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Comment by abrahamsen | Hacker News Reader

It is kind of fun how the failures didn't have to be.

IBM did successfully enter and even define the PC market.

Microsoft saw the threat of the Internet, and reacted swiftly to own it with Windows 95. Internet Explorer demolished Netscape, with illegal methods, but most people at the time also recognized IE as the better browser. Microsoft also got a strong foothold on mobile with WinCE/PocketPC/Windows Mobile.

Google was an early entrance in social with Orkut, dominating some important emerging markets (Brazil, India).

In each case the companies seemed to lose interest and refocus on their moneymaker divisions. It might be intrinsic to large companies: If you want to advance, you should work where the money is made. So the best and most ambitious people would go there, leaving the forward looking parts of the company to die of negligence.

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> Microsoft saw the threat of the Internet, and reacted swiftly to own it with Windows 95.

No they didn't. The original release of Windows 95 didn't come with Internet Explorer. Microsoft were still trying to push their own Microsoft Network (MSN), similar to Compuserve and AOL. They were late to the party - which is why Netscape managed to dominate for so long - and were heavily criticised for it at the time.

Thankfully, they failed. Even though IE dominated the web for far too long, that's a lot less scary than the thought that everyone might be using the MS Network right now while the Internet remained an academic curiosity! shudder

Also: the Active Desktop. Plus ça change...

What is reassuring is that these companies where unable to make anything become completely dominant forever. We tend to obsess over one part of the stack for a few years and forget the necessity of other parts. Another part of the stack will reassert itself and allow someone to challenge dominance. For example, html5 replacing flash is heavily driven by mobile browsers which depended on an evolution in hardware (touch) for them to become prominent. Yet Microsoft pushed silverlight.

Even without becoming perpetually dominant, many of them exercised a huge amount of control over a large area for a long time. IBM from the 1930s through the 1990s, Microsoft from the 1980s through the 2010s, AT&T from the 1910s through the 1980s, etc.

There are cases to be made for these reigns being useful: AT&T spawned Unix and (in part) TCP/IP and the Internet, IBM spawned much IC development, Microsoft proliferated cheap and standardized x86 CPUs. But each also quashed competition in the form of both other firms and competing technologies: AT&T, despite the role UNIX came to play in packet-switched networks, explicitly rejected them for its own network recognizing that this would undermine its own dedicated-circuit switching. Microsoft's treatment of competitors is legion, but it's IBM we have to thank for the term "FUD".

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