Google| Subject | Re: Adobe's Low hanging .... ? |
| From | Mayayana |
| Date | 07/12/2014 05:09 (07/11/2014 23:09) |
| Message-ID | <lpq8mt$lmk$1@dont-email.me> |
| Client | |
| Newsgroups | rec.photo.digital |
| Follows | Whisky-dave |
| Followups | nospam (1d & 16m) > Mayayana |
| >And Windows Active Desktop (1998) was basically an | >attempt to sell people on the idea that they were always | >online, and that they should want to buy stuff while they're | >online. Win98 had ads stuck to the Desktop, for companies | >such as Disney. Windows customers were invited to | >"subscribe" to the Disney "channel". But it was really just | >a bunch of ads masquerading as futuristic interconnectedness | >and valorized as a Bill Gates's stroke of genius. Bill's | | I though it was because of the Apple threat MS had to do something differnt. |
There was no threat from Apple then. I think about 1-2% of online computers were Macs. It was for graphic artists - better display than Windows but far too expensive to reach mass market. (I remember going to buy my first PC at that time. I went into Microcenter, thinking Windows and Mac were like Sony and Panasonic, or Ford and Chevy. I didn't know how to choose. I asked the cheapest prices for each. $2,200 for the Mac. $500 for the eMachines. The room with Mac software was about 10'x20'. The Windows software selection was vast, and cheaper. It was pretty easy to make that choice.)
Somewhere around that time, I don't remember when, MS actually bailed out Apple, just to keep the appearance of competition. (Amazing how much can change in a few short years. Apple's now a much bigger company.) At the time the big worry for MS was Netscape. MS owned PCs, but they worried that Windows could become just a utility for getting to the Internet and felt they needed to get into that game. So they worked hard on IE, avoided compatibility, and did their best to build IE into Windows -- what Bill Gates famously characterized as "cutting off Netscape's air supply". There was a Wired story about all that, many years ago. The journalists invited into a meeting to see Active Desktop came out and agreed that it would be the death of Netscape. People would never have a chance to choose a browser going forward. They'd be using IE on Windows. Just so, IE rreached something like 95% browser share for a long time, before Firefox. It's only a guess on my part, but I suspect AOL must have also been a big factor. Bill Gates seemed to think he'd virtually invented computing and deserved to own it, and profit from it. It must have irked him to see AOL blossoming. MS did try MSN, but never had muh success with it. They've actually never had much success with much of anything but Windows and Office. In 15 years they've failed over and over to cash in on search, email, portals, services [Hailstorm & Passport], SPOT watches, phones, etc. They always come up with a get-rich-quick scheme and figure they'll use their monopoly to force new product on their customer base, without bothering to figure out what people actually want and need. Metro is the latest version of that. MS figured they've got hundreds of milions of portal and app customers, ready-made. All they had to do was to use the Windows monopoly to seduce, herd, or coerce those customers into their cloud services. But as usual, they were busy salivating over the profits and neglected to actually offer anything at all other than a headache for people trying to use Windows software. Metro is an attempt to transform Windows customers into services customers.
| >such a genius that he realized the importance of the | >Internet before anyone else. | | I'm not sure that's true I set up a network long before windows 98. | I was on a friends bullitin board with others in 1994 and from home IIRC. | using a Macplus at 2400 baud I found the login script in one of my old emails. | I was being sarcastic, and I didn't mean to imply that networking was new. But it was the beginning of the Internet craze. It was when the Internet went mainstream. The sarcasm was because the story is often told of how Genius Bill foresaw the Internet craze and brilliantly reoriented Microsoft, just in time to not be left out. But very little actually changed. Active Desktop was really just a scam portrayal of the Internet blended with Windows. MSN never went anywhere. Ads on the Desktop never went anywhere. People were encouraged to embed favorite webpages on the Desktop, where they could update themselves. But why? The whole thing was silly. Microsoft continued to make money as they always had: Windows and Office monopolies. They charged such high prices, with very little overhead, that they had billions to blow on all their other failed schemes. And blow it they did. But they never did become anything more than a sort of corporate dilletante in online businesses.
07/10/2014-
