Microsoft looks to the future amidst increasing challenges to its core business

[mandy]

...maybe the point is that Microsoft needs to find its un-Vista. Several of them, in fact. The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history. New business models are emerging--from low-cost "open-source" software to advertising-supported Web services--that threaten Microsoft's core business like never before. For investors to care about the company, it needs to find new growth markets. Its $44.3 billion in annual sales are puttering along at an 11% growth pace. Its shares, which soared 9,560% throughout the 1990s, sunk 63% in 2000 when the Internet bubble burst, and they have yet to fully recover.

Reigniting growth will require a cultural shift at a company that has long shaped its strategy around maintaining its Windows operating system and Office word-processing and spreadsheet monopolies. That calls for a new breed of leaders who can push the company in directions it hasn't gone before. "Things are different from the desktop world that most of the Microsoft guys grew up in," says Michael A. Cusumano, a management professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written extensively about the company...

full article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/con...tm?chan=tc&chan=technology_technology+index+page_today's+top+stories