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MS did not "gobble" companies?

"a single company that had, like Microsoft, grown gradually without gobbling up other large firms"

MS gobbled or destroyed SOFTWARE companies. The reason there are not any large ones is because MS created an environment where you could not start a software company unless your business plan included:
1. Be bought by MS, or
2. Be destroyed by MS.

There were "large" companies in the 80s. Borland, Ashton-Tate, Lotus, WordPerfect, and others. Each had their market destroyed by the monopoly power of MS:
- Borland -> MSVisualStudio
- AshtonTate -> MSAccess
- Lotus -> MSExcel
- WordPerfect -> MSWord

Lotus escaped the usual fate by being bought by IBM. The only "large" software companies left trace their origins to Oracle, which captured the big database market before MS had enough resources to compete. Oracle and its descendants now worry about MS making MSSQLServer usable, and they are still losing the bottom of the market to MS.

[IBM is not a software company. IBM is a services company that believes it is a hardware company.]

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Two new types of companies developed in the 90s.

The "internet" company capitalized on this new medium. AOL was early, is having difficulties, and MS is trying to compete with MSN. Yahoo and Google know MS is coming for them. Amazon and Dell deal with the physical world too much for MS to care. MS wants to "own" the internet; they just do not know how (and it may not be possible, although Comcast is making a good effort.)

The "open source" company decided to compete with MS by making software free. RedHat and SuSE (now Novell) compete against MS in the Operating System market by allowing their software to be downloaded free. A variety of other companies/organizations are attempting to compete with MS's other products:
- Mozilla vs. MSIE,
- OpenOffice vs. MSOffice,
- various databases,
- Eclipse vs. VisualStudio.
Even giving away their software, each of these knows they have a very difficult battle unless something happens to MS.

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MS did good because they (with IBM and Intel) created an environment where personal computer hardware was commoditized. Then MS slowed innovation in the software world for over a decade. They destroyed the innovators by releasing lesser products, and using tjeir monopoly power to force acceptance. Looking back from 2030, MS will be remembered as the reason why software stagnated for so long.

Posted by: solprovider   Posted on: 03/24/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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