Kantor said:
And they killed everything that competed with the Xbox, Windows Live Search and Windows, right? EDIT: Not to mention Internet Explorer. |
Perhaps the point isn't that MS wins every fight (I shudder at the memory of BOB), but that they're willing to throw massive resources at a market to win over the long haul, and sometimes they overcome all obstacles and still win. Examples are MS Office and Internet Explorer. At one time MS was a minor player in both application spaces: Lotus 123 was king of the spreadsheets, WordPerfect was king of the word processors, Netscape was the king of browsers, etc. But with enough investment and time, MS crushed the competition. As far as office apps go, MS still has about 80% of the market... and that's against a free product. Internet Explorer is currently estimated at about 68% market share overall.
Of course it's entirely possible that MS will never be number one in consoles, but they're likely to keep bleeding a little bit of red (respective to the billions in profit they make every quarter, overall, as a company) just to win the war. Yeah, it doesn't seem fair that an 800 pound gorilla can just step into the ring and use its warchest to start throwing hard punches right away, but that's the way some industries work. Did they beat the PS2 with the Xbox? No. Did they go from zero market share to something respectable in one console generation? Yes. Is Sony out of the running? No. Did they go from being King of the Hill last round to a 3rd place player this round? Yes.
Time will tell.
PS - I use Macs at home as I'm not a Windows fan... but I admit that I'm in a small minority of users.
