But it's still nowhere near as "evil" as
MS former dominance
This argument comes up a lot but I just don't see it.
In regards to the death of such companies like Netscape or Borland, you cannot put the blame on Microsoft's evilness. Sorry but you cannot. These companies completely fucked up their products. If they kept working and improving instead of fucking up their products, Borland would still sell developer tools and Netscape would still make serious money with their browser.
Also, take a look at Adobe. This company is not only big and old, but it thrived in a Microsoft-dominated world with products that directly competed with Microsoft's own products.
Now do a small exercise, take the effects of present-day Apple and scale that to a 90% market-share.
Half of the reason Netscape and Borland died was because of their own mistakes. The other half was that Microsoft had competing products and proceeded to crush them. If Microsoft had taken graphics editing more seriously by creating a Photoshop competitor bundled with Office or built Silverlight 5 years earlier than they did instead of bundling Flash into Windows, Adobe's story would have been very different.
On how many products can a single company work on? If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else, just how they moved the engineers that worked on IExplorer to Silverlight. It's as simple as that.
Even if a company is one of the biggest and wealthiest in the world, development still takes time and resources. Which is why hypothetical questions like what would have happened if Microsoft built Silverlight earlier DO NOT make sense, simply because they didn't build Silverlight earlier and that's that.
Disregarding the fact that Microsoft already had a Flash competitor (ActiveX), Silverlight's technical advantages comes from the underlying platform, which is .NET and no matter how you look at it, if you're talking about current-day Silverlight, then you must include .NET into that equation.
On building Silverlight 5 years earlier, that would have been impossible, considering you're talking about year 2003, with .NET being initially released in 2002. So to make that decision 5 years earlier, then you have to shift the evolution of everything that led to it 5 years earlier. That means the release of .NET should have been in 1997, so development on it should have started somewhere in 1994, before the release of Windows 95.
You could then say that if only Microsoft invested more resources into .NET and Silverlight, then these projects would have been released faster. But by all indications Microsoft made .NET and the Avalon-related technologies (like WPF and Silverlight) their top priority, so they simply couldn't work faster.
"If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else"
huh?
So all that time they were working on silverlight, there was no one working on xbox. or office. or ie. or windows vista/7/xp-patches. or sharepoint. or asp.net. or sql server. or iis. or c#. or linq. or ford sync tech. or metro. or windows phone 7.
Please...
had they wanted to get in to the photoshop realm, they would have.
Adobe's big cash cow is Photoshop. Photoshop users are traditionally Mac loyalists, I doubt many of them would have given any MS offering the time of day.
Photoshop users use Mac because it works the best for what they're doing. If they could have had the same solution vastly cheaper and 80-90% as good you think they'd have been willing to pay thousands more for that 10-20%?
Photoshop gives you much more than 20% over GIMP. Photoshop is light years ahead of anything else out there and only getting more so (see latest sneak of deblurring photos).
Yes, there seems to be some disconnect between Microsft killing off competition and said competition simply being worse. Not to say that there weren't smaller companies with good products that were pushed out by some intentional decisions on Microsoft's part, but the headline examples always rung a bit hollow for me.
People forget, because it's seen as "hip" to hate on it now, but when IE6 was released, it really was a better browser than the competition.
What killed Netscape was that version 3.0 of their server products were terrible. At the time I was working for a company that had spent millions on version 2. It was easier to jump platforms than to try to get 3 stable for us...
Dude, people don't hate IE6 because it's hip, we hate it because it has wasted hours and hours and hours of time for each and every one of us who design for the web, and the websites you use are worse as a result.
Maybe IE6 was better than the competition in 2001, but it was also terribly buggy and non-standards-compliant, encouraged developers to include Windows-only components that made it impossible for users to change browsers or even upgrade, and then wasn't upgraded for 5 years. Five years. And they did it that way not by accident or incompetence, but because they knew before anyone else that the web was a competitor, and they wanted to screw it up as much as possible.
Hate hate hate IE6 and be proud of it. Microsoft has a lot of karma to make up.
Yes, but from when IE4 came out (1997) until late 2004 when Firefox came out, IE was the undisputed best browser (yes I'm ignoring Opera as we always have). That was 7 very long years of getting people to upgrade to IE from NN4.
What? No. Borland was vastly superior to Visual Studio. Today Visual Studio is the best IDE in existence, but in the Borland days creating a GUI was much, much easier in Borland.
In regards to the death of such companies like Netscape or Borland, you cannot put the blame on Microsoft's evilness. Sorry but you cannot. These companies completely fucked up their products. If they kept working and improving instead of fucking up their products, Borland would still sell developer tools and Netscape would still make serious money with their browser.
Also, take a look at Adobe. This company is not only big and old, but it thrived in a Microsoft-dominated world with products that directly competed with Microsoft's own products.
Now do a small exercise, take the effects of present-day Apple and scale that to a 90% market-share.