“Since the mid-nineties, I have nurtured a thesis about the dotcom bubble, tech bust, and the role Microsoft played in it. The opportunity to discuss it has never came up,” Barry Ritholtz blogs for The Big Picture. “That is, until Microsoft’s purchase of Skype yesterday.”
“I have long argued that while Microsoft might have begun life as a software firm, it long ago morphed into something that was more a very clever IP/marketing firm with a huge tactical legal advantage that gave rise to a monopoly, rather than a true technology company,” Ritholtz writes.
“Microsoft remains hugely profitable today, but increasingly irrelevant. Their purchase of Skype is an attempt to buy back some relevance,” Ritholtz writes. “They are the rich, uncool fat kid at school, trying desperately to buy their way into some popularity.” On a spectrum of relevance, where would you place MSFT: Are they closer to Google or Apple or Facebook or Twitter, or are they more comparable to the Maytag repairman of the tech world?”
Ritholtz writes, “Let’s back up a bit, and look at Microsoft’s history, including the impact they had on other technology in the 1990s.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Trevor” for the heads up.]
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