Microsoft Is Now Irrelevant To Computing, And They Want You To Know It

Charlie Demerjian | SemiAccurate | May 15, 2014

Opinion: Two recent cave-ins leave no doubt they are done for

With two major cave-ins in the past few weeks, Microsoft is screaming at the top of its lungs about how irrelevant it is. If you didn’t understand the fall of Microsoft from powerful monopolist to computing afterthought, let SemiAccurate explain it to you.

For the past few decades, Microsoft has been a monopoly with one game plan, leverage what they have to exclude competition. If someone had a good idea, Microsoft would come out with a barely functional copy, give it away, and shut out the income stream of the innovator. Novell, Netscape, Pen, and countless others were crushed by this one dirty trick, and the hardware world bowed to Redmond’s whims.

The company sucked the life and innovation out of the industry for so long that eventually no one innovated because it was pointless, if the idea was good, Microsoft would end it. Ask Gateway about doing something as basic as making the initial desktop and installation process more user-friendly. Microsoft killed them for the sin of trying to make the user experience better. Everything stagnated as a result of this misuse of monopoly power...