Microsoft’s Plan to Be King of All Media

From The New York Times - In November 1994, I had breakfast with Nathan Myhrvold, then the chief technology officer of Microsoft. He talked about how the soon-to-be-introduced MSN online service would best America Online. Central to his thinking was that MSN would give publishers a higher percentage of the per-minute fee for using the service. This would draw more content and thus more users to Microsoft and allow it to earn a smaller fee on a larger block of minutes.

This strategy was misguided for so many reasons. Most notably, the open standard of the Internet allowed publishers to reach out directly to users, without MSN or AOL as the tollbooth. | Read full article