The Lifelong Learner :: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are -Roosevelt ::

Has the Microsoft of Today Become the IBM of the Late '80s?

This is a great article comparing Microsoft to the old IBM, and how Microsoft is starting to lose its shine. It is producing buggy applications filled with security holes and it is trying to integrate everything together. Companies are starting to see that and they don’t want to be connected to only one company. They want choices. They want open standards (not necessarily open source — two different things). They want security. Does Microsoft give them that? I don’t think so. I’ve always said that competition is the best thing for innovation. Microsoft, with its monopolistic tacticts doesn’t have that. And that’s starting to hurt. Anyway, those are my views, but you should read what Espen Andersen has to say about IBM and Microsoft in the latest Ubiquity issue.

Here are two excerpts from the article:

In the early nineties, the firm [IBM] suffered grievous setbacks, had to abandon their life-time employment policy, lost their dominance in the computing market in a classical disruptive technology plot — and, having enough money to survive for a while and the good sense to hire a manager from outside, reinvented themselves as a server-and-service company with, of all things, a focus on open source software.

It seems to me that Microsoft’s main problem is running out of new markets to enter. There are many markets available that are too small for it, at least too small for a pure product strategy. These markets require knowledge of how to solve the customers’ problems, and choosing which products to use after the problem is understood. Microsoft is product-focused rather than solution-focused, and as such will always be enslaved to their main markets, their main users, and their history.

Espen Andersen in Ubiquity July 28 – Aug. 3, 2004 Issue

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