The "problem" with any software company ... MSFT or anybody else ... is that some 12-year-old kid can come along and write a better piece of software.
Like Linux.
There are tons of better pieces of software out there and emerging every day.
Any one of those pieces of software could make an existing software company's products obsolete overnight.
You all were discussing the good old days of the IBM AT and such.
The place I worked bought one of the first PC's. It had a tape drive. BUT it took an all-day tedious tricky manual task and performed it in 20 minutes. Miraculous.
Then one of the "kids" thought about it for a long time. And wrote a routine in four lines of code that replaced that 20-minute routine. His new program ran in seconds on that clunky wonder machine.
He also got upset when we gave him a bonus for writing another program in two-lines of code that produced a report (on price-volume elasticity) that used to drive us nuts that we all had to do every month. He got upset because he said it was a "throw-away" program, requiring no thought on his part.
To quote a line from "Hill Street Blues": "Be careful out there!"
Best to all,
Al
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