Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does.

Actually I don't think most MS execs think they build the same cloud product. I think they believe they have the feature set, but they realize, probably better than most, that they're not as well integrated. This is largely due to antitrust concerns.

MS has been hamstrung on doing deep integration for a lot of features. Live Mesh is a killer feature if built into Win7. As an optional download, no one ever even knows it exists.

With the rise of tablets and mobile phones as computers, they may finally begin to be able to start adding functionality typically seen in standalone apps to the OS (as they can argue they no longer have a monopoly in the personal computing space). Until they feel comfortable doing that they're going to continue to just have silo'ed apps that never get traction. And I think their execs know it.

How much of Microsoft's difficulty integrating things into Windows is a result of the anti-trust lawsuit they went through? People seem to forget that Microsoft went through 3 years of worrying that the government would break them up because they bundled a browser with Windows. That had to have changed how they felt about bundling new things into the OS. Or do people think it was long enough ago that the culture has moved on?

How much of Microsoft's difficulty integrating things into Windows is a result of the anti-trust lawsuit they went through?...Or do people think it was long enough ago that the culture has moved on?

There are some things where this is almost certainly the case, like antivirus. For some other things, some of it has to do with selling an OS and not the whole package.

But I do think the cloud is one area where they'd love to have tighter integration -- but will DropBox, Amazon, and Google protest if they do? That's something that Apple doesn't have to worry about at all -- they can tell these other companies to shove it -- we don't have a monopoly.

Update: And we see the next step of their integration with XBox Live built into Windows -- http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-reveals-xbox-live-will-be...

> People seem to forget that Microsoft went through 3 years of worrying that the government would break them up because they bundled a browser with Windows.

I think that's a pretty large oversimplification.

Microsoft didn't get in trouble just for bundling a browser; they got in trouble for bundling a browser and then using their position of market dominance to lock out competition, e.g., they used Windows licensing agreements to forbade OEMs from preinstalling competing browsers on systems. Microsoft's behavior went well beyond just bundling a browser.

Yes, MS didn't want preinstalled 3rd party apps that replicated functionality. :-)

Although the browser bundling is what people remember there was much more to it than that - just ask Be and Hitachi. At the time the consensus was that Microsoft got off lightly after being found guilty of abuse (although the EU was much stricter).

But yes - it takes generations to change a corporate culture, so it may only just starting to change.

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