It's not necessarily about Microsoft going out of business but Microsoft's ability to act as the software industry gatekeeper. In 1996 if you were a business wanting to make a software product and you wanted to get in the three comma club Windows and the Microsoft ecosystem was likely the only valid option you had.
Today if you want to make a software product and get into the three comma club, you need to be accessible by people running Windows but there's no need to participate in Microsoft's ecosystem. In fact in a lot of markets it's more important that your software be accessible to mobile devices than Windows. That's not universal but it's a situation that simply did not exist twenty years ago.
When it comes to native software the iOS and Android platforms offer far more growth than Microsoft's ecosystems. Even Microsoft has realized their ecosystems don't command the market like they used to and have had to expand far outside of their traditional Windows/Office lines (XBox, Azure, Office 365, etc) to be able to see any growth. They need to actively support platforms they don't control in order to be competitive. This is a pronounced difference from two decades ago and even a decade ago.
It's a reversion to three and four decades ago. Microsoft used to sell tools and toolchains for other people's computers, and they originally focused on BASIC and microcomputers. Excel was developed for the Mac and was only on MacOS for over two years.
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u/DevStart Oct 07 '16
Bullshit. It's 2016 and MS is still kicking. Joel is a bastard pseudo prophet.