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November 03, 2005
Can Microsoft Still Compete?
Back in the 1980s, Microsoft was never more dangerous than when it was threatened and competing. They knocked off Lotus and Ashton-Tate and Borland, and anyone else that Gates and Balmer put in their sights. How many personal DBMS products do you know today? Let's see, there's Access from Microsoft, and a, well, there's Access, and a ...well, that's about it.
Stories are legion of G and B making lists of companies they wanted to eliminate and then doing it.
Does Microsoft still have that ferocity? Have 10 years of sitting on its Windows/Office laurels so softened Microsoft that they can't compete with Google?
(And by the way, why has almost everything interesting in the past several years come from Google or some freeware startup? What is Microsoft doing with those billions they're pouring into research on the Redmond campus? Why, for example, do they not have even a decent XML editor?)
Posted by DavidK at November 3, 2005 06:56 AM | Permalink