Over the course of the last two years or so, I have (for whatever reason) been paying more attention to Microsoft and Google as companies — not so much their products. The entire time, I kept thinking that they reminded me of another tech company. One that was too big to fail. I’m speaking about Apple, of course.
The list of “too big to fail” companies is long for those who were in the game early. Remember GEnie, Compuserve, AOL, Earthlink, WordPerfect, Macromedia, Quark, Netscape, IE, AMD, IBM, Syquest Drives, Zip disks, and more recently, MySpace. I’m sure I could think of dozens more if I had time.
I’ve had a hard time getting past the “outline” stage of an article about this topic, and yesterday I came across this excellent article at AppleInsider titled Google, Microsoft claiming Apple’s crown, albeit from 1994. Daniel Eran Dilger pretty much summed-up everything I wanted to say about the subject quite nicely.