The Shoking story behind microsoft's Downfall

 

Once-mighty Microsoft may be on the verge of joining corporate dinosaurs like Pan Am, Sears, Sharper Image, Circuit City, and Kodak

 After 26 years of redefining how we live, work, play, and think, the first shoe has finally dropped for the company that ushered in the PC age.

The once wildly profitable Microsoft just posted its first-ever quarterly loss as a public company -- to the tune of $492 million. Granted, this was due in large part to taking a $6.2 billion write-down on its failed online ad business, aQuantive... But whether the company's top brass is willing to admit it or not, the writing is most definitely on the wall... in the papers... and even in magazines.

Take Vanity Fair, for example. Its brand-new August issue contains a 7,734-word exposé that delves into exactly "how Microsoft lost its mojo," a recent overly hyped company event that turned out to be nothing more than a "low-octane swan song," and what's behind what the author dubbed..."Corporate America's Most Spectacular Decline"

Of course, one of the things the article points to is the meteoric rise of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, as well as the fact that Microsoft is always at least a full step behind Apple when it comes to innovation and new products. For instance, Microsoft didn't get around to releasing its own digital music player, called Zune, until November 14, 2006. That's five years after Apple released its game-changing iPod -- and just 54 days before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. 

Today, the iPhone alone brings in more money than every single product Microsoft has created since 1975 -- $5.3 billion more, to be exact. But as a handful of insiders --including Bill Gates himself -- know, it isn't any one iProduct that will ultimately bring down Microsoft...Instead it's an awe-inspiring 119-year-old development lurking inside the walls of two mysterious warehouses on the Columbia River...

Bill Gates first learned of these massive windowless buildings on October 30, 2005. Shortly thereafter, he sent an urgent memo to Microsoft's top people -- and then quietly retired. And the incredible story behind the secret that could so easily bring down the world's most powerful and profitable company is so compelling that the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review dropped everything to pen an entire book on the subject.

Yet few investors have read it -- and even fewer have been clued into the three easiest ways to profit from Microsoft's dizzying fall from grace. 

 Content courtesy of The Motley Fool. (fool.com)