4 ms·
Half of the reason Netscape and Borland died was because of their own mistakes. The other half was that Microsoft had competing products and proceeded to crush
by tl 15y ago
Half of the reason Netscape and Borland died was because of their own mistakes. The other half was that Microsoft had competing products and proceeded to crush them. If Microsoft had taken graphics editing more seriously by creating a Photoshop competitor bundled with Office or built Silverlight 5 years earlier than they did instead of bundling Flash into Windows, Adobe's story would have been very different.
- bad_user 15y agoOn how many products can a single company work on? If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else, just how they moved the engineers that worked on IExplorer to Silverlight. It's as simple as that. Even if a company is one of the biggest and wealthiest in the world, development still takes time and resources. Which is why hypothetical questions like what would have happened if Microsoft built Silverlight earlier DO NOT make sense, simply because they didn't build Silverlight earlier and that's that. Disregarding the fact that Microsoft already had a Flash competitor (ActiveX), Silverlight's technical advantages comes from the underlying platform, which is .NET and no matter how you look at it, if you're talking about current-day Silverlight, then you must include .NET into that equation. On building Silverlight 5 years earlier, that would have been impossible, considering you're talking about year 2003, with .NET being initially released in 2002. So to make that decision 5 years earlier, then you have to shift the evolution of everything that led to it 5 years earlier. That means the release of .NET should have been in 1997, so development on it should have started somewhere in 1994, before the release of Windows 95. You could then say that if only Microsoft invested more resources into .NET and Silverlight, then these projects would have been released faster. But by all indications Microsoft made .NET and the Avalon-related technologies (like WPF and Silverlight) their top priority, so they simply couldn't work faster.
- mgkimsal 15y ago"If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else" huh? So all that time they were working on silverlight, there was no one working on xbox. or office. or ie. or windows vista/7/xp-patches. or sharepoint. or asp.net. or sql server. or iis. or c#. or linq. or ford sync tech. or metro. or windows phone 7. Please... had they wanted to get in to the photoshop realm, they would have.
- jiggy2011 15y agoAdobe's big cash cow is Photoshop. Photoshop users are traditionally Mac loyalists, I doubt many of them would have given any MS offering the time of day.
- danssig 15y agoPhotoshop users use Mac because it works the best for what they're doing. If they could have had the same solution vastly cheaper and 80-90% as good you think they'd have been willing to pay thousands more for that 10-20%?
- jiggy2011 15y agoI think they already do that, don't see many professional graphics people using GIMP and others.
- danssig 15y agoPhotoshop gives you much more than 20% over GIMP. Photoshop is light years ahead of anything else out there and only getting more so (see latest sneak of deblurring photos).