The death knell for Microsoft's monopoly has already sounded.
Microsoft produces poorly designed, brittle, badly implemented, unsecure, unscalable, unstable and generally bush-league technology. Their original success resulted from owning the programming interface to the completely open PC platform and leveraging that to dominate the applications market. That rather simplistic business appliance has been putting on weight lately, however, the nutty-professor-esque body isn't well suited to their toy-like frame. Sadly for them, it's too late to do anything about it.
Unilike semiconductors, you can't shrink software without redesigning and reimplementing the whole system and you can't shrink Windows and make it more secure, more reliable and more extensible at the same time! Microsoft doesn't get modern software technology but what they do seem to understand is the notion that their feeble little collection of APIs is in imminent danger of irrelevance.
I get the feeling Intel and Microsoft aren't getting along since Andy Grove really knows whose technology commoditized the desktop computer, and his could at least be called real technology. Microsoft has never developed anything, it's simply a monkey-see-monkey-do-monkey-fail-monkey-try-again operation. |
