How a mighty company can destroy itself

The full Varity Fair article is now available: Microsoft’s Lost Decade.  Excellent article IMO.  Some of the comments pick at technical inaccuracies, which may be the case, but I was most interested in the corporate dynamics.

There was a short-lived 1984 comedy series on USA TV called Empire, which was all about board-room shenanigans.  It didn't last long -- I suspect the sponsors felt it hit too close to home.  Wish I could get it on DVD.

Good article indeed, aye.

For all of Microsoft's faults though, they never worried me as a company despite their monopolistic power and their repeated shenanigans.  Although they were officially "The Enemy" to my world which is the *nix community, they had one very important property that made them harmless in practice --- total incompetence at being evil.  Every evil move would always come unstuck in anti-trust hot water and result in repeated fines by EU bodies, their internal documents repeatedly leaked and highlighting their bad conduct to anyone who cared.  In any case, nothing they ever did could really harm open source and open systems, even their attempts at "embrace and extend" always fizzled out.  It was all totally ineffective.

Unlike Microsoft though, other companies in the sector are not evil and incompetent, but evil and very competent.  All of the companies which have made the equivalent of App Stores (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and now late to the party through their incompetence as usual, Microsoft) have implicitly waged war on the foundations of the Internet and on open systems, because they have balkanized it, corralling users off into their own sections of it and creating bespoke applications that only work with their own sites.

Even worse, unlike in the early days of the Internet when protocols were defined in RFCs and then sites implemented services that used them, this new generation of Internet providers makes up their own protocols for their own sites, and so their apps don't work with any other site.  The malaise is almost universal, with Google Talk and Gmail being almost the only exceptions as they use standard XMPP and IMAP+SMTP (most other Google services are totally corralled to Google though, not like these open ones).

As a result, interoperability between services of the same type (for example, in social networking between Facebook and Google Plus) is almost non-existent.  A new company can't come along and make another instance of the "Facebook protocol" and then federate with Faceboook, as you could with SMTP say, and so the major cornerstone of the IETF mission statement -- interoperability -- has been totally demolished.  That's a real danger, an attack on the very foundations of the Internet.

Plus, there's the war on privacy from all quarters.  Very little to say about that, it's universal.

So really Microsoft is a complete non-event on the dangers front, a pussycat in wolf's clothing.

Pussycat so far, that is.  There are signs that this might change:  UEFI.

Morgaine.

Good article indeed, aye.

For all of Microsoft's faults though, they never worried me as a company despite their monopolistic power and their repeated shenanigans.  Although they were officially "The Enemy" to my world which is the *nix community, they had one very important property that made them harmless in practice --- total incompetence at being evil.  Every evil move would always come unstuck in anti-trust hot water and result in repeated fines by EU bodies, their internal documents repeatedly leaked and highlighting their bad conduct to anyone who cared.  In any case, nothing they ever did could really harm open source and open systems, even their attempts at "embrace and extend" always fizzled out.  It was all totally ineffective.

Unlike Microsoft though, other companies in the sector are not evil and incompetent, but evil and very competent.  All of the companies which have made the equivalent of App Stores (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and now late to the party through their incompetence as usual, Microsoft) have implicitly waged war on the foundations of the Internet and on open systems, because they have balkanized it, corralling users off into their own sections of it and creating bespoke applications that only work with their own sites.

Even worse, unlike in the early days of the Internet when protocols were defined in RFCs and then sites implemented services that used them, this new generation of Internet providers makes up their own protocols for their own sites, and so their apps don't work with any other site.  The malaise is almost universal, with Google Talk and Gmail being almost the only exceptions as they use standard XMPP and IMAP+SMTP (most other Google services are totally corralled to Google though, not like these open ones).

As a result, interoperability between services of the same type (for example, in social networking between Facebook and Google Plus) is almost non-existent.  A new company can't come along and make another instance of the "Facebook protocol" and then federate with Faceboook, as you could with SMTP say, and so the major cornerstone of the IETF mission statement -- interoperability -- has been totally demolished.  That's a real danger, an attack on the very foundations of the Internet.

Plus, there's the war on privacy from all quarters.  Very little to say about that, it's universal.

So really Microsoft is a complete non-event on the dangers front, a pussycat in wolf's clothing.

Pussycat so far, that is.  There are signs that this might change:  UEFI.

Morgaine.