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The Year of Doom For Microsoft, Google and Apple

This article is more than 10 years old.

2012 was the year of the doom merchant in business. In the fantasy world of dying planets earth survived but if you listen to the doom mongers, Microsoft, Apple, Google and a whole lot of other companies are on their death bed.

There are few good reasons for believing that companies with global dominance are doomed but 2012 just seems to have been the year of doom.  Let's look at some of the logic:

Microsoft is doomed because Office is being usurped by Google docs .

Apple is doomed because it has become conservative, opting for stable options instead of disruptive ones.

Google is doomed because of mobile and the arrival of peak search, And by the way Facebook will also decline because of the sudden rise of mobile.

The writers and opinion makers of these doom theses are respected enough but with the amount of hype that's out there I wonder how we are going to exercise discrimination in our collective judgment of what is actually going on.

Big companies do decline, and some dramatically so, but in general they tend to find quasi-monopoly positions, or hide behind vested interests. General Motors is still there, after a century of buying up competition and disruption. So too General Electric, though doing a better job of reinventing itself. Nokia, young in comparison, still has a phenomenal opportunity to shape global mobile services.

So to Microsoft, Apple and Google. In what version of the universe are they threatened? Here is an alternative view that I've offered a few times during the year.

Microsoft has more options at its disposal now than at any time in the past. And the name of the game now is strategic options.

In the 1990s Microsoft sat on innovation. Browser innovation stopped with Internet Explorer, for example. And bloated feature-ware like Word crushed everything around it - who remembers Wordstar outside the legal profession? Why did one document software become a de facto standard? Of course Microsoft also defined certain types of enterprise software "innovation" with those turgid three year releases.

Compare now to Microsoft's latent domination of global IP communications. With Skype, does Microsoft have the largest telephone directory in the world, I wonder? With Lync, doesn't Microsoft have the cheapest enterprise grade Unified Communications product on the market? Putting the two together isn't this a global enterprise communications infrastructure?

Add in its evolving Sharepoint ecosystem, and I think MSFT is skillfully migrating away from its dependency on the old idea of productivity (document-centric) to the new (comms-centric) - and then there's Cloud, which MSFT will do as well as any other mega-corp. X-Box and Kinect meanwhile connect the company to a younger demographic.

It's not a complete picture but in contrast General Motor never transitioned away from autos with this level of panache.

Having said all that Microsoft's declining position in enterprise productivity is opening up tons of opportunity for people like Box - in a recent interview with me Box CEO Aaron Levie quoted BYOD as one of the most potent influences on his business because it is forcing CIOs to buy outside the Microsoft paradigm.

Apple is a different story. When Eric Jackson wrote that Apple could go to $1650 by 2015, a few of us thought it might be a little over the top. But only a little. Anyone who knows mobile and platform businesses knows Apple has a huge range of strategic options at its disposal in markets that are also huge.

Mobile encompasses the world's population in a way that perhaps only food, water and clothes did in the past - we have to accustom ourselves to its scale if we are to understand Apples potential.

Since then of course the stock has declined. But I think that is a reputation problem. People are convinced Apple is no longer an innovator. And Apple's pursuit of Samsung on patent claims that are beginning to crumble casts the company in a bad light. But I think the underlying problem is one of poor reputation management, a problem that Tim Cook doesn't seem to be equipped to address.

For a company like Apple to lose its reputation for innovation so soon after the iPhone and iPad launches is careless management. Maps, patents, and Siri are just detail.

Apple needs a front man who can re-engage people with the convergence of technology and liberal arts, while Cook continues to manage a company that has reinvented enterprise operations. When Nick Vitalari and I wrote The Elastic Enterprise we kept coming back to the awesome new machine that Apple has created and its seemingly endless capacity for scale. But the magic of Apple lies in its aesthetic layer and Ive would be the better man to front that.

In the case of Google, it seems incomprehensible that people can predict its decline. It might be you think of Google as a search company when in reality it is an advertising company. It let search stagnate but is now fixing that. But is is just an advertising company any more?

In the history of enterprises I cannot think of another one that would have gone from advertising to mobility via open source and devices, and then onto autos and personal accessories. These are serious adjacencies that are really worthy of admiration. And they set a challenge to other companies to be as bold and as determined to bust categories.

After interviewing dozens of executives for my work at Innovation Management and my current study for Cognizant, I came to the conclusion that the future enterprise is one that functions essentially as an innovation pipeline, creating a plethora of options that executives can then choose to deploy or hold back.

Markets are changing their structure - we think mobile is the big disruptor. And indeed it is an unprecedented technology. But what's really happening is that the nature and contours of markets are changing. To keep up companies need options they can deploy whenever necessary - augmented reality in Google's case or even transportation modes that allow drivers to travel while being distracted.

Yesterday's post was really about the search for truth in the ever expanding universe of web content. Today's is on a similar theme. How can we accelerate an answer to the growing problem of figuring out what is going on inside so much content? What is not going on is terminal decline for these companies, all of which are managing change much better than the mega corp of the past ever did.

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