Nothing stays forever, the same applies to the success of Microsoft. The times when the company was on top all the time became a history.  But there is a general opinion saying that Microsoft is probably too big to fail, and its victories will cover its failures.  Among Microsoft’s failures are the following: the widely overhyped resource hog that appeared to be Windows Vista, anti-trust fights that brought a bad reputation to a company, attempts to succeed with the smart phones, being not on time in the rapidly developing tablet market, etc.

But Microsoft is still standing thank to its Xbox, Windows  7 and Vista. The windows Smart phones are not so popular now, but Microsoft is trying make them work for the society. There is kind of grey zone for the company, but Microsoft is still making money. For the Q1 of fiscal year  2012 the company had almost  6 billion profit.  And this figure had been achieved despite of low sales of PCs due to popular  Apple’s iPads. Microsoft keeps the track thank to good sales of XBox, Microsoft office and Lync and Windows Server Licenses.

However, this situation might not last too long. More employees will come to work with their personal devices which most probably are not Microsoft. More back-end technology is switching to the cloud, the desktop licenses cannot be reliable for Microsoft forever.

Canalys analyst Tim Coulling mentioned that with continued shares decline Microsoft slowly losing its control over the standards and it is no longer the innovation source in PC market.  Microsoft might also fail in convincing manufacturers to apply their OS like Windows 8 rather than use free platform  as Android for example. Already in 1999 in the interview with BBC Bill Gates mentioned that his company probably will be replaced in future due to industry developments.

For the first time for its existence Microsoft had to lay off about 5000 employees during the recession.While Apple’s shares were enjoying 1000 per cent growth, Microsoft’s stock price declined about 20 %.

Microsoft is fortunately too big to suffer at this point, but in long-term things can become more serious. It is time to work at plan B.

Some experts suggest  that Microsoft has to react to really low cost productivity offerings in the market being chosen by businesses as well as free, advertising-supported mobile and desktop applications, tools and software.

If Microsoft fails to implement  a new landscape of free web apps, public application programming interfaces (APIs) and government open data, the company is will finally will be out of competition and other companies will replace it.