3 ms·

It's not fair to compare pre-antitrust Microsoft to post-antitrust Microsoft. They will never be allowed to be what they once were. What we're seeing now is the

by jsz0 17y ago

It's not fair to compare pre-antitrust Microsoft to post-antitrust Microsoft. They will never be allowed to be what they once were. What we're seeing now is the real Microsoft competing without most of their monopolistic advantages. That is a company producing mostly mediocre products & services that don't interoperate with non-Microsoft products & services all that well. When you're a monopoly that's a great business model. When you're just another player it's a disadvantage. I also don't think it's fair to lay it all on Ballmer. Most of the current Microsoft flops were projects in development while Gates was CEO. I'm not sure they've ever really caught up after completely missing the boat on the Internet in the mid-90s. I envision most of the management structure at Microsoft as being comprised of a bunch of people who never really had to compete with outside forces other than deciding which company to buy and kill.

deleted 17y ago
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btilly 17y ago
Um, Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000. Most current Microsoft flops such as Vista started development after that. You're probably confusing his stepping down as chair in 2006 with his stepping down as CEO in 2000. Also I can assure you that Microsoft temporarily caught up after missing the boat. Just review the history. Until partway through 1995 they didn't think about the web. But by early 1998 they had the dominant browser, successfully destroyed Netscape, and had a strategy for taking over the server side of the web that people were genuinely concerned about. Then the lawsuit hit. Microsoft's plan to use the browser monopoly to leverage a server monopoly had to be put on hold. In the next 2 months several major competitors (Informix, Oracle and IBM) jumped on the open source bandwagon. The dot com era exploded. And Microsoft lost control. Post lawsuit they tried several things to get control back, with no success. Nothing they tried there had any traction. (Remember Hailstorm?) They poured energy into trying to get control of DRM, which customers didn't want in the end. They got sued again, more painfully, in Europe. They are being sued again over antitrust issues by Novell. So the question is this. Has the lackluster performance of Microsoft since Ballmer took office been because of the lawsuit, or because Ballmer is a worse CEO than Gates? I'm inclined to say "lawsuit + accumulated ill will". But it is hard to separate the two.
- d4nt 17y ago
  I think you're being quite charitable there. A lawsuit locking you out of a market like that is only as tough as having a big competitor beating you in that market. At this level you need a CEO to (a) anticipate then work around some of these things, and (b) break through despite them. Take Nintendo; they lost their market position for years because of Sony's playstation then came back with the Wii. They did it by wrong footing the competition and moving away from realism and performance. Microsoft could have wrong footed Google by buying Facebook or Twitter. Or built the App Store for Windows Mobile. Or built MS Office completely in Silverlight years before Chrome, V8 and HTML5 arrived. They didn't want for resources, just vision and drive.
  - eru 17y ago
    Or shipped the Internet Explorer with a built-in adblocker. (Though they would have needed to block all advertisements, and not just Google's, so that they'd stand a chance in court.)

by jsz0 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

btilly 17y ago

Um, Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000. Most current Microsoft flops such as Vista started development after that. You're probably confusing his stepping down as chair in 2006 with his stepping down as CEO in 2000. Also I can assure you that Microsoft temporarily caught up after missing the boat. Just review the history. Until partway through 1995 they didn't think about the web. But by early 1998 they had the dominant browser, successfully destroyed Netscape, and had a strategy for taking over the server side of the web that people were genuinely concerned about. Then the lawsuit hit. Microsoft's plan to use the browser monopoly to leverage a server monopoly had to be put on hold. In the next 2 months several major competitors (Informix, Oracle and IBM) jumped on the open source bandwagon. The dot com era exploded. And Microsoft lost control. Post lawsuit they tried several things to get control back, with no success. Nothing they tried there had any traction. (Remember Hailstorm?) They poured energy into trying to get control of DRM, which customers didn't want in the end. They got sued again, more painfully, in Europe. They are being sued again over antitrust issues by Novell. So the question is this. Has the lackluster performance of Microsoft since Ballmer took office been because of the lawsuit, or because Ballmer is a worse CEO than Gates? I'm inclined to say "lawsuit + accumulated ill will". But it is hard to separate the two.

d4nt 17y ago
I think you're being quite charitable there. A lawsuit locking you out of a market like that is only as tough as having a big competitor beating you in that market. At this level you need a CEO to (a) anticipate then work around some of these things, and (b) break through despite them. Take Nintendo; they lost their market position for years because of Sony's playstation then came back with the Wii. They did it by wrong footing the competition and moving away from realism and performance. Microsoft could have wrong footed Google by buying Facebook or Twitter. Or built the App Store for Windows Mobile. Or built MS Office completely in Silverlight years before Chrome, V8 and HTML5 arrived. They didn't want for resources, just vision and drive.
- eru 17y ago
  Or shipped the Internet Explorer with a built-in adblocker. (Though they would have needed to block all advertisements, and not just Google's, so that they'd stand a chance in court.)