What competency can’t cure, money can. That’s the new strategy Redmond seems to be moving too as Microsoft looks to buy a stake in AOL. More so than the one-time investment the company made in Apple, this payout comes at a price.
Microsoft is in a problematic position. Until this strategy shift, buying out your competition, they relied on bundling - neither of which indicate a strong business model. And the products support this. Think Longhorn/Vista versus Tiger, IE versus Firefox, Opera and Safari, MSN web services versus Yahoo! and Google. With the exception of gaming (which I don’t know enough about) and Office suites, no expert would argue that Microsoft is leading in quality in any of these categories.
To figure out how we got here, we have only to look at the first strategy in place at M$: charge for something that used to be free and then eliminate alternatives. Once that worked for them, it was on to bundling and now acquisition. There’s no part of that equation that requires quality - their business model never has. Quality is as foreign a concept as innovation at Microsoft, despite how often they rattle them as buzz-words.
Belligerency as the third leg of World Domination also explains Baller’s embarrassing remarks toward Google. For those who have believed that Microsoft was the evil villain, Redmond seems bent on fulfilling their expectation. So how far can money get you? I guess we’ll see.
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September 19th, 2005 at 2:32 am
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