Microsoft Running Out of Excuses

I’m wondering what excuses Microsoft will invent to explain away the fact that Apple has now surpassed Microsoft in terms of market value. The unofficial version from Microsoft, delivered over the past few years in off-the-record conversations, has basically boiled down to the notion that investors are fickle creatures who are so swept up in Apple’s hype and hysteria that they fail to see how great Microsoft still is. [NEWSWEEK has a content-sharing partnership with msnbc.com, a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.]

But honestly, when you look at charts like this one from The New York Times you do start to wonder how this once powerful company could have fallen so far so fast.

And it is getting harder and harder for Microsoft to keep insisting that its CEO, Steve Ballmer, is doing a great job.

Last year I wrote a column for NEWSWEEK explaining how poorly Microsoft has performed in the 10 years since Ballmer took over.

I followed up soon after that with an essay for NEWSWEEK predicting that Ballmer would be pushed out of the company in 2010.

All I did was point out the obvious. Microsoft stock has been a dud under Ballmer. The Vista operating system was a disaster. Microsoft missed pretty much every big, new important market for the past decade: Internet search (Google), digital music (Apple), social networking (Facebook). Microsoft once had a lead in mobile-phone software, and now has become an also-ran.

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