>What went wrong? That's the real question. I work in the OS world, so I have thought about this question. What I think 'went wrong' with Microsoft - as is ha

>What went wrong? That's the real question. I work in the OS world, so I have thought about this question. What I think 'went wrong' with Microsoft - as is happening with other "Operating Systems" developers, is that they have forgotten that they are there to serve their users, not an onboard business-model. Seriously, think about it. Let us take the example of shared filesystems, a common 'posession' of the OS in certain terms .. OS, filesystem, network, its all right there in the kernel .. but .. Why, on gods green earth, are we relying on 'startups' and 'upstarts' to deliver us peer-to-peer networking at the front-end user interface instead of actually having it, de-branded, at the operating system level as a matter of course? Things Dropbox, if Microsoft was awake, wouldn't have happened, because the peer-network shared filesystem thingy was sorted out .. in the 80's, I might add .. and then promptly forgotten about. Because the OS vendors have lost the plot on what is an operating system (hint: its the source, stupid!) and what is a 'branded service which produces other revenues for the OS vendor', and because the anti-trust thing happened, in the first place: OS vendors have lost the plot. Also, the very first sign that things were going awry was when someone decided that a user operating system should not ship with its own compiler(s), onboard! The separation of those tools, and the sheer bloat that results from not having a tight Build/OS binding, means that things got out of control on the developer, developer, developer(s), side of things, imho. I think this disconnect of the User-is-the-Developer mentality from the "what service is sold -outside- the box of the OS" profit excuse, with the ease of device manufacturing these days, OS vendors have new challenges ahead, and the crux of the argument is this: Its damned easy to make a new OS, for your own device, and then serve the hell out of your customers. In a very real sense, who needs a desktop if all you have to do is turn something on, and press play, in the first place.. ? With the way things are going, cheap light computing built-for-task is the new hotness, and .. well at least imho .. There may well come a point where the new hot OS ships with everything you could possibly need, already onboard and working, to build something new for the platform, itself. Put that ethos back, and lets talk again in a year about it ..