評論
打印
Microsoft and the PC industry
微軟和個人電腦業
Defenestrated
被拋棄
Steve Ballmer is a casualty of the personal computer’s rapid decline
史蒂夫鮑爾默是個人電腦迅速衰敗的罪魁禍首
Aug 31st 2013 |From the print edition
UNTIL August 23rd few people would have described Steve Ballmer as “retiring”. Microsoft’s chief executive has played both tiger and Tigger: snarling (toothlessly, as it turned out) at Apple’s gadgets; and bouncing, with a whoop, onto conference stages to extol his company’s wares. But retiring he is, within a year.
在8月23日之前很少人會想到史蒂夫鮑爾默會退休。微軟的首席執行官即使老虎也是跳跳虎，與蘋果的產品叫板，但是結果卻沒什么威脅，在發布會上吹噓其產品。但是他將會在一年之內退休。
Mr Ballmer’s departure is a surprise. He had announced a reorganisation of the company only in July and had hoped to oversee much of the change. Some celebrated his going: Microsoft’s share price went up by 7.3% on the day the news broke. Mr Ballmer has plenty of critics, although Microsoft’s revenues have trebled on his 13-year watch, to $77.8 billion in the year to June, and profits have grown similarly, to $21.9 billion. The critics point at the rise of Apple and Google, and say Microsoft should have done better—or handed some of its $77 billion of cash to shareholders. In an interview with the Seattle Times, Mr Ballmer denied that pressure from ValueAct, a fund with a small stake in the firm, helped push him out.
鮑爾默的離職是一個意外。就在七月他還宣布了公司的重組，希望能看到改變。一些人為他的離開叫好，微軟的股價在鮑爾默退休消息傳出的一天內上漲了7.3%。盡管微軟的營收在鮑爾默的13年掌舵期間翻了三倍，達到了219億美元，但是他還是飽受批評。批評者瞄向蘋果和谷歌的崛起，表示微軟應該比現在做的更好，或者將其770億現金部分返給股東。在一次來自西雅圖時報的采訪中，鮑爾默否認了其迫于擁有微軟小部分股份的基金ValueAct而離開的說法。
Microsoft sits atop a pyramid of companies that prospered from the long boom in personal computers (PCs). The vast majority of PCs run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system and are powered by Intel’s processors. They bear the brands of Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Lenovo and others, and nowadays are mostly made by Taiwanese contractors. The trouble is that people increasingly prefer to buy mobile devices, made by Apple or running Google’s Android operating system. Sales of PCs have been falling at double-digit rates. From the pyramid’s apex to its base, companies are desperate both to refresh the PC and reduce their reliance on it. Few are having much success.
微軟坐在受益于個人電腦長期繁榮的公司金字塔頂端。大部分的個人電腦跑的是微軟的視窗操作系統，用的是英特爾的處理器。它們支撐著戴爾，惠普，聯想和其他品牌，大部分是有臺灣代工廠完成的。現在的麻煩是人們越來越多的傾向于蘋果生產或者運行谷歌安卓操作系統的移動設備。個人電腦銷量以兩位數的速率在下降。金字塔上的公司個個都昂著更新個人電腦，減少它們對個人電腦業務的依賴。幾乎沒有一家取得成功。
Frank Gillett of Forrester, a research firm, reckons that Windows’ share of the market for personal devices, once 95% or more, has dropped to around 30%. Microsoft responded belatedly with Windows 8, a new edition intended for touchscreen PCs and tablets launched last October, with variations for cheaper tablets and phones. Applications lie behind oblong tiles designed for fingertips rather than icons for mouse-clicks. Microsoft’s successful Xbox entertainment system was given the same look. The idea was that this uniform style would help to transfer Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop to mobile devices, and refresh the PC too.
