If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area long enough, your view of the world gets a little warped. “Hot weather” is anything above 75 degrees, “rain” is a four-letter word, and the East Coast might as well be a part of the European Union.
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area long enough, your view of the world gets a little warped. “Hot weather” is anything above 75 degrees, “rain” is a four-letter word, and the East Coast might as well be a part of the European Union.
Even newspapers here tend to skew your perspective. In recent weeks, Microsoft’s settlement was front page news, and if I’m not mistaken (there’s that perspective thing again), Microsoft garnered a bigger headline than the Giants’ wins and losses in the World Series. (But, of course. After all, everyone in the Bay Area works in the computer industry.)
But the news about Microsoft and the company’s anti-trust settlement being approved was hardly worth all of that ink. While the anti-trust case might have been important when it started, it’s mostly irrelevant now. Business happened, mergers happened, and the Old Economy slowly and patiently outlasted the New Economy, smartly integrating what worked on the Internet, and discarding everything else.
Moreover, today, Microsoft, like Sun, HP/Compaq, AOL, and Oracle, is faced with the challenge of reinventing itself, innovating new products, and pursuing new lines of business.
But, wait. Don’t gloat. Read that last sentence again. All of the companies listed above, not just Microsoft, are faced with a down economy, and as far as I can tell, no breakthrough, killer app to drive throngs of customers to their door. And that’s not a good thing. Why, it seems like the…
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