I don't think it's wrong to criticize them for missing this as an opportunity.
I remember playing with it at the time, it was really revolutionary. There was literally nothing like this available to the general public before this.
And who owns mapping these days? Google. It's pretty sad that Microsoft wasn't able to turn a six year head start into a reasonable business.
That's sort of been the story of Microsoft for the past 15 years or so, lots of cool ideas, then a failure to execute and make a great product out of them. I wonder if young engineers these days realize how formidable Microsoft used to be. There was a time when having MSFT in your rearview mirror meant you were in deep shit. Now, they're just another big IT company.
You think that's sad? MSN Messenger had millions of users, complete with their "friends". And they failed to turn that into any social network worth anything. Duh.
Microsoft has a culture of being first of the market, though not always with the best product. Products like Windows 98 and IE4 were buggy, but so far ahead of their time that they had a crushing impact and it took the rest of the world years to catch up. Nowadays competitors with better solutions are usually not far behind. Google and Apple are rarely first to the market, but usually the best. It's a more effective strategy nowadays.
Amazon is one of the few companies that still manages to be first to the market and be successful (Kindle, AWS). Perhaps because many of the old Microsofties went there.
I really don't think either Windows 98 or IE4 were "first to market". OS/2 and Netscape were available and better at the time.
Microsoft's skill was other aspects - really building the whole products that businesses needed, and building a complex channel of services companies for delivery of installation, customisation and training.
My hunch is that's still their advantage, above say the Google Apps team, and it'll come back into play as quick wins of Internet and mobile wear off and it needs deep integration into businesses.
I was doing webdev in the 90s when Netscape Navigator was king.
I have always believed that Microsoft won the browser war, less because of integration with Windows and more because IE4 was so much better. It was generations ahead of Netscape and they focused on making a canvas for developers (excuse the HTML5 pun).
Lots of the 'Microsoft ignores standards' crowd were Netscape centric people who did not like that with IE4 Microsoft tried lots of new stuff but in hindsight this forward push propelled the idea of the web as a platform for development.
Most people using the internet today never used IE4, they were not there and have no clue how big a deal it was.
I remember playing with it at the time, it was really revolutionary. There was literally nothing like this available to the general public before this.
And who owns mapping these days? Google. It's pretty sad that Microsoft wasn't able to turn a six year head start into a reasonable business.