Re: RE: Portable GUI (was Re: Future with Ada)

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9vvja5$edn$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
>
>Little guys can afford to make little mistakes. Big guys can afford to make
>big mistakes. I understand how their size & wealth have enabled them to

Quite so.

>survive some bad product decisions, etc. But if they didn't have some
>enormously big successes (which means they must be doing *something* right!)
>they wouldn't have the cash cows out there to make up for the marketing
>flops and tactical blunders.

If you read the history of the company, you will find that it could easily be
argued that everything they now have has flowed out of having the OS monopoly.
How they ended up with that was indeed luck (early on they actually tried to
give it away twice). However, *someone* would have ended up with it either way.
So from our perspective luck wasn't an issue at all. We would have had our
Microsoft, no matter what their name ended up being. :-)

It could be argued that they have been at least fairly crafty in maintaining
their monopoly, and in continuing to keep plugging away when they enter new
markets and fail initially. But I don't see where we need to ascribe to the
company unnatural levels of skill, intelligence, or good looks to explain the
current state of affairs.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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