thought for the day – Operational Battle Station:

“Here’s something else to consider: Microsoft has so rarely had worthy competition from other Big Boys that the total rounds down to zero. They had it from Novell when Craig was running strategy there (one Microsoft guy told me “he kicked our ass”), but that was back in the 80’s. They had it for a few minutes from Netscape when that company creatively ubiquitized LDAP. But they never had it from Apple (which for the Jobs interregnum was more of a bad partner than a good competitor). For brief and shining quarters they had it from Borland, Lotus and WordPerfect; but all of those companies lacked the endless supply of adrenalin a company needs to stay in the game. I’m not saying those weren’t valuable companies (some still are); just that they were never in the same league.”

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