Note: this article is the writers personal opinion. It is based upon almost 40 years of experience in small computers and communications, but it is still an opinion.It is presented AS IS. All use is at your own risk.
Microsoft was unsuccessful at introducing their Phone 7 product a month or two ago, with reviewers saying everything from “Well, at least the UI looks functional” to listing long lists of features promised two years ago, and expected by consumers in all smart phones today, that still are not in the Phone 7. Most intelligent manufacturers would look at this and fix the product, but that is not the path of Microsoft Hubris.
A month or so ago, Microsoft decided that instead of fixing its own product to realistically compete with market leading smart phone platform Android and #2 phone iPhone, that instead they would try to scare Motorola away from manufacturing the Droid by suing them for supposed patent infringement. Motorola has now turned the tables on Microsoft and is instead suing them for patent infringement. The details are discussed by Nicholas Kolakowski in an E-Week article you can read here.
Don’t get me started on how stupid it is to allow massive obsolete dying dinosaur corporations to patent every mathematical algorithm and scientific principal they would like to call their own. Microsoft has once again demonstrated that it is still Business as Usual in 1986. Drive all competition out of business, kill those you cannot buy — Microsoft is ‘too big to fail’!
Microsoft is not ‘too big to fail’: Microsoft could fire their obsolete 1980’s thinkers and hire people with vision to bring the company into the 21st century and compete. This same hubris is why Microsoft has lost customer after customer over the last decade to Apple and Linux — it is a big part of why their market share (as measured by statistics on which OS is in use on every computer which visits our web sites) has dropped from 90% a decade ago to maybe 60% now. It is likely also one reason Linux has grown so much from a trivial presence a decade ago to 27% today.
This maneuverer is the same failed approach used by SCO just a few years ago to try to intimidate IBM, and it cannot but fail just as badly and for the same reasons: Microsoft does not dare show one line of code that is allegedly stolen by Linux (Android) because as soon as they do there will be a global paper chase to identify the true origin and revision history of that code, and it is very very likely that any code Microsoft would claim was stolen from them by the open source community was actually in open source some years prior to Microsoft appropriating it from Linux and inserting it into their for profit product without honoring the legal obligations that attend the GPL. In other words, Microsoft does not merely live in a glass house: they live in a glass house where most of the glass has huge cracks due to their foundation settling.
Once any supposed stolen code segment is shown to have actually been stolen from the global Open Source Community by Microsoft, Windows would likely fall under the GPL and Microsoft would collapse under its final act of supreme unfathomable Hubris and stupidity. What would be truly delicious in this situation would be if Google and IBM would like to join in the fray and deliver a serious spanking. Maybe there would follow some serious cleaning at Microsoft and the company could quit living in the past and begin innovating again.