MS is facing tougher competition in several areas now

[Alby_da_Wolf]

slowmo said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

[...]

I totally agree that the most dangerous attacks to MS won't come from Ubuntu. Some are already happening, some others are only delayed compared to when MS feared they'd have started (for example, consoles being able to totally replace home theatre PCs). Finally, most are totally unknown except by those that are preparing them.

About MS succeeding on PC due to competitors' ineptitude: true about financial management, true regarding some products, but false about some other products, Office and its single parts for example defeated far better office suites and single products, Word 6 was the worst, buggiest and most bloated word processor of its times, but survived to better competitors (and to Word 2 competition itself) just thanks to MS brute force. Not to mention that MS was fined quite a lot of times for unfair competition and it almost always preferred to pay the fines and keep on behaving unfairly, as for mysterious reasons, US legal system almost never thretened retaliations as hard as against IBM, for example. Company splitting never was a real danger for MS as it was for some years for IBM, even years after IBM ceased being a potential monopolist, as OS/2 and Smartsuite were still slowed by the fear of antitrust threats while Windows and Office were left free to kill them when MS power on PC market had already become greater than IBM's for years.

You're right that Office is in my opinion a true monopoly that Microsoft fostered and were allowed to behave badly with.  In fairness there was too many companies working to grab that monopoly rather than being altruistic and contributing towards a common standard file system that all office products would use.  In effect through brute force Microsoft have made their formats the business standard and it's a license to print money.  I wonder if they could have achieved this if the internet had been more prevalent earlier so people would have had access to applications such as Open Office earlier. 

The Ipad is a perfect example of a device taking vunerable market share from Microsoft as they really have no answer at this time to it.

You're true about the lack of format unification efforts by MS competitors, it took Sun, that had very little interest in the office suite business itself and a lot more in breaking MS' "siege", to create OpenOffice by releasing as open source StarOffice's code. Internet wasn't so small, but most of the open source community was still totally happy with text files for the simplest text documents and TeX and LaTeX when careful publishing was needed (BTW when printed documents publishing style uniformity is desired, for example in universities for theses, articles, papers, etc, and outside of professional publishing environments like print shops, LaTeX is still king).