An interesting question. For most companies, I'd simply predict doom, as the architecture continues to go down the drain. I'm not quite willing to do that in this case, because Gates *has* demonstrated the ability to turn the ship -- I'm thinking of both the moment when he realized that the Win95 architecture was fatally flawed, and when he finally "got" the Internet. In both cases, the company managed a fairly impressive (albeit slow) transition, due to the extremely strong mandate for change from the top.
*Can* it be done this time? I'd say it's possible if and only if Gates gets scared enough in time. This is an even harder and huger problem than the previous two, requiring either an unparalleled refactoring of the codebase or simply throwing the whole thing out and starting again. If he becomes convinced that it's necessary for corporate survival, and realizes this at least 3-4 years before it *is* necessary, then I can imagine succeeding.
*Will* that happen? I dunno. I don't see the urgency at this point: while their market share is eroding, it's doing so subtly, as PCs gradually become a less dominant lifeform in the computing world. Microsoft is doing decently in those fields, but is nothing like the dominant player it is in the PC environment. It's quite possible that Windows will simply become *irrelevant* over the next decade, as our concept of a computer system changes; whether Microsoft can survive in an environment where it has to actually compete remains to be seen.
It's an interesting topic for some scenario planning -- trying to figure out the factors that are going to play in, and seeing how they interact...
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*Can* it be done this time? I'd say it's possible if and only if Gates gets scared enough in time. This is an even harder and huger problem than the previous two, requiring either an unparalleled refactoring of the codebase or simply throwing the whole thing out and starting again. If he becomes convinced that it's necessary for corporate survival, and realizes this at least 3-4 years before it *is* necessary, then I can imagine succeeding.
*Will* that happen? I dunno. I don't see the urgency at this point: while their market share is eroding, it's doing so subtly, as PCs gradually become a less dominant lifeform in the computing world. Microsoft is doing decently in those fields, but is nothing like the dominant player it is in the PC environment. It's quite possible that Windows will simply become *irrelevant* over the next decade, as our concept of a computer system changes; whether Microsoft can survive in an environment where it has to actually compete remains to be seen.
It's an interesting topic for some scenario planning -- trying to figure out the factors that are going to play in, and seeing how they interact...