“Mr. Gates readily acknowledges these days that Microsoft “blew it” in the market for Internet search.”
[. . . ]
Mr. Gates, belatedly waking up to the threat that the Internet posed to his business, aimed Microsoft’s firepower at Netscape and flattened his rival[.]
[ . . . ]
In Davos, Mr. Gates ruefully acknowledged that Google “kicked our butts,” reminding him of what Microsoft itself was like two decades ago.“Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignore the other stuff,” he said. But “it’s the remaining 20 percent that counts,” he added, “because that’s where the quality perception is.”
Perception is reality. If all you ever go after is the low-hanging fruit, what are you really good at? After all, Netscape likened ‘Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers.”” What’s changed, other than its ubiquity?
It’s interesting that a company that guesses wrong so consistently is so powerful. Who would have thought that imitation would be so rewarding?