ABC News has a piece on their web site with the title “Silicon Insider: R.I.P. Microsoft? “. They compare Microsoft to Silicon Graphics. Back when I started my current job Silicon Graphics was the leading internet server provider. When you walked into a data center there were racks and racks of Silicon Graphics servers and few predicted that the company would tank the article says, except the author who did a pice on them for Fortune.
I understand the analogy, I brought the first Sun machine into that data center filled with Silicon Graphics equipment and people thought I was a little daft, but I had been in the Unix server business back at HP and thought Sun was a better bet in the long term and it was (at least at the time). But, I am not betting against Microsoft. I might cheer for Microsoft’s competitors on occasion but I think this is the press taking itself too seriously. Microsoft IE has lost market share to FireFox, and frankly I think it should. Microsoft might even lose market share to Apple this year, and that would not disappoint me. But they have quite a lot of market share to lose. And for many many consumers Microsoft Windows defines what a personal computer is and does. I don’t see that changing any time soon.
