Re: The Age of the Customer is over
It's not new. That's how Microsoft always operated. Look up "Embrace and Extend".
Back in the 90's, there was a series of trade shows where many start-ups (the moniker didn't exist yet, but that's what they were) would present some amazing new software. By the end of the trade show, one of two things happened: 1) Microsoft announced that they were working on their own version which would work with Office (meaning, the announced start-up would NOT); 2) the start-up (or at least their software) was bought up by Microsoft. Later iterations of this would have start-ups banking on (2) to make money.
Invariably, the software either vanished, or came to public a few months later as a pale zombie shadow of the original presentation that never worked very well. Many hopeful and amazing advances in technology, in particular for word processing and writing, were killed or set back for DECADES by this, and came only to users when the Microsoft monopoly was broken by mobile devices.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
