revived its flagging fortunes by cutting the price of its cloud services and letting customers use their own choice of software. Since assuming the top job, besides making Office available on Apple and Android mobiles, he has moved it towards a “freemium” model: for personal users (though not businesses) the basic version costs nothing, but you pay for extras. Under Mr Nadella the company is showing flexibility in other ways, such as by cutting deals with rivals. For instance, users of the online version of Office, called Office 365, can now save their files on the servers of Box, an enterprise-software firm. “They used to treat us like arch-enemies,” says Aaron Levie, Box’s boss.

Mr Nadella is also seeking to rejuvenate Microsoft’s internal culture, to make it more like the startup it was back in the days of flared trousers and outsized lapels. Far from having them stamped on, Microsofties are now encouraged to test their “wild ideas” on a public website called Garage. It rushes early versions of products out of the door, so customers can try them out, and help spot any bugs. Microsoft has also bought some hot young startups. One such is Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, a popular online game. Another is Acompli, whose e-mail app has been renamed Outlook and is now Microsoft’s e-mail service for Apple and Android mobiles.

Yet Mr Nadella’s biggest achievement so far is that he has given Microsoft a coherent purpose in life, as it enters its fifth decade. He sums it up in two mottos. One is “mobile first, cloud first”: since these are where the growth is going to come from, all new products need to be developed for them. The other is “platforms and productivity”. Windows is still an important platform, and Office still an important set of productivity tools. But Azure is an increasingly significant, and more flexible, platform. And among a new range of productivity applications Microsoft offers is Cortana, an intelligent personal assistant much like Apple’s Siri and Google Now. It already recognises natural language, answers questions and issues reminders; in future it will increasingly anticipate what a user needs, for instance by pulling together the documents for a meeting.

Talent competition

Although industry observers mostly praise what Mr Nadella has done so far, they have several nagging questions. One is about talent. “Microsoft has lost a lot of great people,” explains Marco Iansiti of Harvard Business School. Although it has also gained fresh blood by buying startups, it will have to work hard to keep up in the battle to hire the best programmers. Another problem may be the quality of its software. In the past Microsoft has worked hard to prove to commercial customers that its programs are reliable, says Rob Helm of Directions on Microsoft, a research firm. As it tries to function like a startup, releasing products early and often, they may become less “trustworthy”, to quote another of Microsoft’s mottos.

What should happen to Microsoft’s other businesses is also an open question. Analysts have called for them to be hived off. Bing, the firm’s search engine, seems safe: after losing billions, it will soon be profitable; and it provides important data inputs for Cortana and other services. The Xbox, a gaming console, is recovering from misguided attempts to turn it into a hub for the digital living room. But Nokia’s handset business, which Microsoft bought last year to save the last big maker of Windows-powered phones, now looks like a mistake after the changes in the firm’s strategy.

The biggest question is about Microsoft’s finances. As people and businesses buy ever fewer, and cheaper, PCs, the revenues from Windows are falling. In the quarter to December 31st they were down by 13% on a year earlier. Sales in the commercial cloud business, including Office 365, more than doubled year-on-year, to reach an annual run-rate of $5.5 billion. But this is only a small fraction of total revenues, and the division is still thought to be losing money. Furthermore, says Rick Sherlund of Nomura, an investment bank, it is unclear how newer applications, such as Cortana, will make a living. “The business models have yet to be invented.”

They are unlikely to be as much of a cash cow as Windows and Office, which still generate 44% of revenues and 58% of profits. The gross margin of classic Office is 90%; that of Office 365 is currently only 53%. In other cloud businesses profits will be elusive, given the intense competition from Amazon, Google and increasingly IBM. Citigroup, another bank, recently estimated that Amazon’s margin in the cloud was between -2% and -3%. In other businesses Amazon has shown a high tolerance for losses as it strives for growth.

As other tech firms, young and not so young, seek to learn from Microsoft’s middle-aged decline, the main lesson they will draw is that it was too protective, for too long, of its main franchise, which led it to ignore threats that eventually became unignorable. Mr Gates was most to blame for this; Mr Ballmer was adept at continuing to milk the Windows cash-cow for longer than might have been expected, but he too was slow to respond to the rising threat from the moves to mobile and the cloud. Now Mr Nadella is having to move rapidly to dispel the impression, among customers, analysts and tech talent, that his company’s better days are behind it.

古禾