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Re: Ozzie and OS as commodity
First, I'm not sure their applications account as much as we think for their "grip" on desktops. Remember that Microsoft Office is the top productivity app on Macs as well. The grip to a large degree derives from the stuff Ray was talking about: the development environment, the tools, the support for people who work in that environment. The #2 guy at a competing software company (a pretty big one) told me tonight that he thought "90% of all business applications are written in Visual Basic." Maybe Microsoft deserves a little credit for making app development relatively easy. Call it "seduction" if you want, but Microsoft was interested when plenty of other companies weren't. Can we blame Ray for responding in kind? I suppose we can, on the grounds you outline. The hegemony extends itself through all these ties and dependencies between applications. But I'm still not that concerned. A special relationship between Groove and Office might be scary if Groove were another essential baseline gotta-have-it app. But so far it's not. By all accounts it's a great product, just not one we're all going to be using. My wife is fond of saying "trees don't grow to the sky." Microsoft is one of those trees. that has seemed to defy gravity for a long time. But they won't forever. There are responses to this message:
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