William Sommerwerck wrote:
"josephkk" wrote in message
.. .

Microsoft, like all large corporations, has no interest in producing
"best" anything, just an acceptable thing.

I beg to differ... Pioneer plasma. Nikon & Canon cameras. HP
just-about-anything (but calculators in particular). The SX-70.

I'd definitely agree that the Nikon and Canon products had a lot of
corner-cutting going on... they were designed at a price point for a
market.

HP is weird, though. HP was a large corporation that didn't act so much
like a large corporation, because even when it was public it was still
managed basically as a private operation by actual engineers who made
products for other engineers. HP is very much the exception to the rule,
or at least it was until Carly wrecked it.

Polaroid is another one of those oddities, a company actually driven by
engineering. Unfortunately a side-effect of that was making a lot of
ingenious and amazing products that nobody wanted, like Polavision.
The SX-70 was interesting too; in terms of image quality it was a step
down from the older 2-part pack technology, but Polaroid found out what
the market really wanted and made it for them and if it wasn't necessarily
the best image quality that was fine.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."