Why Microsoft's competitors fail...

S. Srinivasa Sivakumar notes an exerpt from a semi-autobiographical book on Larry Ellison. Right from the start, you can see why Oracle has been losing market share and stock value:

A subject that's close to Ellison's heart is Oracle's enemies. He strongly believes that Oracle is always at its best when it has an identifiable enemy to go after: "We pick our enemies very carefully. It helps us focus. We can't explain what we do unless we compare it to someone else who does it differently. We don't know if we're gaining or losing unless we constantly compare ourselves to the competition." [emphasis mine]

Whether in politics or in business, it's very hard to sell someone on your product or service by focusing on what your competition is doing wrong, or -- for that matter -- using them as a mirror for yourself. If Larry Ellison and other Microsoft competitors focused a little more on addressing their customers' needs, and a little less on who their "enemies" are, perhaps they would be in better shape today. That's not to say, of course, that Oracle is going to go out of business any time soon. But they've suffered greatly since the tech bubble burst, and it's not clear whether they'll ever return to their glory days.

By contrast, I see Microsoft focusing on driving their own platform forward, not on their "enemies". The only important thing about their competition is figuring out the things they're doing right, and improving upon those. For all that many have derided C# has just a Java clone, few who know what they're about would argue the fact that Microsoft made improvements over Java in C# (and v2.0 will carry these further). The .NET Framework has provided a dramatic improvement over the wide variety of APIs -- from the Win32 API to ADO and other COM components, and more -- used to write software on Windows, and brought them all together in a single programming paradigm, and made them accessible to a variety of languages, each of which acts as an equal partner on the platform. That may not qualify as "innovation" in Larry Ellison's view, but it has made my life, and the lives of many other developers, much easier, which is what counts in my book.

6 Comments

  • Um, not quite. Remember something called Netscape? Better yet, when you think of the MS of today and the word Linux comes to mind, what follows?



    MS certainly DOES consider itself in a battle with competitors.



    Oh, and there's that damn court ruling a few years back. Memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall it involved something about monopolistic practices...



    Much of what you say has merit. But your comments about MS not focusing on their enemies is simply laughable.

  • Duthie's remarks are about right. Microsoft does push their platform first, then incorporate what they can from competitors. Sure they play hard ball, but all businesses do. And if they didn't, well then we saw what happened to AT&T after their monopoly was broken up.



    I think the major contrast is compared to "other competitors" like Sun. Sun would not do anything at all today if it weren't for Microsoft. You can't talk to Ellison or McNealy without getting them foaming at the mouth about Microsoft. In contrast, Gates always focuses on the customers or the developers. And guess what? Who's got $50B in the bank? The market has decided.

  • Okay, I can agree with most of your reply. But not quite all. :-)



    Can MS explain what they do without regard to their competition? Yes. But they do more than just 'focus' on their competition when they design and build their product... they focus on 'eliminating' their competition, no matter how level the playing field is.



    Which is exactly why the DoJ won their case. Was it brought about by competitors and not consumers? Yes again. But did they lose because they didn't play the lobbying game? Not quite. They lost because the findings of fact were that they practiced winning over the competition in illegal ways.



    Back to the browser. Was it 'personal'? No. Was it more than just a company putting out a better product? You betcha. When MS decided to 'merge' the browser with their OS - long after actually coming out with IE - they acted in a manner COMPLETELY dictated by the competition. In fact, some may argue that it can't get more personal than that.



    Can I imagine an OS without a browser? Well, yes. It's called Linux. Oops... that wasn't imagining, that was reality.



    Is it wrong, or personal, to consider your competitors when operating a business? Not at all. Is there a boundary to what is acting legally or illegally? Definitely. Has MS been guilty of this in the past? Yes. Could they be guilty of it in the future? Certainly.



    For the record, I'm much more a fan of Gates than Ellison. Both in terms of products and actions. But the tone of both your post and your reply comes off to me as unrealistic - almost as bad as Scoble sometimes. You defend EACH AND EVERY action MS takes. You simply admit that the only thing MS was guilty of was not lobbying hard enough with the DC crowd without any attention to things they were simply wrong on. It's like MS can do no wrong, ever.



