Interesting to note that he starts of with saying he wasn't at Microsoft in 1985 and then talks about a bunch of similarities between Google of now and Microsoft of 1985.
I know it is hard to imagine today that Microsoft was once like this...but they were. In a follow up post I might dive into how they lost that feeling. Personally, I think when the business people started outnumbering the engineering people...is when they started losing their way.
Don
How do you make key partnerships without great tech?
Think about OEM customization, i18n/l10n, backwards compability (etc). If MS didn't know how to do these, history would be different.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
Microsoft was infamous for announcing products that they didn't have ready. This often discouraged corporations from buying competing products.
In this case, business trumped technology.
Isn't having good "business people" the reason why every Fortune 500 company pays huge license fees to Microsoft and not to Google?