DISQUS

Skip Oliva · 1 year ago

"What’s sad about this, of course, is that Microsoft still labors under ridiculous antitrust restrictions and government oversight efforts across the globe even though markets and technological innovation are doing a much better job of eroding the market dominance that those regulators fear."

Actually, I think the regulators fear markets and technological innovation more than Microsoft. That's why you're seeing the FTC taking steps to usurp control of standard-setting organizations (via the Rambus case and others) and why there's been a panicked rush to expand antitrust powers via wiretapping and eliminating due process for targets of antitrust investigations.

dmarti · 1 year ago

To be fair, Microsoft also labors with the benefits of "pro-trust" government policies such as patentability creep and the criminalization of some forms of interoperability through anticircumvention laws. Do pro-trust policies delay the natural succession and make it more painful than it has to be, like suppressing natural wildfires?

Ryan Radia · 1 year ago

A counterexample: Intel. They've been the king of desktop CPUs for 25 years, and everytime a rival comes close to challenging them, Intel emerges on top. Even when AMD was churning out faster, cooler, cheaper CPUs for a good while(Prescott vs Manchester era) Intel still emerged victorious with the groundbreaking Core architecture.

Now, with AMD in its death throws, it's hard to foresee how Intel will be dethroned given the competition. Wouldn't surprise me if Intel is still the market leader in another 10 years. And with Intel's foray into mobile devices via Atom, they could take over that market in a few years as well.

Richard Bennett · 1 year ago

Intel's success is mainly on PCs, and that's all one "era". If they can establish dominance on smartphones, I'll give them credit for two.

Google is looking to use regulation to extend the period of their dominance; "net neutrality," which they support in a big way, is a recipe for lock-in that raises the stakes for would-be competitors very high.

eee_eff · 1 year ago

@ Don: Yes that's exactly right, not to mention the intervention of the US government on the behalf of Microsoft in the EU case for example. How pro-trust is that?

@ Adam: IBM is proabably a bad example to use for an example of a "one trick pony":

The company which became IBM was founded in 1888 as the Tabulating Machine Company by Herman Hollerith, in Broome County, New York. It was incorporated as Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR) on June 16, 1911, and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1916. IBM adopted its current name in 1924, when it became a Fortune 500 company.

But an interesting point that Paul Ormerod makes in his quite interesting book Why Most Things Fail is that, to double the likelihood that a given company won't fail in the next year, it has to be twenty times the size. This rather weak correlation between size and survival holds true in many other industries, not just the tech sector so there really isn't anything surprising in Mr. Stross's observation. Ormerod also sends up these so-called pundits (like Mr Stross) who announce that some company has found some secret formula of success only to have it shown to be false over time.

In anycase, the reason why Microsoft is finding its battle so hard to win is very simple. They have, at every turn, shown that they believe they can write the rules, decide when their customers will up grade. Then Mr. Balmer calls the GPL a 'cancer; they are shown to be behind the funding of the SCO lawsuit vs. IBM. In short they have behaved like a monopolist. Customers don't like monopolists, neither do economists; there's a lot of sub-optimal market conditions that come to exist in markets dominated by just one player.

In the game of being a tech giant the game can't be won; smart players realize that the objective is to stay in the game as long as possible. If you succeed in become the 'top dog' (for a day) everyone will have you in their sights, and your connectivity will be zero. Many criticize IBM for creating the PC standard and then failing to monetize it adequately; BUT we will see who is around 20 years from now.

eee_eff · 1 year ago

@ Richard:
Google is looking to use regulation to extend the period of their dominance; “net neutrality,” which they support in a big way, is a recipe for lock-in that raises the stakes for would-be competitors very high.

Google's attitude towards net neutrality is largely defensive; they understand that given a non-neutral network, they could bee locked out of there main revenue stream extremely quickly. Many don't appreciate how fragile Google really is.

Richard Bennett · 1 year ago

Google's attitude toward neutrality is driven by the fact that their mega-datacenters exploit the flaws in Jacobson's Algorithm (multi-flow, slow start, RTT, loss unfairness) give them fast-lane access to residential networks at a wholesale price.

Steve R. · 1 year ago

I am please that the concept of the "The Rise & Inevitable Fall of Tech Giants"/b> is being raised here. in fact this deserves a lot greater analysis.

Adam writes "What’s sad about this, of course, is that Microsoft still labors under ridiculous antitrust restrictions and government oversight efforts across the globe even though markets and technological innovation are doing a much better job of eroding the market dominance that those regulators fear."(emphasis added)

While I disagree about the antitrust restrictions comment, Adam is quite correct that markets and innovation forces cause companies that have become "established" to fail. An example of this process at work was recently reported by TechDirt. It seems that a hobbyist was able to get Creative audio drivers to work with Windows VISTA. Instead of being grateful and offering this guy a job Creative attempted to shut this person down.

Regarding this incident, The Register had this quote from Creative: "The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products."

Whenever a company makes a statement, such as the one above, it is an indication that the company is now being run as a "cash-cow" business by managers who have lost the entrepreneurial spirit. To put it another way, the company is no longer interested in innovation or serving its customers.

In terms of Microsoft, TechDirt Reported on April 23, 2008 "Microsoft's Final 'Up Yours' To Those Who Bought Into Its DRM Story".

When companies refuse opportunities for innovation or undertake actions that screw their customers, they are starting the long slow ride into oblivion. I look forward to further analysis of how tech companies die because they fail to pursue Technological Freedom.