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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Hurst who wrote (172185)	10/8/2005 8:38:08 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 281500

Soon perhaps people will be saying "I don't think we would have missed a beat if Google never existed. I just don't get it. I was using Alta Vista 7 or 8 years ago. I don't see the difference.

To: Don Hurst who wrote (172185)	10/12/2005 12:19:08 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Don, Gates and Co are adept at pressing their advantage to crush their competition. But can you tell me what exactly has been microsoft's contribution to the computer science and industry? What innovations have they come up with? What revolutionary software did they ever design? Here is a very recent report from America's number one business school on Microsoft: knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu ... Marketing professor Peter S. Fader says Google's threat is a tune Microsoft has heard before. "It's history repeating itself over and over and over. Every time a new threat emerges to Microsoft, people think, 'Oh, this is it -- the one that's going to knock Microsoft off the block.' There's no reason to believe it will play out any differently this time. Google is a different kind of competitor, but Microsoft has dealt with a pretty wide range of competitors before. It's a tortoise-and-hare scenario. And Microsoft is a very good tortoise. What the company will do is figure out a way to replicate the features of competitors' products. The products won't necessarily be better, but they will be adequate." Whitehouse suggests that Microsoft may have to change its philosophy if it truly wishes to compete with Google. "Microsoft has tremendous resources, and it performed a similar turnaround once before when it took on Netscape in the 'browser wars' of the late 1990s. Microsoft, however, tends to focus on stopping the onslaught of the web -- which it did very well with Internet Explorer in the late 90s -- but then falls back and refocuses on its core operating system and desktop application businesses. So, for example, in recent years we've seen a major push to develop Vista [the long-delayed operating system, once code-named Longhorn, that is scheduled to replace Windows XP in 2006], but there have been no major new improvements in Internet Explorer in years. "It's not clear how much Microsoft actually believes that the web is the platform of the future. After conquering its immediate adversary, the company tends to retrench and fall back on developing its core assets. That may work again this time. But, eventually, it may not be enough to forestall the Internet tidal wave that will eventually arrive."