Taking down Microsoft

Just read this interview of Scott Collins (of Mozilla/Netscape fame). It was a rather different interview. I mean most of these IT interviews I've read are either highly technical or crammed with business jargon.

This one was philosophical. Check out one of the quotes...

There's only one thing powerful in this world enough to topple Microsoft, if toppling Microsoft is your goal, and that is Microsoft. People and empires, they fall under their own weight, because they're the only ones heavy enough to take them down. I think we are seeing the beginnings of that, a tremendous backlash in the marketplace towards software companies that are taxing their users, hugely in the cases of these giants like PeopleSoft and Oracle, but even those that tax the middle class like Microsoft does.

There's also Microsoft's hubris, that they have all the answers, that they know what's right for you, but yet we keep getting more and more security patches from them, because they don't actually know what's right for us. And Ballmer is saying that they didn't make any mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, I've certainly made my share, and I'm certain that Microsoft has made their share. And to say that the virus culture was different two years ago, that's not true. Viruses were bad two years ago just as they are now; it's the same environment and the same hostility. Microsoft didn't do the right thing then, it wasn't a different culture, and they made a mistake.

Pride comes before a fall, and it is their hubris in knowing what people want, and saying "we know what is good for you," that is eventually going to pull them down. It's not going to be that somebody else actually knows better, because Microsoft actually does have a pretty good idea of what one generalized virtual person wants. But I think in the new world it's not about one big program to solve everybody's needs, it's about a zillion tiny programs all stuck together. Stuck together one way for you, stuck together another way for me that do the right thing. I think people are becoming savvy enough where they don't want a general program, they want something customized, they want a software kit that does what they want. Maybe if you're a business, it's not that every employee has a software kit, but maybe you are willing to spend to have two IT guys take an existing software kit and make it exactly what your business needs.

Microsoft is going to make it so painful for people to have exactly what they want that they'll give up. Some of them will live with what Microsoft gave them, and others will turn to systems to where they can get exactly what they want. And since no two people want the same thing, it's going to be a world of putting the pieces together. Microsoft will be the fall of Microsoft, and that's when the little pieces that cooperate with each other will thrive. Will Mozilla beat Microsoft? No. Can Mozilla thrive? Yes. What will make Mozilla thrive? Microsoft's fall under their own weight.