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by lproven·5y ago·view on hn ↗
The reason MS didn't have to do this stuff in the last decade or 2 is because it has already killed all its opponents.

Name another big desktop app vendor will hundreds of millions of seats. Name another industry-leading groupware system.

The last big dominant rival MS took down was Nokia's phones operation, but it mainly succeeded there because Google and Apple accidentally helped: Evidence: MS doesn't make phones any more. It derailed the #1 smartphone vendor's own OS efforts and planted an MS exec in charge so that vendor used exclusively MS phone OSes, but it wasn't good enough. The OS failed and the vendor left the market.

Apple is in a different market. Apple sells hardware. Its OSes are free. It also makes a cut on content for those devices.

Character attacks? Have you bothered to read any of the links I have supplied to support my argument?

1 comments
I remember the 90s just fine, but i think MS also knows that they lucked out on the antitrust rulings with getting their fingers slapped. Also on top of it Gates isn't there in charge to be ruthless any more (and the competitors today knows the things to watch out for).

But more importantly than all that... MS knows they aren't competing with other companies per-se but rather ecosystems, open source and developer mindshare. If we don't like it we can fork off things and go on our way (like developers did during the Ballmer era despite him jumping around chanting developers....).

Windows isn't even the most used personal OS today, Android is.

Funnily enough thanks to MS in part, not because they sabotaged Nokia (Many N insiders have spoken about how dysfunctional and unfocused their management was even before MS came into the picture), But rather because they fucked over their enthusiastic WinPhone7 users, retailers and devs with WP8 not supporting the prev generation of devices and API's changing.

WP7 had a far snapper and easier to understand UI than contemporary Android devices, but once they dropped the WP8 news the old devices just lay on shelves and sellers who had bet on WP7 selling were left with un-sellable devices and didn't feel like buying a new batch to see it happen again.

Yes, that's all fair.

I know why the WinPhone fiasco happened: they, very reasonably, wanted to get everything on an NT base. WinPhone 7 was WinCE, WinPhone 8 was NT.

I don't think they realised how many people used WinPhone 7 and were happy with it. Over here in Czechia, Windows phones were the main smartphones I saw when I moved here in 2014 -- Android and iOS were very rare, because they were very expensive. Windows phones were the affordable way to get a smartphone -- there were a lot of candybar dumbphones still around here in 5-6 years ago.

I don't think dodging antitrust was luck, though. I think the US was afraid to kill or even maim one of its very few big success stories, one of the only ones that _wasn't_ being outcompeted by Asian or European companies.

Since then, MS has lost some big battles -- notably, phones and tablets -- and it's learned to be conciliatory and how to appear friendly to people too young to remember the viciously rapacious 1990s MS.

My point is, I still think it is just play-acting friendly. This is the null hypothesis: same company, same people, same structure, and therefore, same business practices. It just got burned a few times so now it wants to come over as a reformed character.

Oh my, didn't remember or take notice of the the CE/NT thing. So understandable and yet so stupid in hindsight (gotta have been a bunch of internal voices agains't this but well).

When i mean lucked out i mean that they were lucky enough to have good enough lobbyists to pay their way out of their trouble.

Any company can become aggressive/shitty/evil depending on who runs things. I mean if we look at Suns legacy, Sun today is the biggest threat to open source we have (would would have thought about that in the 90s?).. sure it's really called Oracle now with Larry.E pulling the strings.

MS in the 80s and 90s had lucked in on their DOS deal and i think Gates in the back of his mind might was just watching all the time for threats coming and doing to MS what he did to IBM. But being facing a split-up i think Gates didn't see much point in "winning" any more since doing that would just lead to being big enough to actually be forced to divest things. (So he got bored and started doing other stuff, i know i would)

I think a comparison to the oil industry is apt, early oil was really ruthless in terms of competition (until the breakup of Standard Oil that really MS was the closest to becomming) but todays big-oil industry is quite evil but that is more the making of a collective greed of many middle to high managers and we're seeing the big IT firms approach that state quickly.