Evan Kirchoff explains a great deal about why Microsoft has always been an "almost great" company. The money quote
It is, however, typical for Microsoft to choose to focus intensely on something, carry a solution to within striking distance of greatness, and then wander away distractedly like a bird spotting a shiny object. This is not a company that sweats the small stuff, or any stuff below the mid-sized.
Exactly.
Macintosh, on the other hand, is a brand whose greatest value proposition is sweating the small stuff. Now that it's plunked itself at the heart of the Unix world (Mac OS X is at heart an implementation of FreeBSD for PPC), it's going to be interesting to see how their sweat the user interaction details will work out with Unix' traditional attitude of sweat the technical details but not the UI.
Posted by TMLutas at December 19, 2003 10:09 AM