what went wrong at microsoft? it's very simple: they committed suicide by their own (temporarily successful) attempt to achieve a monopoly. so, somehow they managed to impose windows on the whole world, and spent much of their energy crushing the oppostion (and trying to fight off anti-trust, etc). right, but windows was an unbelievably shitty operating system, which became immediately evident to anyone who was able to access an alternative. it was full of stupid bugs, unbelievably virus-vulnerable, crazily heavy, still working on underlying dos code a decade or more beyond where that many any sense. i have no idea what their thousands of code writers and such were doing that whole time: playing tiddly-winks, maybe. so, in the usual fashion, a monopoly grows mind-numbingly complacent. after a certain point, it didn't (and it doesn't) matter what they did: people associated their flagship product with palpable shittiness that fucked up their day every day. it may well be that there's no coming back from that even if you improve, and i say good riddance.
you might want to think about this history when bill and melinda are trying to tell you how your children should be educated. i'm not saying they aren't extremely, insanely, unbelievably wealthy, however, which of course does entail their excellence in all possible dimensions.
junior sisk and rambler's choice rock in general - for one thing, a fresh repertoire within a traditional vein (check 'the story of the day i died', for another example) - and i am rather delighted by 'old bicycle chain'. i'm going to let it stand as my reply to highs in the low fifties, while speculating on the grounds of having read all the author's other works that this one is liable to be extraordinarily well-written and very hilarious, with moments of profundity.
