A Remark On Competing With MS

An old Monghol saying goes: "Don't take to the weapons of your enemy unless you can improve them substantially."

To analyze the weapons by which MS fought and fights their competition we must first know what they are up to.

What MS has been doing for a long time is not what their enemies always said the did. What they did is the same thing that we do and that all the others do: Making money by raiding the large body of federally subsidized academic and corporate work, that has been worked out in the US and elsewhere and that has been put into the public domain by virtue of federal democratic law: information procession theory, logic, algorithms, OS-theory, language design and so on and on.

They have been very good at implementing this and selling the resulting products (e.g. Xenix). Only in recent years have they shown serious weaknesses.

"To ignore MS" as Mr. Cringely says is important for companies when they design a product strategy but should not be done dogmatically. There is still a lot to learn from MS History.

While Jobs drives Apple back into its normal rational greed mode and IBM might look like a big future winner, MS is being confronted with the situation of being the empire themselves. This is a role that they are not very well prepared for: A lot of their energy and spirit came from being the rebels against the evil empire of IBM with an oppressive 70% marketshare worldwide in HW and SW. In this, MS is like their environment, the US. The US too, still has not really accepted the fact that they are not the Rebel Alliance but the Empire and accordingly and responsibly should act as such.

MS now have little to go up against and lots of turf to defend. IBM on the other hands bet some of their cards on associating with the rebel spirit of Linux and Java. They have still a far way to go. Let' see.

Still nobody but Google - who have no old turf to defend and newer research - knows by which weapons to beat MS if not by ignoring them or going into a niche for 5 years or so. If anyone wants to work with their weapons they have to do better and I mean really implement better and they must sell better and I mean really sell better.

MS used to treat developers better than their competitors which was a great strength because it helps in both fields. Being the empire means they cannot do this anymore as well. Oracle and Sun have not learned this lesson yet. Only some open source projects treat developers better than MS. IBM at least tries to. A bit. This is a beginning but no guarantee.

Let us ignore MS in what we do but not in what we can learn.