How did Windows become irrelevant?

I was reading a post this morning about Newt Gingrich pulling out of the GOP leadership race. I couldn’t help myself, I commented “Newt Who?” And then I started thinking of some other great also-rans. I started thinking about Microsoft Windows.

In the 90s, Microsoft was the talk of the town. Windows 3.1 became Windows 95 and the world of GUI was born. Then nothing changed. Then the internet cleaned Microsoft’s clock. Today there is Google. There is Facebook. There are phone apps (mostly iPhone apps) that make the old Windows world look–well–old. Microsoft Office is limping along, trying to be the next best thing. Windows 8 looks like it’s well on its way to being an also ran. The world is cheering for its favorites–Google Android and Apple iOS. Window has ceased to exist.

There are many articles on the e-verse lately about RIM Blackberry’s demise. There really is not even any chatter anymore about Windows. Windows XP, the last great Microsoft mark, lives on in the decaying boardrooms of a ravaged corporate America. When that is gone, stick a fork in Microsoft, it’s done.

How did it get this way? Somehow, somewhere Microsoft leadership decided to hitch its wagon to the star of corporate dominance in America. Any single business that builds a business on that sort of relationship is bound to fail. Building a business on constant, never-ending innovation? That will eventually fail as well. There really is no such thing as constant, never-ending innovation. There really is nothing new under the sun. Witness, Windows 3.1/95/NT/XP. When you’ve gone through seven (plus or minus one) iterations of the next best thing, your time is up. Nothing more complicated than that.