Mxsmanic wrote:

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.

Well, yes, and that's what my comment "But 'best' includes more than just
the technical" meant to address.


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.

Yes, but I think you're talking about a time period slightly after the
period I was, before the clones were in swing. Although, IBM *did* leave
the hardware open to encourage third party add-on suppliers, just not
copies, while Apple kept things much closer to the vest.

But the mainframe point is well taken and IBM would, of course, have a lot
more experience in that what with them being the premier mainframe supplier
at the time.


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.

Well, 'average' people or, simply, lots of people. And that'll take
managing because you simply can't expect everyone to be a genius, much less
a genius at everything. Not to mention you can't have even geniuses going
in every which a way direction. There has to be focus.


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.

Yes, there's the 'vision' thing.

Still, there's the matter of why would someone be induced to change the
vision? Stagnation is one possibility and the other is the 'new guy' making
his mark with his own 'vision', but if things are humming merrily along
he'd be foolish to change things too much so we get back to "where do we go
now?"


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.

Sure it was the norm because it only ran on the company's proprietary
hardware so, go to it folks, make more stuff for our proprietary hardware,
which is where the money was to begin with, and you're not releasing into
the market the thing that makes it proprietary, your hardware.

IBM failed to recognize just how utterly trivial it was, compared to
'mainframes', to duplicate the hardware, not to mention they had simply
purchased a public domain design made from freely available parts, and then
to publish the one and only 'proprietary' piece, BIOS source, *PLUS* haven
given away rights to sell the DOS (same, "who cares about the software?"
notion)... well, woops.

I'm not saying it should have been obvious at the time but it sure is in
hindsight and I'd imagine Microsoft noticed it along with everyone else.

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.

Sounds simple but, in practice, it isn't as it usually takes more than just
a really smart group of people as familiarity, experience, insight, or
whatever combination that went into the particular 'great idea' isn't
necessarily translatable into another one. I think it was you, yourself,
who pointed out that Microsoft was good at the business suite business but
not very good in others as they just don't have sufficient experience or
insight for them.

That's one reason why companies are always searching for a 'process' that
is, essentially, 'one-time genius' independent. I.E. idea generation from
market feedback, hire/consult 'experts' in the new thing, brain storming
sessions, focus group studies, etc..


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.

I wonder if that's because Bill Gates is 'gone' or if it's more the result
of this being about as far as a business suite/'Windows'O.S. combination
can take them, especially in a U.S. market, at least, that is closer to
saturation than it is the wide open early days of growing by leaps and
bounds and where you have to now do upgrades, or 'something', just to stay
even. The wave they were riding ain't there no more.

And there isn't another 'IBM' giant poised to dominate a huge future market
that you can sell DOS to and clean up when someone cracks their BIOS code
nor is anyone going to give them 'sell to others' license rights, so those
'great ideas' aren't going to happen again no matter how 'smart' they are.

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.

When you first posed that scenario I thought it made a lot of sense but the
more I think about it the more I question it, at least as a 'universal'. It
can certainly happen that way but you can also be simply obsoleted by the
next 'great idea'. For example, the introduction of calculators put the
slide rule folks out of business, at least in that business, virtually
overnight without them having to make 'too many mistakes'.

Of course, I suppose you can always call it a 'mistake' to not be
diversified enough (that's those bottom-line-style management types you
don't like), not see that microcomputers can do almost anything
(electronics wasn't their business), or whatever the 'next great idea' is
(how are you going to get around the patent/copyright?) but that's
stretching the 'mistake' concept a bit.

It's fun musing about it though.


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