What is #Microsoft actually good at? Going thru their key products, it is clear they don't create new paradigms, they make often buggy implementations of ideas from other people: #BASIC #MSDOS #Windows #Word #Excel #browser #Bing #Cloud #dotnet. One thing they are clearly good is building a #monopoly. So it seems what they are good at is seeing good ideas, "embrace and extend" to control it, then building monopoly profiteering.
@eighthave I have no love for microsoft, but I would argue that their only actual good product is actually excel.
My personal pet peeve is people using excel when they really shouldn't (which is most of the time), but the flexibility of excel, and how relatively easy it is to learn, it's an impressive piece of software.
@eighthave of course it just started as a ripoff of lotus123
@mvgorcum the spreadsheet started with #VisiCalc, it was the "killer app" that made Apple computers take off at the beginning. Then Lotus 1-2-3 did the same for the IBM PC. Then there was Excel. Sometimes Microsoft makes good software. That is not what makes them so dominant. Their skill at deploying monopoly-building tactics is. Microsoft bought Lotus, for example, while continuing to make Excel.
