The more successful you are in the marketplace, the greater ability you have to leverage your product in innumerable ways.
True to a certain extent. It's called critical mass. You have the distribution channels in place, the superior products, and a whole lot of money, and a whole lot of power. But all of that power is dependent 100% on one thing: Consumer acceptance of your product. Consumers today are in fact less loyal than alley cats. When they see the next big thing, they leap on board en masse, with nary a thought for loyalty. Many mistake a consumer liking a product with blind loyalty.
But let's take Apple's OS. They have bundled Cyberdog, a web browser, in their OS for years. I'm fairly ignorant on the subject of Apple, but this is what I read from a poster lately.
So is it fair to Microsoft to deny them the right to make their product at least as good as Apple? Is it right or wrong to force Microsoft to emasculate Win98 so that it has inferior capabilities compared to Apple OS? If that's the point our society has gotten to, then that is sad.
Those that claim that the wintel platform and the wintel business practices stifle innovation are simply LYING. Take a look my friends, at Mirabilis LTD., an Israeli company owned by just four shareholders. They have with their ICQ product managed to gain 11 million registered users world-wide; about the same number of users as America Online. Mirabilis is being bought out now by AOL, for a cool $300 million. Imagine: Mirabilis accomplished what they did right under the nose of not only the beastly Microsoft, but also America Online, which had a competing feature called 'buddy list'.
This Mirabilis miracle happened because of the Microsoft business practices, not in spite of them. Those who would claim that Microsoft stifles competition simply aren't reading the news. |
