Making customers miserable the Microsoft way

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That Vision Thing

Microsoft has Bill Gates. Now there's a man
with real vision.

In fairness, Gates did have a vision for the
future which saw a computer on everyone's
desktop. Beyond that, not much.

Oh, he adopted others ideas and called it
innovation. In truth there isn't much original
thats ever come out of MS which isn't entirely a
bad thing. Not a good thing either when it is
presented as something original though.

There is, however, one truism which comes into
play here. Once you're at the top there's
nowhere to go but down. Gates, having knocked
off IBM on the desktop, among others, is well
aware of this and attempts to do what he can to
stop it.

Still, Microsoft has managed to make every
mistake a monopolist can make most significantly
raising prices and lowering quality. And they
are focused not on quality but on maintenance of
their monopoly.

That said, they're still a quite the
comptetitor. Not as nimble as they used to be
nor as quick off the mark. But that does come
with size.

Still what they are facing is something they
have no answer for. Open source is a
significant threat because it works well, not
simply good enough, and because it doesn't fit
in with the notion of profit making. Non
profits never do.

Rome, as you point out, fell because it no
longer had economic, political and social
answers to the questions of their time.

Microsoft, while I doubt it will ever be wiped
out the way ancient Rome was, is facing a world
where it no longer has answers to these
questions short of reams of FUD and supporting
the odd silly lawsuit (SCO).

Oh, and MS isn't above using open source when it
suits them. Which tends to make a mockery of
it's loud objections to the GPL.

I expect the historians you're talking about
will be very far in the future.

I suspect that time isn't very far off.

ttfn

John

Posted by: TtfnJohn   Posted on: 04/08/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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