David Maynard writes:

Perhaps but it's not unusual for the 'engineer', or geek type, who often
like to 'build the best', or so they believe, and then blame limited
acceptance on the 'stupidity' of the buyer, or a market conspiracy.

The engineer is probably right, in a sense, but that won't pay the
bills. Apple has come up with many interesting innovations, but it is
rather blind in its belief that its ideas are the _best_ ideas, and
it's also very obstinate in not backing down on its principles. I
suppose that's commendable, in a way, but it doesn't bring in
business. If I truly believed Apple to be the best, I might invest in
it, but although Apple is distinctive, I'm not at all convinced that
it's the best, so paying a price premium for it (and spending eternity
under Apple's thumb for both the hardware and the OS) isn't justified.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure it was Apple's closed box approach that
was so much the 'mistake', after all, they all were at that time, as it was
IBM's mishandling of the PC, which threw it open to a flood of clones,
along with Microsoft providing the missing link of a competent O.S..
Although, if Microsoft hadn't someone else surely would have because that
became too big a market to ignore.

But Apple might have fared much better if the market had remained
proprietary system vs proprietary system, as it had always been.

As I recall, I skipped Apple just because it was far too expensive. I
liked the concepts and the look and feel and so on, but not enough to
pay such a severe price premium. Also, at work we used PCs from the
beginning for everything except secretarial workstations, because they
could easily be customized to work with our mainframes, whereas with
Macs, there was either the Apple way or the highway.

But I'm not quite as willing to blame it all on 'corruption' as I am on the
complexities of large hierarchical organizations populated by imperfect
human beings. You don't have to be 'corrupt' to screw up

Point taken. I guess it's easy to find ten smart people, but much
more difficult to find 40,000 smart people. Eventually, you get a lot
of stupid people in the company.

On the other hand, a well established path to corporate doom is for the
entrepreneur who started it to try running the whole she-bang as it grows
beyond the ability of any one person to manage.

Yes, but conversely, the beginning of the end for many companies is
marked by the departure of the founder(s). Disney, Hewlett-Packard,
Microsoft, IBM ... the list goes on and on. Notice that Microsoft has
changed since Bill Gates left.

But after IBM's debacle with issuing BIOS source one can surely see why
Microsoft doesn't do it.

IBM had a history of publishing source, which was the norm at one time
for mainframes. Microsoft never had any exposure to that.

Again, I think it's more fundamental. I mean, a 'soaring success' is often
started by a 'great idea' but markets change, products mature, competitors
move in, so where does the next 'great idea' come from? It isn't as if
they're a dime a dozen, you know

If the first great idea was pure luck, that's true. But if it was the
product of a really smart group of people, they should be able to come
up with other great ideas.

What, in particular, do you have in mind?

Since Bill Gates assumed a background role, Microsoft has shown
distinctly less innovation and much more bottom-line-style management.
Steve Ballmer is a businessman rather than a geek, but he has no prior
experience, and now he's in charge of a multi-zillion dollar company.
Inevitably, mistakes are made, and eventually too many mistakes will
be made and the company will being its downward slide. Like so many
big companies, Microsoft will commit suicide; it won't be killed by
the competition.

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