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Content Tagged with User:jerryk + apple

From a recent Roughly Drafted article:

Spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt by spewing ignorance and false information are efforts to keep the world stuck in the tech rut of the 90s, where no critical thinking was required. Lazy pundits like no possibility of being wrong, so working to keep the technology world enslaved to Microsoft helps them appear to be insightful when they prophesy that Microsoft will eventually come out with a copycat version of whatever anyone else is doing. Sure enough, it happens.

The same Mike Elgan wrote in Computerworld last fall that Microsoft’s Zune “scares Apple to the core,” and announced that Microsoft would “leverage the collective power of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Soapbox (Microsoft’s new “YouTube killer”) and the Xbox 360” to push Zune adoption. What a celebration of half decade old decrepitude and three new but clearly dismal failures!

It’s amazing how much lip service still gets paid to the interlocking Microsoft monopolies in spite of the fact that just about every one of their ballyhooed announcements of the last few years has floundered even with the potential lock-in and network effects that MS managed to exploit so successfully in the past. The old myth that “Microsoft always ships plague-infested rat turd in versions 1 and 2, and then it gets it right and conquers the world with version 3.0” that our management used to reassure us with internally seems to have become progressively more invalid as time has passed.

Unfortunately, from the inside, what the absorption of that myth seemed to me to produce was an intellectually slovenly and unimaginative engineering culture that assumed that pinching off a version 3.0 of something was a necessary and sufficient condition for market domination. This leaves the question of what the company is left with today? A horde of zombie troopers-based product development organization that strains and labors to produce a sub-mediocre product like Vista even after repeated delays and massive cuts of features, the feasibility and usefulness of which were often in doubt from the outset? An “enter new markets by acquisition” business development machine that shows up late to every game, buying the 4th or 5th place not-quite-also-run and then managing to use its boundless resources to make a market loser even more mediocre? An internal corporate culture of partners and plebeians where the latter are either disgruntled malcontents or naive and feckless n00bs, while the former continue to evolve into the near-looting kleptocracy that marks a large company that has passed from vigorous adolesence into senescence with only the briefest stopover at maturity?