arifsali, you're horribly underestimating Microsoft if you think a company whose only means of revenue is online advertising, something that can be flipped off as easily as has been flipped on... at any time, without ANY other products that make money, combining forces with a company which has been in business for pretty much as long as Microsoft, yet only managed to gain 5% marketshare, can actually be a force to reckon with. Yes, Microsoft is the big terrible beast... blah blah blah. So, far many people tried to wrestle with them, and the digital road is solidly covered with their bones. And the current situation has nothing to do with Bill, since he's leaving the building... it's now B...

arifsali, you're horribly underestimating Microsoft if you think a company whose only means of revenue is online advertising, something that can be flipped off as easily as has been flipped on... at any time, without ANY other products that make money, combining forces with a company which has been in business for pretty much as long as Microsoft, yet only managed to gain 5% marketshare, can actually be a force to reckon with. Yes, Microsoft is the big terrible beast... blah blah blah. So, far many people tried to wrestle with them, and the digital road is solidly covered with their bones. And the current situation has nothing to do with Bill, since he's leaving the building... it's now Ballmer and Ozzie driving the bus.

Google might have an office in Kirkland, and there are talks about them getting into some new tower in Bellevue (the city where Microsoft started from) and they may have Schmidt come 10 more times and speak to the UW crowd as he did before to try to get young brains to work for Google and I'm sure to a degree they'll be successful. I use Google stuff daily, like most of it a lot, found some incredibly useful things that would be great for companies... and yet, many of my clients I tried to introduce these tools to look at them with 'yes, it's nice, but you know how to do all of this and we just sent Jimmy to get another copy of the MS Office'. Like it or not - that's still the mentality of the mainstream users and with $90B in the bank and spending $6+B annually on R&D, without any debts, Microsoft isn't that easy to conquer.

Apple gets kudos for trying, but they get almost nothing for results. At least on the serious business users spectrums. The game's definitely not about the best looking or best functioning products... as I so painfully found out when the best designed computer, in terms of innovation, capabilities and power - was relegated to nothing and died, even though there that army was more potent than Apple's.

sohil, with all of my support for the mighty MS - I must disagree here. There's nothing 'genius' about it. MS had a history of undercutting competition. Access is one of a number of examples how they climbed back from behind and killed the opponents - simply by underpricing them. I don't think you need to be a genius to come up with a tactic where you intentionally 'lose' money for a while to gain marketshare. The only people that can do so are the ones with huge bank accounts, ie MS...

The problem with Netscape was that it was a free product. Not exactly a good case of something you can underprice. So, they matched it, but they also had a very potent (proven in the past so) way of ...

sohil, with all of my support for the mighty MS - I must disagree here. There's nothing 'genius' about it. MS had a history of undercutting competition. Access is one of a number of examples how they climbed back from behind and killed the opponents - simply by underpricing them. I don't think you need to be a genius to come up with a tactic where you intentionally 'lose' money for a while to gain marketshare. The only people that can do so are the ones with huge bank accounts, ie MS...

The problem with Netscape was that it was a free product. Not exactly a good case of something you can underprice. So, they matched it, but they also had a very potent (proven in the past so) way of distributing it - so they did. It wasn't anything new or genius, in my opinion, they did what they always did in the past with things like disk utilities, defrag etc.

In fact you could argue that it may not have been as 'genius' at all considering the fact that it cost them so much money and almost broke the company into pieces with people still trying to sue them and forcing them to do stupid things, like what the EU is trying to force them to do now.

Of course I'm writing this on CM running in Firefox... so much for the 'genius' factor