Microsoft's secret is, and always has been, incompetent competition. If you invent a time machine, don't kill Bill when you go back. Build something that's genuinely better for both users and developers.
> Build something that's genuinely better for both users and developers.
When I was much younger I, too, thought this way. Reality, however, does not align with this at all. Better products do not necessarily win. I might even go as far as saying that they almost never win. The vast majority of products --not just software, anything-- are mediocre at best. What they do is solve a problem.
One thing engineers, developers have to work hard to get out of their heads is that the actual users of software, operating systems, applications, websites could not care one bit about anything that happens under the hood. Nothing. Not one bit. To put it plainly, they doing give a shit. At all.
When someone wants to order a pizza online, write a document on their laptop or play some music, all they care about is that thing. Nothing else matters. You could have a dozen hamsters trained to push buttons behind the scenes for all the care.
It truly does not matter. Internalizing that realization, is, in my opinion, an important step in the evolution from being a junior engineer to someone with enough experience to understand reality enough to get the job done.
This does not mean creating garbage. It does mean not being a complete pain in the ass about how to deliver a solution that users will, well, use.
This argument about the Windows registry is just silly. And the proof is simple: BILLIONS of people are benefitting from what this software does. Billions. The only people complaining about it are engineers not experienced enough to understand what they think is utterly irrelevant when compared to the scale and success of the SOLUTION the software provides.
In my forty years of hardware and software development I have yet to find a single piece of technology I could not criticize to one degree or another and, given the opportunity, improve. And yet, with enough experience, you realize this is the wrong metric to focus on.
People's needs are served by solutions. Their lives are improved by software and hardware that solves the problems they have. The person in the hospital recovering from a heart attack gives two shits about the Windows registry, even though nearly the entire computing chain that was used to save his life was likely run on Windows computers. That's reality. The rest is geeks not understanding that they don't know what to focus on or how to actually evaluate the value of a solution, which very often turns out to be far less than ideal and can always be criticized from a distance, both in time and space.
EDIT:
> incompetent competition
Serious question: Do you stop to read and think about what you are saying? I am not attacking you at all. I am just trying to understand how you might justify this perspective.
"incompetent competition"?
This is the company that has f-ing owned home, desktop and enterprise computing for what, FOUR DECADES? Incompetent? C'mon. They have solved problems for people and companies large and small for decades. The world has been running on MS solutions for longer than some of the people reading this have been alive. That is far from incompetent competition. Very far.
Serious question: Do you stop to read and think about what you are saying?
I don't have to. I was around when the "competition" consisted of companies like Lotus, Borland, Digital Research, and WordPerfect... to say nothing of IBM and Netscape.
All of which reinforce my point nicely. Microsoft succeeded because they sucked less than everybody else. Nothing more, nothing less.
It had nothing to do with sucking less or being better (whatever that means).
Sometimes success is about doing enough important things well enough while your competition does less or simply gets in their own way.
That was the case for IBM back then. I remember buying my first original IBM PC. The experience was definitely what one expected from the International Businesses Machines corporation. Not what that market ultimately needed. They started it, failed to execute and lost prominence. Microsoft took advantage of that, and more.
They started it, failed to execute and lost prominence. Microsoft took advantage of that, and more.
So we're in violent agreement, then.
Although I was thinking of OS/2 rather than the PC itself when I cited IBM as an example, your example is valid as well. Market leadership, like control of a car, isn't usually lost but rather given up.
