DirtyP2002 said:
The Windows Live Messenger is the best on the market and the Xbox360 (especially Xbox Live) is a success so far. The Internet Explorer is by far the most used browser in the world. --- It is just wrong to say "MS goes in and tries to destroy the competitors." MS is running a business, not a fanboy war. They want to make some money, like everybody else. They see some interesting markets (gaming / Instant Messenger / Search engines) and they jump in. Did they buy anybody to do so? No. They created a product and participated. They have the ressources to do so and they are doing it. They did not buy one single competitor and did not destroy the competition. |
With very few exceptions, Google has more than 50% marketshare in every country. In some countries it has as much as 90%. It is undoubtedly the most commonly used search engine in the world, and indeed the most popular website.
I find Bing absolutely useless. A Google search for a large website will reveal a search bar and sub-links for that website- Bing only has the usual title and summary. Everything Bing can do, Google can do. Yahoo is a pretty good search engine, but I find nothing comes close to Google in terms of number of results, relevance of results, and different search options.
Windows Live Messenger is the best, I agree (though the entire VGC staff with their AIM would probably disagree), I'll give you that.
Internet Explorer is the most used browser in the world, but it's not the best, and it's got nowhere near the dominance of, say, Windows OS (also my personal favourite). As of February this year, IE had just over 65% marketshare ( http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/02/02/internet-explorer-market-share-falling-like-a-ton-of-bricks/ ) and as the article name suggests, the marketshare is falling- down 2% from the previous month, and a good 12-13%, looking at that graph, from the previous year.
MS does try to destroy the competition. They're willing to bleed any amount of money to do it, because they know that once you have a monopoly, it's very hard for anyone else to steal it, and because they have no real shortage of money. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just what they do. Some would question it, but all's fair in love and war, if you're not breaking any laws, and Microsoft aren't. Very rarely do they settle for second place. They did this gen, because they saw it was unwinnable. Next gen, with their Natal technology, I can guarantee you they will be willing to spend any amount of money to get the NextBox in first place. But sometimes money can't buy you success.