Bill Burnham draws a parallel between today’s Microsoft and IBM of old, circa 1975. They have pretty much the same problems and people perceptions are nothing to write home about. Reading Burnham’s post, I found myself nodding my head in agreement, wondering if history is any indicator, then Microsoft should have a lot of trouble ahead before it rights itself.
The key then for Microsoft is to avoid the near death experience that IBM needed to survive. Right now there’s no suggestion that Microsoft is even close to such an experience, but the potential for such an experience arguably exists the larger, more powerful, and more introverted Microsoft becomes.
Now that would be most certainly the case, except for some odd reason I believe that world’s richest man didn’t get that way by being stupid.