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If your current OS is the market leader why wouldn't you lose sleep over it. They are running a business and have to worry about the competition. Progress on competing products might be good for consumers but not for the employees or shareholders of the company.

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If you are afraid of progress then you aren't the market leader because you aren't leading. You just happen to be the biggest company currently on the market.

Why not expand on the things where portable software is weak, like making a well-integrated system? But they missed it and let Apple fill that space.

Why not accept the future you predicted and be the first to arrive there? But web development only considered Microsoft an annoyance for a long time due to Internet Explorer.

Fear is the first step in taking steps to compete. Its an acknowledgement of the threat from a better product. If any company doesn't have that they will fail. This can be seen during the ballmer era where he totally ignored the threat posed by iPhone and ended up conceding entire mobile os market share to Apple and Google.

Whenever questions like why are they afraid of progress, it's for common good etc come up (which I feel are based on morality) , it makes sense to imagine yourself in their shoes and see what you would do.

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