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> Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?

iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?

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Like all big companies, when something comes along that is growing fast, where they don't have a product, they might choose to buy an existing one to get in the market. On some of them they might spend lots of time and money building huge amounts of new technology and improving on some of them so they were hardly comparable to the original. SQL Server is one example I worked on. The original sybase product had a pretty nice sql language with stored procedures, but the implementation didn't take us very far. It was basically awful. We spent years building out a new database with that same sybase surface layer, we added lots of new things over time - new execution system, new query optimizer, integrated it with .net, etc. Because we didn't have to develop a new surface or sql language, it helped a lot. I always wondered how much that cost Microsoft to buy it. I'd say even at 100 million it was worth it.

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