Apple's market share in the >$1,000 retail computer segment is an astounding 66 percent, according to eWeek. While Apple is almost entirely alone in this segment of the market, it still speaks to Microsoft's increasingly fragile hold on its once indomitable market power.
But to truly get a sense for why Microsoft has never been weaker, consider where web development is going: MySpace and Facebook, according to new research from O'Reilly Media. The two web platforms have attracted tens of thousands of applications in the past year alone.
If you're a platform company, as Microsoft once was, then this has to be troubling. The web is being built on LAMP and other open-source technologies. It is emphatically not being built on Microsoft technologies. Not even close.
Microsoft's biggest opportunity in Yahoo! is the chance to embrace a more open web platform. Its biggest risk is in frittering years away in trying to make the web, via Yahoo!, conform to .Net and a "control all" approach to technology.
In typical Microsoft fashion, it is trying to get the enterprise to bet everything on Sharepoint. Outside the firewall, however, Microsoft's attempts to get the world to bet on its version of the web should get the cold shoulder.
Correction: This post was updated to correct the time line of John Lilly's meeting with Jerry Yang.
John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla
(Credit: Matt Asay)I spent an hour Thursday with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of Engineering, and learned a few things. For one thing, I once argued that Mozilla should hire more "capitalist pigs." John's riposte Thursday was, "We have more capitalist pigs than you think."
John didn't mean that Mozilla is just another commercial open-source company. It's not. Clarifying that comment, John went on to point out that four out of its five executives are entrepreneurs. In other words, though Mozilla is tiny compared to its proprietary competition (and big by open-source project standards), Mozilla's team and community are well-architected to compete. It's not going to fall over at Microsoft's feet anytime soon.
But while competing, Mozilla is heavily focused on its customers first and its competitors second. As John indicated to me:
Our question is always, how do we grow in a way that is leveraged? We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.
That user experience is starting to evolve beyond today's browsing experience. The most interesting topic discussed in our meeting was just how compelling Mozilla's Firefox will increasingly be as the platform for much that happens on the Web. Forget Facebook, MySpace, the iPhone, and other so-called platforms. Firefox could well prove to be the most disruptive Web platform on the market. Here's why.
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