主题：【原创】闲聊微软 序 -- 丁丁鱼

Robert, my good friend, they couldn't even do a decent job of copying RSS aggregators, and the prior art was already a half-dozen years old when they decided to enter the market. Today's Microsoft isn't even good at copying. You're right, the Microsoft of 1989 was at the top of its game, copying Lotus, Wordperfect, Borland, Ashton-Tate and Novell. By 1992, they had wrapped it all up, only to see it unravel again and again. The problem is that the computer industry was never meant to be dominated by one company, but it's tantalizing, they came so close, only to be dethroned by the next layer of technology, which never comes from the market leader, it usually comes from the users, who, having been locked-in, finally figure out how to get unlocked. For too many reasons, when they (Microsoft, and IBM before them) try to cement their win, they end up the ones in cement and the market continues to grow around them, driven by the inexorable Moore's Law.

Today the dominant vendor in software is Google. How do I know? This morning their calendar service went down, and all of a sudden I could see how dependent on them I had become. That's why Microsoft stock is in the dumps, and why Google is riding high, but of course, they're repeating the same mistakes Microsoft and IBM made, and will eventually be unseated when the users take control again, as they are certain to do.

Innovation is the province of users. It's hard to see this in an industry that's so good at spinning its tale and in a publication like The Wall Street Journal that's so willing to help spin it. But IBM was unseated by users named Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Mitch Kapor and Philippe Kahn, Michael Dell and Rod Canion. And Microsoft was unseated by users named Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Linus Torvalds and a few others. Google is locking users in just like the others did, they can do it because the technology is new and mysterious, but soon it won't be so new, and the users will take control again. And that's where innovation comes from the technology world.