Microsoft sold some crazy UNIX thing called Xenix, DOS, and ported their software to OS/2 and Mac OS.
Microsoft did not care who won, as long as they were positioned to get their foot in the door, make a huge profit, kill off all the competition, start displacing their upstream and downstream dependencies, and cement their position by extend-embrace-extinguish.
They have one offering on the mobile, nothing to speak of in the tablet space, and very few apps / trojan horses for iOS / Android. It's like watching Ulysses stick to the Marquess of Queensberry rules.
A bit? They had some prototypes with just the industrial design, some with just the software, some with just the performance - but none with all the aspects of the finished product. And they say they were a few months away?
The hubris behind this kind of thinking is astonishing. It would take nothing short of a miracle to pull together all these elements in such a short timeframe. There are so many inter-related aspects that would prevent this. Performance, battery life, weight, heat dissipation, software drivers, power management - must all be designed and working in concert for a successful product.
And that says nothing about the product positioning. Are there seriously millions of architects out there who have been saying: "Boy, I wish I had a small, portable computer screen I could sketch my ideas out on." ? There's a reason they have huge drafting boards - they think big, and need big spaces to sketch out their big ideas.
I love the way they were thinking outside the square, and there were some seriously cool ideas in Courier. But it seems much more like a groovy concept than a nearly shipping product.
Wait, what?
