Paul Thurrott: Last week, during an annual Strategic Update meeting with Wall Street financial analysts in New York, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laid out his assessment of the coming year and Microsoft's plans for coping with what is clearly an historic economic downturn. Ballmer's talk was hopeful at times, but more tellingly it offered a pretty brutal overview of the problems facing the software giant as some of its traditional core products are beginning to flat-line for the first time. Looking at the state of Microsoft's businesses and ahead to the coming year, however, one thing becomes clear: The software giant still makes most of its revenues from businesses, not consumers.
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