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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

I totally see Microsoft ruining TikTok simply because of their corporate culture. Microsoft has had an astonishing history of destroying billions of dollars in value simply because they can't manage their products better. Internet Explorer, Bing and their mobile phones represent entire industries where Microsoft has been totally decimated despite enormous advantages in terms of resources and monopolies.

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I wasnt aware that the bar for having a good corporate culture was to be so utterly successful at everything you try ever that you end up with a monopoly in every single sector you ever compete in and become the most successful company in human history. Somebody should tell Nadella that the new corporate culture he is building at Microsoft that has led to their enormous turnaround in share performance and public perception is all in vain and has failed because ballamer laughed at the iPhone once.

Your premise is very obviously false on the face of it: the notion that a company can own everything, always succeed, and generally dominate every major segment it enters.

Your criticism is that Microsoft isn't a $5+ trillion company, doesn't have five plus monopolies (desktop OS, mobile, browsers, search, and a few others that would go along with those positions including advertising), and basically isn't all knowing and all powerful.

What you're projecting is impossible of course. No company could ever accomplish all of those things. What you're holding up as a supposed indication of incompetence, is in fact unavoidable: failure will happen, you will not always win, your products will not always succeed, and most likely you will fail the majority of the time; it doesn't matter who you are, or how big you are.

You realize that Microsoft is the third most valuable company in the US? It was the most valuable in 2001.

The browser wars are old. The only thing having dominance in browser market share is good for is advertising.

As far as mobile, it hasn’t been that great for Google either. It came out in the Oracle trial that Android had only made Google $22 Billion in profit from inception through 2016 (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...), much less than it paid Apple during the same time period to be the default search engine for iOS.

There is no reason to believe that the economics are any better now.

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