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Comment by louismg | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft acted like a spoiled monopolist who aggressively guarded their turf throughout the 80s and 90s. Absolutely. They wanted a PC on every desktop in every home running Microsoft software. All absolutely true.

But did they make this noise from a challenger position, which is the case for all the examples I cited? No. They acted like a big gorilla from the top.

Oracle too is crazy aggressive. In one of the books I mentioned, but not by name, is "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison is that God Doesn't Think He Is Larry Ellison." Fantastic book. Go read it.

It is absolutely possible to find exceptions. There are few absolutes. But I do believe that challengers to #1 who publicly make #1 the target rarely succeed. This is true. It's not "couldn't be further from the truth" because of a few examples.

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Microsoft was a huge underdog in many areas, namely to Novell and Wordperfect. Later in the 90s they tried to break into enterprise software, and were largely laughed at, having little credibility in the space. Today, they make billions on Windows Server, SQL Server and Exchange.

Were you in the computer industry during the 80's and 90's?

My bio and resume are on the site. I am sure you would interpret it different than would I.

I mean absolutely no disrespect to you here, but it's remarkably poor judgement to cite your bio and resume on this site in particular. While you were attending school, I was writing a variable interpolaters in COBOL (a language without strings) -- and I would usually never mention that here, because someone's going to show up that makes me look like the amateur that I am. Your experience is also very heavy in the marketing field, which makes it reasonable to conclude that you might not have had to deal directly with the effects of the business tactics that the giants used (and are still using). Quite a large number of people here, on the other hand, have a much more personal memory of the ruthlessness of the I.T. field. You are Stef Murky, speaking to a rather large crowd of Gregs and Pitrs.

That said: I read your post as though you were making a larger point that it's a strategic business error to focus on "taking down" a competitor, and that's probably usually true, and a good thing to remind people sometimes.

Unfortunately for the rest of the content of your post, it somewhat misses that Apple was referring to IBM in their 1984 commercial; that Apple was publicly mocking Microsoft in the early 90s before a lawsuit made them cooperate, at last, by bringing Office to the Mac; or, for more recent examples, that Google is working hard to depose Apple in the smartphone market or that Apple has its sights set on Amazon with their cloud offerings or ...

It's generally a good idea to focus on your product or service, not your competitor, but pointing to big, successful I.T. companies is not the way to make that point.

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