“With two major cave-ins in the past few weeks, Microsoft is screaming at the top of its lungs about how irrelevant it is,” Charlie Demerjian writes for SemiAccurate. “For the past few decades, Microsoft has been a monopoly with one game plan, leverage what they have to exclude competition. If someone had a good idea, Microsoft would come out with a barely functional copy, give it away, and shut out the income stream of the innovator. Novell, Netscape, Pen, and countless others were crushed by this one dirty trick, and the hardware world bowed to Redmond’s whims.”
“The company sucked the life and innovation out of the industry for so long that eventually no one innovated because it was pointless, if the idea was good, Microsoft would end it,” Demerjian writes. “Ask Gateway about doing something as basic as making the initial desktop and installation process more user-friendly. Microsoft killed them for the sin of trying to make the user experience better. Everything stagnated as a result of this misuse of monopoly power.”
“What are the two recent cave-ins which show that Microsoft wants the world to know that they are irrelevant? XP and XBox, X marks the spot really. Both have recently been the focus of major Microsoft policy shifts that the company swore would not happen,” Demerjian writes. “Both were a line drawn in the sand that Microsoft was hinging their future on, and like Office and Exchange on mobile, the world said no. Once again there was no backup plan either so Microsoft had to publicly crawl on their stomachs to apologize. Mis-management indeed… For any onlooker that still doesn’t realize how irrelevant Microsoft is, these latest two should be quite direct proof. Microsoft wants you to know they are irrelevant, and you have to give them credit for at least trying to get the word out, loudly.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: We love the smell of Microsoft’s irrelevancy in the morning.
If for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years. – Steve Jobs, February 1985
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Aparajita” for the heads up.]