Man, Google is the new Microsoft of the 90s. Fuck them. I have 3 Nest thermostats (bought prior to the Nest acquisition.)
Mind you that’s the old Microsoft. The new Microsoft is totally different.
> Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
They didn't shut down services, they'd make previous market leaders irrelevant & alternate implementations difficult to impossible (as they couldn't keep up).
Their attitude here would have been to not buy Nest but ship devices reimplementing the Works-With-Nest protocol, then add convenient / useful new features to the protocol in ways difficult for Nest to implement, and finally manage to lock it down such that Nest simply wouldn't be able to use the extensions while retaining compatibility with WwN devices themselves.
They'd kill Nest, not the WwN ecosystem.
But generally speaking I don't disagree with your assessment. It's just that media for hire was never really their strong suit and the Zune was a bit of a joke.
Where they must have suffered a world of pain is to keep old software compatible on newer Windows versions and I actually appreciate that.
Spoken like someone who never owned one. The hardware (built by Toshiba) was excellent as was the software - if you avoided the harebrained DRM scheme and loaded your own MP3s.
I got a defense however:
You may recall that this completely idiotic DRM implementation allowed to beam a DRMd song up to 3 times to other Zune users. That process was called squirting.
One /. commenter suggested that one should imagine Steve Balmer in the process of squirting.
Well, that pretty much killed it for me.
Hopefully most wp8 devices can be upgraded but I would not depend on that for long...
They don't shut down every service, just ones that aren't performant from a business perspective.
Which, I would think, works pretty well as a business model.