eaves.ca - Latest Comments in Microsoft: A case study in mismanaging a business ecosystem

Re: Microsoft: A case study in mismanaging a business ecosystem

Andrew — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 04:55:36 -0000

I agree. The fact that you have written this now and almost mentioned some of the points made by Joel Spolsky in his essay of some years ago shows that he was right about a lot of things.

http://www.joelonsoftware.c...

I think even Microsoft internally would recognize that breaking the backwards-compatibility of Visual Basic, while cool and nifty in the short-term, was a serious long-term mistake.

Even though they clearly did succeed in cutting off Netscape's air supply, Firefox lives on because it is open source. And yes, developers moved to niche platforms where Microsoft would leave them alone long enough for them to create something cool - Linux, OS X and what we now call Web2.0

They forced all the action and futuremaking to move to the iPhone and the cloud. How many rich clients made with wonderful old .NET do we use today?

Joel's other important point here was that Microsoft inherited it's monopoly from IBM and so abused it for as long as it could. Google earned it's 85% market share by being superior. Although that may not mean it fares any better.

Does anyone think the stock market has registered this long term weakness at Microsoft over the next decade, or is it just way down anyway because everything is?

Re: Microsoft: A case study in mismanaging a business ecosystem

Conrad Barwa — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:09:14 -0000

A business ecosystem is like a natural one. It doesn’t matter how nutrient rich the environment (like say, one with excellent development tools) if emerging lifeforms are consistently snuffed out, pretty soon they will elect to grow and evolve elsewhere - even in places where the nutrients are weaker.

This is a slightly optmistic reading imo; you assume that the so-called "emerging lifeforms" have the freedom of choice to move elsewhere. That is a big if, plausible in some situations but not in all

Re: Microsoft: A case study in mismanaging a business ecosystem

Kim Feraday — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:27:07 -0000

Interesting but I think any large company is inevitably going to act in similar ways. They need to expand reach in order to grow revenue. Any technology that is adjacent to core products is going to be fair game. The company can either move into these spaces organically or through acquisition. If you're in an adjacent space, you're an acquisition target, if not then you may be in for a tough fight. If you're lucky you can find a profitable niche (either geographical or industry) and establish some barriers that way. MS did this to us in the 90's (Delrina). But then Netscape tried to do similar things at a small company I went to after.