My thinking for the last couple of months agrees with your paragraph in bold above. It's probably why MS is offering Win10 for free for one year. The hope being that folks will want compatibility across their phones, tablets and desktops. Apple has already got that right.
Amdahl, Data General, Tandem, Silicon Graphics. And even Prime :-(
What would prevent MS from buying companies that would facilitate an increase in market share? A Korean phone company running MS OS might work.
Well they already bought Nokia's phone division a couple of years ago with exactly that aim and I haven't really heard anything that suggests it's helped much so far. In fact their Lumia phone sales seem to have been dropping as of late, as has Windows smartphone OS market share. Only Android seems to have any significant market share growth these days.
Samsung seems to be doing quite well in the mobile market. Ask Apple
It's the passing of the guard. Gene Amdahl was to the IBM 360 what Dave Cutler was to the DEC VAX/VMS architecture (and who then went on to imbue Windows NT with many of the same concepts).
Yeah, I had seen that earlier today -- it made me think of Amdahl, the company.
I remember reading "Inside Windows NT" when NT came out; Dave Cutler wrote the foreword. Looking at his MS bio, I see he also did RSX-11M (which was on a little PDP-11 we had); a more impressive resume would be hard to find. And apparently he's still going.
I am aware of Nokia. Why stop there?
Well I guess the obvious choice would be Samsung, but I'm really not sure how feasible that would be.
I was thinking along the lines of HTC. If you were Samsung, would you spin off your phone division for a sale to MS.
And Google lost a bundle buying Motorola Mobile.
The battle for smartphones as we know them today is over. Microsoft lost. Actually they were never really in the fight.
No one knows the future! Apple certainly didn't see Samsung coming when they blitzed them with the Galaxy S. Now Samsung is Apple's chief rival in the Smartphone market. Things change, players move around. Today Microsoft isn't in the game but in a few years, I'm not so sure they'll be so insignificant here.
The successful ones do seem to have an ability to bet on the future, whether you think that's a matter of skill or pure luck (or a bit of each).
It might but I'm not seeing evidence of the type of leadership that I think it will take.
Perhaps because the innovations they do come up with are met with such hostility.
I think folks want "compelling advantages" rather than the merely "different" (for the sake of different).
Sticking ads on Solitaire isn't innovation. Innovation is coming up with solutions to problems people didn't know they had. Whereas proscribing new solutions (crappy, self serving UI changes) when people were happy already is arrogance and rarely rewarded.