調查公司Forrester的Frank Gillett認為微軟一度站個人設備市場95%以上的視窗系統現在所占份額跌到了大概30%。微軟隨后的回應是適用于觸屏個人電腦和平板電腦的視窗8系統，發布于去年十月，同時擁有廉價平板和電話的版本。應用以矩形磁貼展示在桌面，為了使用手指觸控而不是鼠標點擊。微軟成功的Xbox娛樂系統也使用同樣的外觀。微軟的想法是這種風格上的統一會幫助微軟從桌面霸主轉變成移動設備霸主，同時也更新個人電腦。
It has not happened yet. Few businesses were likely to hurry to buy Windows 8 anyway; some have yet to switch to its predecessor, Windows 7. Consumers have not taken to tiles on PC screens: a new version, Windows 8.1, due in October, will make it easier for them to stick with the old look. Only now is a wide choice of touch PCs and tablet-PC hybrids appearing.
然而這個愿景還沒有實現。很少的企業急著想購買視窗8系統，有些甚至都沒有使用前代的視窗7系統。消費者也沒有習慣筆記本屏幕上的磁貼，將于10月發布的最新版本的視窗8.1會讓消費者更簡單的回到傳統桌面。現在有很多混合型平板電腦機型出現在市面上。
Microsoft’s own tablet, the Surface, has been a flop, forcing it to make a $900m write-off in its latest results. Windows phones, mostly made by Nokia of Finland, are far behind iPhones and Android devices, with just 3.3% of the world market according to Gartner, another research firm. They have ousted BlackBerry from third place, but that is not saying much.
微軟自家的平板Surface是一款失敗的產品，到現在只銷售了9億美元。另一家調查公司Gartner表示，使用微軟操作系統的手機，主要由芬蘭的諾基亞生產，銷量遠遠落后于iPhone和安卓設備，只占到手機世界市場的3.3%。它們已經取代了黑莓第三的位置，但是也說明不了什么。
Next to Microsoft at the apex, Intel has also done poorly in smartphones and tablets, though it is striving to catch up and in June unveiled a new chip that it hopes will bring new zip to PCs. Among the PC-makers, HP pondered quitting altogether in 2011, then sacked the chief executive who suggested it. Meg Whitman, his successor, chose to stay in, as well as pushing into services and software and shedding 27,000 jobs. She has plenty still to do: HP’s latest results, on August 21st, sent a share-price rally into reverse. At Dell, which is scrapping for much the same ground, Michael Dell, the founder and chief executive, still hopes to win a battle to take the company private. Of the leading PC-makers, Lenovo has coped best. Its home market, China, is slowing but growing, and it is selling plenty of smartphones.
跟微軟地位相同的英特爾在智能手機和平板市場表現也不佳，盡管其在努力追趕，并于6月發布了一款新的處理器，希望給個人電腦注入新的力量。在所有的個人電腦生產商中，惠普在2011年曾考慮退出，然后解雇了提出這個想法的首席執行官。繼任者Meg Whitman選擇繼續留在個人電腦市場，進軍服務和軟件行業，并減少了27000個職位。她仍然有很多事要做：惠普8月21日最新的財報顯示股價重新下跌。戴爾的境遇也非常相似，創始人兼首席執行官邁克爾戴爾仍然希望讓公司私營化。在所有的個人電腦制造巨頭中，聯想的表現是最好的。在本土市場中國，聯想在緩慢增長，同時也銷售相當部分的智能手機。
Despite its slow start in mobile, Microsoft remains hugely profitable. “It’s easy to get focused only on Windows,” says David Cearley of Gartner. The firm was quicker than its rivals to provide cloud services to big companies. Although Google’s free word-processor and spreadsheet threaten its Office software, Microsoft still has most of its customers, to whom it can sell improved services online. The direction Mr Ballmer has set “makes a lot of sense”, Mr Cearley says. Had he set out sooner, he might have seen the journey through.
盡管在移動市場開始較慢，但是微軟仍然有很大利潤。Gartner的David Cearley表示，專注于視窗操作系統很容易。微軟在給大公司提供云端服務上比其他對手快了不少。盡管谷歌免費的文本處理軟件和表格處理軟件對微軟的Office構成了威脅，但是微軟仍然擁有大部分顧客，微軟向其銷售改進的在線服務。Cearley說鮑爾默規劃的方向起了很大的作用。盡管他就要離開，但是他可能看透了前景。
