Windows 7: Microsoft as the modern day Titanic; we all know how that ends

There’s a scene in James Cameron’s Titanic that serves as a good analogy to Wall Street’s feelings about Microsoft these days.

In the movie, the lookouts who spotted and reported the iceberg are at their posts looking straight ahead at the iceberg when one asks, “Why aren’t they turning?” Of course, the orders have been given to steer the ship away from danger - but a big ship like the Titanic doesn’t just make a hard left turn. It takes time for something that big to move to another course. As we all know, the end result is a sinking ship.
Over the weekend, Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar sounded the alarms in a research note suggesting that Microsoft’s lack of a plan for a tablet PC will push the company into slower revenue growth, from 12 percent in 2010 to 7 percent in 2011. (Techmeme) TechFlash picked up the research note and noted that, while the Windows team is reportedly beefing up the touch screen technology in the next version of Windows - not expected until 2012 - the company still lacks a dedicated tablet product group. The blog quotes from Friar’s note:

Windows tablets – a “slew of them” – will be unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, according to an article today in the New York Times. Citing “people familiar with Microsoft’s plans,” the Times reports that several manufacturers have signed up to build Windows tablets, including Dell and Samsung.