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RE: Search engine...
By Solandri on 10/2/2008 5:36:14 PM , Rating: 2
10 years ago, Yahoo was an index/portal site. You went to AltaVista for searches. If I want a portal site, Yahoo is still the first one that comes to mind. DEC never really put as much effort into AltaVista as it deserved (I heard it only indexed like 3% of the net), so Google really capitalized on an underserviced market at the time.

Microsoft has never been very good at Internet stuff. Their past successes have mostly involved seeing what other people are doing, and leveraging their dominance of the OS to beat their competitors:

- Excel (Lotus 123) and Word (WordPerfect), both of which missed the transition from DOS to WinAPI.
- transparent file compression (Stacker) which they simply added to the OS when Stacker refused to sell.
- IE (Netscape) which they bundled for free so people would stop downloading Netscape.
- DirectX (3Dfx's Glide and OpenGL) where I actually think they did the graphics world a service by supplanting two contentious and poorly updated standards, even if it is a pain to code in.

The notable exception is Photoshop, where I think Adobe managed to hold out because initially the bulk of Photoshop users used it on Macs.

When it comes to stuff independent of the OS, they've fared poorly. They totally missed the boat when the Internet first became mainstream. Gates thought the CompuServe/AOL model of glorified proprietary dialup BBSes would win out, and so refused to put a TCP/IP stack (necessary to access the Internet) into Windows until Win95. That was a full year after I started seeing URLs being advertised on billboards and TV (granted I was in Boston at the time). MSN actually started out as a dialup competitor to AOL, before they put it on the Internet at large. When they needed a web-based mail service, they didn't even bother trying to make one, they just went out and bought the already-successful Hotmail.

They make some good products (their Outlook/Exchange combo for business completely owns anything else I've tried). But their poor Internet efforts IMHO support the claim that if they didn't dominate the OS market, they'd just be a mediocre software company.

RE: Search engine...

I don't think transparent file-compression really mattered.







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