Risk Factors
The Risk Factors section consists of legal boilerplate material spanning a number of pages and covering both industry- and company-specific risks (Exhibit 4.10). A close look at this section could yield important red flags while allowing the readers to familiarize themselves with some of the industry dynamics within which that company operates.
| Challenges to our business model may reduce our revenues and operating margins. Our business model is based upon customers agreeing to pay a fee to license software developed and distributed by us. Under this commercial software model, software developers bear the costs of converting original ideas into software products through investments in research and development, offsetting these costs with the revenue received from the distribution of their products. We believe the commercial software model has had substantial benefits for users of software, allowing them to rely on our expertise and the expertise of other software developers that have powerful incentives to develop innovative software that is useful, reliable, and compatible with other software and hardware. In recent years, a non-commercial software model has evolved that presents a growing challenge to the commercial software model. Under the non-commercial software model, open source software produced by loosely associated groups of unpaid programmers and made available for license to end users without charge is distributed by firms at nominal cost that earn revenue on complementary services and products, without having to bear the full costs of research and development for the open source software. The most notable example of open source software is the Linux operating system. There is a wide variety of other open source software available, such as Open Office.org and Eclipse. While we believe our products provide customers with significant advantages in security and productivity, and generally have a lower total cost of ownership than open source software, the popularization of the non-commercial software model continues to pose a significant challenge to our business model, including recent efforts by proponents of open source software to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of open source software in their purchase and deployment of software products. To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, sales of our products may decline, we may have to reduce the prices we charge for our products, and revenue and operating margins may consequently decline. |
| We face intense competition. We continue to experience intense competition across all markets for our products and services. Our competitors range in size from Fortune 100 companies to small, single-product businesses that are highly specialized and open source community-based projects. While we believe the breadth of our businesses and product portfolio offers benefits to our customers that are a competitive advantage, our competitors that are focused on a narrower product line may be more effective in devoting technical, marketing, and financial resources to compete with us. In addition, barriers to entry in our businesses generally are low. The Internet as a distribution channel and non-commercial software model described above have reduced barriers to entry even further. Non-commercial software vendors are devoting considerable efforts to developing software that mimics the features and functionality of various of our products. In response to competitive factors, we are developing versions of our products with basic functionality that are sold at lower prices than the standard versions. See the Competition section for additional information about our competitors. These competitive pressures may result in decreased sales volumes, price reductions, and/or increased operating costs, such as for marketing and sales incentives, resulting in lower revenue, gross margins, and operating income. |
Source: Used with permission. Microsoft 2005 Annual Report.
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