Re: What the market wants...
> It's always tricky to reliably determine what "the market" wants, particularly if your own job relies on a getting specific answer.
Some good analysis in the article. I can't help being reminded of the early 90s, in fact, when Windows 3 came out. At that time Lotus was king. In fact, they were so crucial to the PC platform they could not envisage a future that they didn't dominate. When Windows 3 looked like a step up from DOS, and knowing the backward step Lotus 123 v 3 was, we went to talk to Lotus Development about how they saw the future. Could be DOS, could be Windows, could be OS/2, they said, we don't care. We had the same discussion with Microsoft (yes, customers could indeed go to talk strategy with these companies in those days...) We're throwing everything at Windows, said MS. We know we have work to do to get beancounters to trust Excel, our bought-in spreadsheet. We think we can produce something as good as Wordperfect or Multimate.
On the basis of those discussions, we moved from the dominance of Lotus to a Windows strategy, and were pleased to have such a clear idea of where we were heading. Within 5 years, MS were starting to deal with the failure of success, like Lotus had. By the late 90s, MS strategy amounted to a mere marketing flavour of the month. The foray into phones shows they have still not learnt the lesson of what gave them their dominant position 27 years ago.
Makes one wonder about humanity's capacity to handle true power.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
