“Microsoft is not driving the consumer revolution in the mind of the consumers,” Schmidt said. “They’ve done a very good job of getting [customers] locked in on the corporate side.” “Typically, tech companies eventually become boring and middle aged,” he added, noting that Microsoft’s legacy products would, however, provide “a flywheel that will power Microsoft and what they are doing for many decades.” The current situation, with so many big players, is a new platforms war, Schmidt claimed. And unlike past platforms wars, which included just two players—Apple and Microsoft during the PC wars, for example, or Internet Explorer and Netscape in the original browser wars—this time there are multiple competitors, each with unique consumer-oriented offerings. Apple, he said, created beautiful consumer products. Facebook organizes “every friend you’ve ever known, and even ones you can’t quite remember.” Amazon is “the world’s largest bookstore” (which seemed like a bit of a snub; Amazon is of course much more than that.) And Google “organizes the world’s information.” The sad part is that this is not really a radical statement. People have over the last few years begun to realize and agree with that statement… Source]]>
