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I don't deny that there is something admirable about the way that Microsoft outdid the big companies back in the early nineties. But I do stand by my conviction that it was a different world back then. Microsoft had a whole market waiting for them that had simply not been served by the big guys. This is where they made their great breakthrough. I think that it isn't a coincidence that even today they are still fighting for their place in areas that were always dominated by UNIX systems. Well, OK, fighting may not be the best word here but it is clear that their status in the world of high-end computing and servers is hardly as comfortable as it is in the small server and home user market. Why? It's habit and costs again. If you're the first to open up a new market, you seems to get a headstart that will last you years (unless you badly screw up, of course).
And new windows operating systems will probably keep appearing until Kingdom Come. I just wonder about the state that they are in right now. They never were real pioneers (possibly to avoid alienating part of their customers by moving too fast) but their latest OS is certainly a major disappointment. Five years in the making and it's still not clear to me whether it deserves to be considered more than XP SP3 - an SP that they decided to put out as a new OS because it was high time to start cashing in after five years of investing. On top of that, most of its innovations can be traced back straight to Apple and Linux. This is what explains my concern: they are heavily inspired by open source concepts and yet they are working very, very hard to keep open source down. How much progress can we still expect if they get their way?
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