    If MS _never_ was guilty of being overly concerned with obliterating the competition, then why do/did so many developers have so much fear about creating something new? Why is there so much fear among those 'competitors' in blogland over what MS will do about blogging software? Why was there so much concern over how they would implement RSS? If they've _never_ acting inappropriately, how could their rep be so poor?

  • Dave,



    You said:



    "they focus on 'eliminating' their competition, no matter how level the playing field is"



    Even if I concede this point, which I'm not sure I do, can you name me one company or industry in which the ultimate goal *isn't* eliminating the competition?



    "Which is exactly why the DoJ won their case. Was it brought about by competitors and not consumers? Yes again. But did they lose because they didn't play the lobbying game? Not quite. They lost because the findings of fact were that they practiced winning over the competition in illegal ways."



    IMO, the reason the DoJ won their case is that the judge accepted the DoJ definition of the relevant market. A definition which excluded Java, Apple, and Linux from the relevant market, while at the same time claiming that Microsoft acted anti-competitively against all three. IOW, it's not too challenging to get a monopoly ruling once you've got the judge to accept that the relevant market only includes PC-compatible desktop computers (that don't run Linux). I think Microsoft bears some responsibility for this outcome, in that their legal counsel antagonized Judge Jackson, and may have made him more sympathetic to the government's case in the process. But the case was won largely on the basis of an absurdly narrow market definition. I never claimed Microsoft *lost* the case because they didn't play the lobbying game, I said that was part of why the case was brought in the first place.



    "When MS decided to 'merge' the browser with their OS - long after actually coming out with IE - they acted in a manner COMPLETELY dictated by the competition."



    Nonsense. As Microsoft argued at trial, there are plenty of benefits to be had by integrating the browser into the OS, including providing a unified model for browsing both local and remote resources. Integrating IE also provided application developers with the ability to add web browsing to their applications, without having to write their own browser, or package one with their application. The idea that the only reason for integrating IE into the OS was to destroy Netscape just doesn't hold water. Likewise, I don't find your argument that Microsoft's behavior was dictated by it's competition compelling at all. Microsoft's behavior vis-a-vis IE was dictated by the fact that users needed a web browser, and the fact building a great web browser would add value to Windows.



    "Can I imagine an OS without a browser? Well, yes. It's called Linux. Oops... that wasn't imagining, that was reality."



    Uh-huh. And how many Linux distros for the desktop don't include a browser of some sort? Yes, I'm aware that it's not a part of the OS, but can you seriously claim that there are end-user distros that don't have at least one Web browser as part of the distro?



    "You defend EACH AND EVERY action MS takes. You simply admit that the only thing MS was guilty of was not lobbying hard enough with the DC crowd without any attention to things they were simply wrong on. It's like MS can do no wrong, ever."



    I never said anything of the sort. You made arguments based on Netscape and the antitrust ruling. I addressed those specific arguments. I did not claim that Microsoft has never done anything wrong (nor, for that matter has Scoble ever made such arguments, to my knowledge). What I did say was that in the specific instance of the antitrust trial, I think the case was politically motivated, and pushed by Microsoft's competitors as an alternative to competing in the marketplace. That's not even to say that Microsoft is an innocent little lamb. Microsoft is a bare-knuckles brawler of a competitor, and probably pushes the boundaries wherever possible. But that's not the same as saying that what they did in this case was wrong.



    "If they've _never_ acting inappropriately, how could their rep be so poor?"



    Again, I did not say that they've *never* misbehaved, but that aside, much of what you describe can be also ascribed to envy. Success, especially extreme success breeds envy. It's the same reason that Martha Stewart is hated in many quarters (and quite possibly part of why she's now facing prosecution).


  • Microsoft is the next form of Communism, but this time, they will end up ruling the whole world.

  • "Microsoft is the next form of Communism, but this time, they will end up ruling the whole world."



    That has got to be one of the single silliest things I've ever heard. Sure, dude, I can totally see BillG as the next Kim Jong-Il. Dude...put down the crack pipe...seriously. Let's try some perspective here.



    Microsoft:



    - Sells software.

    - Competes vigorously in the marketplace.

    - Loses where there product sucks (think Bob).



    North Korea (the most egregious Communist nation at present):



    - Conducts chemical weapon experiments on entire families.

    - Manufactures nuclear weapons with which to hold other nation hostage.

    - Starves the populace while feeding and equipping the army instead.



    Sure, pal...I totally see the comparison. Geez, get a grip!

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