Expression Studio: Microsoft’s Failed Challenge to Adobe
Expression Studio: Microsoft’s Failed Challenge to Adobe | Young Coder | Matthew MacDonald | Young Coder
Every good tech company watches its competitors closely, searching for innovations that might overturn the current order. And if anyone holds the Silicon Valley record for corporate paranoia, it’s Microsoft. In the fifty years since the company was established, they’ve never stopped nervously eyeing their competitors, and rushing out new products to try to steal emerging niches.Sometimes Microsoft failed, but mostly they succeeded. In the distant 1980s, when booting up a computer was a thumb-tapping ritual of patience, Microsoft conquered software pioneers WordPerfect, Lotus, and Harvard Graphics, because office software was where the business customers were. In the 1990s, they launched the mediocre Internet Explorer browser and ruled the web with it for years, because Netscape had mused about a world of browser-based computers that wouldn’t need Microsoft operating systems. In the early 2000s, Microsoft shadowed Sony and introduced the Xbox, just in case the future world would revolve around gaming systems and entertainment rooms. A few years later, they tagged along behind Amazon into the world of cloud software, and made Azure into a…