At $400 billion, Apple is worth more than Greece

[rocketpig]

disolitude said:

I have a feeling we could go back and forth on this for months. I will only address your last statement to avoid this.

Microsoft has always been a company that is late to the party. Their whole strategy is based on seeing which market is successful and enter it late, refine the product and outmuscle the competition over a longer period of time by using their resources. Their mobile strategy used to be a mess but for the first time i see them being on a right path there despite lack of marketshare at the moment. Down the road they will have one ecosystem for all platforms opposed to multiple ones that everyone else is doing. Even apple will have a hell of a time trying to merge osx and iOS once that bbecomes thes standard with windows 8 and beyond.

I think microsoft was in much bigger danger of fading away as you said 4 years ago as vista, xbox, phone, zune were massive failures at that time. Ttoday i see this turnaround well on the way and microsoft as a much more focused beast than they ever were.

We could go round and round about this for months.

I admit that I like a lot of the things MS is doing right now but I question whether it's too little, too late and whether they'll actually deliver on Windows 8. We've heard this song and dance before but the actual product has fallen short too many times in a row for me to be too optimistic about the operating system. But I admit that I love the idea of Metro.

I disagree that MS has always been late to the party. They were there for the birth of business desktop computing with Windows and Office. They were really rolling with Windows by the time the personal computer was ready to hit households in large numbers. But this time, they're entering at a massive disadvantage. They have not one but two competitors with superior products and marketplace dominance. Their software is behind both of them. They have no distinct hardware advantage. They don't have inroads to railroads consumers into these products via one of their established businesses, as they've done in the past through Windows (IE, Office, Exchange, etc.)

In short, this is a very different ballgame and for the first time in nearly two decades, Microsoft is going to have to play fair to win in the consumer computing market. And I doubt they're up to the task, at least not on the scale they did in the 90s and early 00s.