CaptainABAB said:
Since when did they ever compete against Flash and Photoshop? I would say that Microsoft never had a product that was in direct competition with those two.
http://www.microsoft.com/products/imaging/products.aspx
And when Internet Explorer first came out, anyone with a working brain would've said - correctly - that it wasn't anywhere near the same level as Netscape Navigator. But hey, here's the lowdown on Microsoft. It's the truth, you can either believe it or not, I don't care:
Microsoft rarely
creates, and they often react to market demands and shifts rather than predict them. DOS was bought from a tiny company in Seattle; Windows was the result of Microsoft's work with IBM on OS/2 (Microsoft left mid-project, effectively stabbing IBM in the back); Internet Explorer, at first, was largely based on Spyglass code; WebTV was outright purchased.
Then there's the XBox, which was created for the singular purpose of trying to head off Sony from taking over the living room; the stronger push you see for WMA to become a standard is because of the iPod's meteoric rise; PocketPC/WinCE was developed to stop Palm. Remember their brief attempt at a TiVo like service? I barely do, that's how well it did. And you know what? If Sony *or* Nintendo agreed to use some form of Windows to power a console, you'd see Microsoft drop the XBox in a heartbeat. That kind of deal would be much more lucrative to them. That's why XNA is being pushed, it
is an exit strategy. Get XNA tools to run on next-gen consoles, plus the PC, and Microsoft instantly has their fingers in everyone's pie, and that's healthier for them as a company.
Do you see a pattern here? Microsoft pathologically either buys their competition, or tries to crush them outright. They're a very big, very powerful one-hit-wonder desperately trying to stop the inevitable, which is a transformation of how society uses computers in their collective, everyday life. They want to control these new devices, and it's going to be significantly harder for them to convince people that they should this time around. It's an empire built on one poorly worded contract with IBM, and no one is so stupid as to let something like that happen again. There's too much money at stake.