On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 7:11 PM, MB Software Solutions, LLC > hehehehehe! Ted, were there any Microsoft acquisitions that you think > were a good thing? :-)
As we've discussed to no end on this forum, there are few products from Microsoft that aren't acquisitions. Business isn't so much about good and bad. Microsoft has produced more millionaires than any other company. So, the acquisitions were good for them. For investors for a period of time, the ROI was a good one, not so much for the past decade, though. I think the FoxPro product only could have achieved the dramatic story arc it did with the deep pockets of Microsoft. Dr. Fulton admitted his company could never have funded the Visual Foxpro product. And that was a brilliant achievement, converting a procedural product to an event-driven, object-oriented one. The smart folks on the team invented genius designs for the Power Tools and their storage. So, VFP was belly, belly good for me and many others. But, there were a lot of products that didn't fare so well. OS/2 killed a number of companies whose principals I knew. Windows At Work, Tablet Windows, Visual J++, dbWeb, there were a lot of false starts, reboots, etc. BizTalk's rewrite between Beta 1 and Beta 2 cost people their jobs. Overall, whether the history of computing looks at the Microsoft Age as a good thing or a bad thing is something that likely requires a perspective we won't have for some time. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
