> At least they did it by having the best product (unlike MS). Microsoft fell into the DOS monopoly because they were effective at business and Digital Researc

> At least they did it by having the best product (unlike MS). Microsoft fell into the DOS monopoly because they were effective at business and Digital Research (the more obvious vendor) wasn't. Windows won because Apple (by choice or by failure) didn't succeed at beating PCs with the Mac and because they executed better than other choices for transitioning away from DOS (OS/2 in particular, but also notably GeoWorks). OS/2 was the inside-track solution that failed because it was too closed -- Windows was the comparatively open solution (because it ran on all PC-compatibles) that beat it. Office won because it was a genuinely better product in a GUI than Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and other competitors. Word and Excel had been honed on the Mac for years as the overwhelming leader in the word processing and spreadsheet markets there. Microsoft is not a company that got to be as enormous as they did due to one lucky break early on. They did it by building products that lots of people liked, by making smart business decisions, and by being the toughest competitor to face. > Google is big because they have created a ton of value. Google is a smart company that got off to a start with brilliant technology in a form lots of people love. But now that they are big, they have a lot of the same advantages Microsoft had in the 90s. Would Google Apps really have vastly more mindshare than alternatives like Zoho purely on the product merits? Google is now in the stage where they can become one of the leaders in a market simply by announcing a product. This pretty much puts them where Microsoft was in 1995. That may be the free market, but if you're competing with them, it's pretty frustrating to know that even if you beat them hands down on product desireability, they can still win in the market just by being Google.