Great thought, W.D. I remember the Microsoft Explorer vs Netscape wars as really annoying -- like you'd try to put Netscape on your machine so you didn't have to use monopolistic ol' Explorer and the two programs would kind of literally go to war and sort of mess up the functionality of your machine (and as my hazy memory recalls, the fix basically was to uninstall Netscape). Those were the good old days. ;)

It's a good point that GOOG vs. MSFT is ironic in that GOOG gets away with a lot more than MSFT did in the old days. However GOOG just seems sooooo "not evil." ;)

Look at how AAPL does/has done some stuff that's pretty non-competitive too. It's not an open company. And in some ways hasn't been a very nice company. Yet it's "cool," well designed, and had a great brand and a difficult but charismatic leader.

I think Microsoft under Bill Gates might have had many fatal flaws -- not just that their products often weren't the very best they could have been but also because Gates never really "got" how to seem like his products/business was either "good" or "rebellious." Microsoft somehow never escaped certain reputations (and now I think is kind of blaaaah, though obviously still highly used).

I dunno, you just got me thinking about talking a good line or not in business, you know? Not that Microsoft was puppies and kittens in any way. I never thought highly of that company, quite honestly. It was only when I was reading the Steve Jobs biography that I realized that all that "think different" stuff meant I just *might* have been kind of a sucker for the brand's line from the very beginning though. ;)