Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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That's because Microsoft has the resources (both the money and the talent) to reinvent everything ... how many other companies can claim to have developed an OS (mostly) from scratch, or a VM + a language + an IDE + an ecosystem (mostly) from scratch, or a Flash-competitor or something like Bing, again, mostly from scratch.

Yeah, they clone or buy ideas and are known to beat their competition through illegal practices ... but no other company I know can be so infected with the NIH syndrome and get away with it.

"far more open standards" is really subjective. Microsoft invented Ajax. And before IE 6, when they've stopped caring, IExplorer kicked Netscape's ass.

And to me, standards are also relevant for hardware ... Microsoft is know to favor standards and openness in hardware. That's how they've beat both IBM and Apple.

So in the grander scheme of things, we don't know which company served a greater good. From my perspective computing wouldn't be as ubiquitous as it is today without someone like Microsoft.

Microsoft have money, they had talent but they no longer have vision nor talent.They can keep reinventing whatever they want, but gone are the days when they can use their OS monopoly to take over other markets(word processor, browser,...), because two future platforms of computing: mobile computing and web, they don't control.Between Google and Apple, Microsoft is getting beat on both vision and talent side.

Your description of Microsoft might be true for recent years but their dominance in the Market was through business practices not through superior technology. I think back to DOS and windows3.1 and the PC software was terrible. I'm not just thinking about apple here, there were a number of good microcomputer operating systems in the late 1980s.

Getting the best software developed on your platform is half the battle and history of Microsoft is to develop to market trends not to enter the market first.

Computing would not have been so ubiquitous without IBM, credit where credit's due.

Apple supports standards in hardware (USB, PCI, SDRAM, Ethernet, Firewire [debatable], DVI, DisplayPort, 802.11, EFI, CD/DVD-R). Most of their systems are made up of standards-based pieces... it's just the glue that holds them together that's proprietary.

Apple's non-compliance with USB standard example:

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/2010/04/chargin...

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