[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

So, am I supposed to judge you as the way you were as a 7 year old? Or, they way you are today?

That depends upon how different I am from that 7 year old.

Little kids tend to have a me-centric view of the world, and see things in terms of what they want. Part of the process of growing is learning that you aren't the only thing in the world, and that you won't (and can't) always get what you want, when you want it. It takes some folks longer to grow up than others, and some never really do.

Microsoft became the biggest, wealthiest software vendor in the world, and became used to having things its own way. It largely set the standards in the PC world, and had a "Do it our way" attitude to how things should be done. That's changing slowly, as the computer landscape has changed, and MS can't simply do things by fiat. It is learning the value of cooperation, but it pretty much had to be dragged kicking and screaming to that point.

It's still doing its best to dominate and control the PC market, though it's being a little more circumspect about how it does so.

Microsoft is in for interesting times, in the "Chinese curse" sense of the word. For years, MS was the quintessential "growth" company. It regularly posted double-digit increases in revenue and profits, and got a stock price in the stratosphere. It didn't pay dividends for a long time, choosing the retain earnings, but shareholders made fortunes in capital gains.

The problem it faces now is where continued growth will come from. It's in transition from a "growth" company to a "mature" company. Mature companies throw off enormous amounts of cash, but don't have stock prices in the stratosphere. MS needs to continue to grow, but how?

Over here, pretty much everything that can run Windows and Office, does. MS is having problems in Europe, which does not trust it. It's getting nowhere in India or China. The X-box is only beginning to contribute to revenues in any real way. The search business is being re-invented yet again, but thus far isn't a threat to Google.

You can make a good case that Vista got released when it did, not because the market needed it, but because MS needed a new revenue stream from a new product. Unfortunately, much of the hardware in the pipeline back then didn't have the horsepower to really run it effectively, pick up suffered, and MS got (another) black eye. (Win 7 should do better simply because more of what it out there now can run it.)

Bill Gates picked a good time to step aside. He walked away a winner, having built MS into the biggest most powerful software house in the world, and becoming (for a time) the richest man in the world in the process. His job was to create and increase shareholder value, and he did that very well.

Now Steve Ballmer has the reins, and his big challenge is preserving shareholder value, which means supporting the stock price. It's not clear to me that he can, and I'm rather grimly fascinated wondering what Microsoft will do in pursuit of that goal.

MS is growing up, finally. I just think it took too long to recognize it needed to change.

Keep in mind... IE was the first browser the brought a lot of stuff to the web like AJAX for one. At the time there were NO standards.

Sure. Standards evolved as the web did.

Anyway... I agree with you... we will always live with these issues as web devs. Even Gecko and Webkit and Opera render some stuff differently... and all the different javascript engines don't help either.

Thank you.

But, I do think blaming MS for all the ills of the world is just a bit to tunnel visioned for me. Hind sight is 20/20.

I don't blame them for all the world's ills. I do blame them for a chunk of the ills in the PC market.
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Dennis