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Even Bill Gates knew this. Throughout the 90s he saw his primary competition at the time from a technology perspective as being NeXT. When he beat up his develo

by simonh 5y ago

Even Bill Gates knew this. Throughout the 90s he saw his primary competition at the time from a technology perspective as being NeXT. When he beat up his development tools and OS platform teams over technology and tools strategy, the benchmark he measured them against was NeXT because he recognised they were best in class, regardless of their market share. This is according to Steven Sinofsky, who was very much in a position to know as he was one of the people taking the beatings. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/

Fnoord 5y ago
Microsoft has been unable to leverage their desktop monopoly into a mobile market share. They lost from iOS (Apple) and Android (Google), after playing quite or double with Nokia. All of this happened under Ballmer's flag.
- simondotau 5y ago
  I said it a decade ago, Microsoft should have either acquired RIM (Blackberry) or otherwise partnered with them to make Blackberry the canonical Microsoft phone experience. If they acted fast, they could have retained a solid third place, perhaps still holding on as the handset which corporations deployed to employees. Instead, Microsoft did to the mobile phone space what Google did with messaging platforms and gave us endless cycles of killing and reinventing them, hoping maybe something would stick. By contrast it’s interesting to remember how much Apple got right with the iPhone in 2007. Many of the fundamentals of the hardware, software and UX were gotten right before Apple ever offered one to a paying customer.
  - simonh 5y ago
    The BlackBerry software platform was even worse than the CE kernel based Windows Mobile, so I don't see how that would have helped them. The problem was they didn't have a competitive software platform ready in time. In 2007 Google's Android team was already several years into developing Android and immediately started pivoting it into a touch based modern desktop class OS in a mobile package. Microsoft didn't realise that's what they needed to do until 2010 when they started work on Windows Mobile 10. But even in 2007 it was too late. They would still have been several years behind Android and there would not have been space for a sub-par licensed OS up against a free competitor that was years in front of it. The game was already over, it just took them 10 years to realise it.

by simonh 5y ago

Fnoord 5y ago

Microsoft has been unable to leverage their desktop monopoly into a mobile market share. They lost from iOS (Apple) and Android (Google), after playing quite or double with Nokia. All of this happened under Ballmer's flag.

simondotau 5y ago
I said it a decade ago, Microsoft should have either acquired RIM (Blackberry) or otherwise partnered with them to make Blackberry the canonical Microsoft phone experience. If they acted fast, they could have retained a solid third place, perhaps still holding on as the handset which corporations deployed to employees. Instead, Microsoft did to the mobile phone space what Google did with messaging platforms and gave us endless cycles of killing and reinventing them, hoping maybe something would stick. By contrast it’s interesting to remember how much Apple got right with the iPhone in 2007. Many of the fundamentals of the hardware, software and UX were gotten right before Apple ever offered one to a paying customer.
- simonh 5y ago
  The BlackBerry software platform was even worse than the CE kernel based Windows Mobile, so I don't see how that would have helped them. The problem was they didn't have a competitive software platform ready in time. In 2007 Google's Android team was already several years into developing Android and immediately started pivoting it into a touch based modern desktop class OS in a mobile package. Microsoft didn't realise that's what they needed to do until 2010 when they started work on Windows Mobile 10. But even in 2007 it was too late. They would still have been several years behind Android and there would not have been space for a sub-par licensed OS up against a free competitor that was years in front of it. The game was already over, it just took them 10 years to realise it.