The NY Times has a pretty good piece on the current state of affairs for MisterSoftee. They basically point out Microsoft's futility in it's attempt to maintain it's status as tech industry leader now that the PC era is waaaay back in the rearview mirror and we're smack-dab in the middle of the internet era. I think that they start to point out some obvious reasons for the inevitability of Microsoft's fall. If you consider this article along with all of the other evidence that has mounted in recent years, you begin to see a larger theme: Microsoft can't innovate. This is a company that essentially built it's breathtaking success upon some amazing business saavy and sheer corporate market brutality. They successfully leveraged some incredibly opportunistic deals and partnerships to hoist a commoditized computing experience upon a doe-eyed market that was still just super-psyched about being able to drag files into the trash. The problem we have for them now is that both the enterprise and the consumer PC markets aren't the impressionable, uninformed pushovers that they were in the 90's. People aren't just looking for a computing experience but they're looking for the best computing experience and they demand convenience. I'll write more on this later but I think you can guess where we're going with this. Anyway, enjoy the article.
I also wanted to point out for my fellow Lotus fans that the article uses the IBM + Lotus acquisition as an example to show how the merge and aquire strategy doesn't always pan out. Lotus was an exciting, innovative software company that has arguably rotted on the vine under IBM's wing.
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