Companies with Focus like Macromedia win, and leave Microsoft with dead products like Photo Draw and Vizact. The early wins took patience and one thing the current Microsoft lacks sometimes is patience. I think this is because of the whole BOB fiasco. Few places where Microsoft took market share from an established player will you not find it was actually given to them by poor decision making. Yet the quality of today's desktop software is undeniably in need of improvement.
Patents are an attempt to prevent dominant players from controlling markets permanently.
And it failed to address cable companies. There is a lot of nonsense put out by free-market thinkers that somehow markets will deliver the highest efficiency if left unregulated. Regulation is difficult to pull off in a fair way, but necessary if we want innovation. Regulation is difficult to pull off in a fair way, but necessary if we want innovation. Up until the early 1980's the computing world was pretty much dominated by IBM and its mainframe computers.