Microsoft disappointed the investment community and its shareholders in July declaring its biggest profit shortfall and taking a $900 million loss on unsold Surface tablets. PC sales are dwindling worldwide in the face of more popular and ever increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets. This creates bigger problems for Microsoft. On one hand, ever declining PC sales are hurting the bottom line of Microsoft. On the other hand, Microsoft is not a dominant player in the smartphones and tablets market. Microsoft’s Windows operating system now holds only 20 percent of the world’s consumer computing market that includes tablets and smartphones. Compare this to 42 percent of devices that run on Google’s Android OS and 24 percent of Apple iOS. Microsoft’s Surface tablet accounts only 3.7 percent of tablet sales and when it comes to Windows running on smartphones, its share is even lower at 3.2 percent.

Many think that it is time for Microsoft to start writing apps for other tablets and smartphones and vigorously expand its applications such as Power Point, Word, and Excel into mobile platforms including smartphones and tablets. It will take some time for the behemoth to move on a dime but the time is ripe in the face of dwindling revenue to look for ways to save the company.