Considering Windows was a ripoff from the Mac OS and was light years behind it, your original statements are just plain wrong.

If you want a history of the computer industry and how M$ got started, check out "Triumph of the Nerds".

This thing is ridiculously factually inaccurate. Ignoring the first paragraphs, how is it that the Xbox 360 has had three price cuts and the PS3 has only had "one small price cut?"

Interesting read but just a few things :

- Windows 95 is not the first version of Windows far from it (the version before it was 3.11 so that gives you an idea).
- Apple has been in the computer business since the end of 70s, it's not like they saw the popularity of the PC and decided "Hey let's make computers too!". Apple had a very sucessful run but then lost most of their market share to PCs before they reinvented their products to better fit the evolving market (even now they still have only a small part of the market).

Anyone else find that Sony section to be just a little ridiculous? It reads as if Microsoft is a complete mess with Sony looking down on them...

I did =(

You don't know the first thing about MS history, do you?  First of all, Windows is closer to 30 years old than 13  years old.  Secondly, Microsoft stole all of the ideas from Apple.  Apple stole the ideas from Xerox. Microsoft even swindled their first big product (DoS) from some poor family man who wrote it.  MS sold DoS for millions through a licensing deal with IBM and bought DoS from some poor sap for $50K.

The difference between Apple and Microsoft back then is approximately the same as it is today: Quality.  Microsoft had a shitty product (Windows) and Apple had a high quality product.

Since MS released office and Windows originally, they've tried and failed for almost 30 years straight to come up with a single damn profitable idea or product.  And they haven't found one yet.  The Xbox division has been arguably their biggest failure thus far from a monetary standpoint.

Microsoft just isn't good at competing.  They said they'd crush google.  After giving up on the idea that they were capable of competing with Google, they tried to buy Yahoo.

Couldn't you say the same thing about every section...?

The difference is their chosen business model. While Apple is making premium on every product sold on (comparatively) niche market, M$ runs its OS as an industry standard, with smaller profit per unit sold.

Sure, but there are more differences.  Apple's customers are all Apple's customers by choice, wheras MS customers are largely MS customers by cohesion.  "I have to be compatible with (business|school|friends/family) and therefore I have to run windows."

It's funny -- MS makes terrible mistakes that they claim aren't mistakes, then they have to clean them up later.  They're remarkably short-sighted.  Bill Gates stated, not all that long ago, that the Internet would never pick up for home users so they weren't going to design around it.  When it did become popular, they refused to create a security model around it.  Instead, in order to beat Netscape in the browser wars, Microsoft integrated their insecure browser closely with their OS ensuring security nightmares for years to come.

Now, about 10 years after everyone else had been implementing UAC, Microsoft introduced an overly-aggressive and piss-poor implementaion of UAC with Vista, claiming it was a security innovation.  Of course, by being overly aggressive it has the opposite effect as security and only trains users to type their password whenever prompted.

The problem isn't that MS copies its competitors and is late to the game over and over.  The problem is that MS misses the point when it does so and ends up with a shitty copy.  With the Xbox 360, you see primarily the fruit of better companies than MS -- those quality third parties putting out quality games.  Whereas the actual hardware for the 360 might be the worst hardware in the history of consumer electronics.

So what has MS done good lately?  I don't care much for Apple, but at least they don't make stupid decisions over and over and over.  At least they've made successful products this decade and at least they can perform standard business functions (like successful marketing campaigns), generating profit in multiple divisions, increasing consumer loyalty, supporting consumers properly, etc.

That may be so... I just don't know as much about Apple or Google. I mentioned Sony in particular because they've been thrown billions of dollars into the red to compete with Microsoft.