Why Microsoft killed Courier | Hacker News Reader

Why Microsoft killed Courier

dailytech.com

26 pointsj-g-faustus6 comments

In the old days, when competitors were afraid to even say Bill's name, Microsoft would have hedged their bets.

Microsoft sold some crazy UNIX thing called Xenix, DOS, and ported their software to OS/2 and Mac OS.

Microsoft did not care who won, as long as they were positioned to get their foot in the door, make a huge profit, kill off all the competition, start displacing their upstream and downstream dependencies, and cement their position by extend-embrace-extinguish.

They have one offering on the mobile, nothing to speak of in the tablet space, and very few apps / trojan horses for iOS / Android. It's like watching Ulysses stick to the Marquess of Queensberry rules.

The difference being, of course, that in the old days Microsoft was not a convicted monopolist.

> According to Courier team members, the 130+ team had several finished prototypes and could have brought the device to market in mid-2010 with a bit of extra manpower.

A bit? They had some prototypes with just the industrial design, some with just the software, some with just the performance - but none with all the aspects of the finished product. And they say they were a few months away?

The hubris behind this kind of thinking is astonishing. It would take nothing short of a miracle to pull together all these elements in such a short timeframe. There are so many inter-related aspects that would prevent this. Performance, battery life, weight, heat dissipation, software drivers, power management - must all be designed and working in concert for a successful product.

And that says nothing about the product positioning. Are there seriously millions of architects out there who have been saying: "Boy, I wish I had a small, portable computer screen I could sketch my ideas out on." ? There's a reason they have huge drafting boards - they think big, and need big spaces to sketch out their big ideas.

I love the way they were thinking outside the square, and there were some seriously cool ideas in Courier. But it seems much more like a groovy concept than a nearly shipping product.