MS is facing tougher competition in several areas now

[Alby_da_Wolf]

thx1139 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.

I beg to differ.  Word 6 beat WordPerfect because WordPerfect didnt believe business wanted Windows based solutions. WordPerfect for Windows from the same era was still a DOS program in a Windows shell. AmiPro was niche, but nice.  Access beat Dbase and Paradox because Dbase didnt release a Windows version until Windows 95 and Paradox was huge and bloated.  Excel beat Lotus 123 for the same reason Word beat WordPerfect.  Basically the other office based solution manufacturers were slow to move to Windows 3.1 and it cost them. Finally Windows beat OS/2 because IBM didnt build apps for OS/2 and when they did they were hugely expensive.  Mac didnt beat DOS/Windows because Apple kept them very expensive and hardware was locked to Apple (even peripherals at the beginning had to be Apple).

Competitors like WordPerfect and WordStar were slow to go to Windows, but the versions of MS programs that besides being on Windows, also deserved better sales than competitors were not so many. Word 2 was quite good, but Word 6 was so worse than it that it would had deserved to be beaten by its predecessor and that users stuck with Word 2 and let it rot waiting for competitors to catch up and compete with Word 6 successors, WordPerfect caught up quickly enough, and in Win 95 OSR2 times the first decent Win 9x, WordPerfect Suite was as good as Office 97. IBM was verey clumsy and not committing itself to port SmartSuite to OS/2 in reasonable times was a deadly mistake, but it's undeniable that IBM felt constrained and hampered in any true possible competitive effort by antitrust threats. MS was already quickly killing or absorbing its competitors one after the other, but antitrust wasn't paying much attention to it yet, still watching IBM. And even after, threats against MS never were so harsh and serious as against IBM, only a minority of states ever arrived to be willing to threaten to split it, but they never gathered a majority to make that threat real and effective. Being threatened only with fines, MS was actually free to behave as it wanted, as paying those fines, when it could benefit more from going on behaving unfairly, never was a problem.