Safari is the new IE

Re:Safari is the new IE by braythwayt on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @11:08AM (#9805797)

  > Microsoft didn't "break the web" they created their own web
  > and then let it twist in the wind because they were pissed
  > about the government beat down.

I was around as well. My recollection is that they let it twist in the wind because SaaS competed with their two interdependent quasi-monopolies: Windows and Office.

Which is another instance of the Innovator's Dilemma: How can a successful company embrace technology that disrupts themselves?

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Re:Safari is the new IE by toyg on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @11:36AM (#9806030)

> they let it twist in the wind because SaaS competed with their two interdependent quasi-monopolies

It wasn't called SaaS back then, but in any case -- they let it "twist in the wind" because their market had become the enterprise, and that's a market that wants stability, predictability and no updates if they can be avoided. By then they had killed all competition, so their incentives were to keep businesses locked-in through backward compatibility and security fixes. Add to that the big move to .Net and an effort to replace Flash...

IMHO it wasn't about the antitrust or platform control (they could have broken all the SaaS apps they wanted with each update, they had 95%+ of the market and were n.1 target for every website out there). They just had other priorities: the browser war had been won and attention was now on the enterprise market. Around that time, IIRC, Gates also retired, leaving Ballmer in charge; Ballmer was not the sort of technologist to lose much sleep over "the future of the web"...

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