In an excellent article recently written on PC World, tech analyst Mike Elgan points out that Apple may have replaced Microsoft as the computer company that people love to hate.  As he admits in the article, his goal in doing this was not to bury Apple, but rather to point out that neither Apple nor Microsoft deserved a lot of the vitriol heaped at them in terms of bundling software and forcing it on users as well as using the large inertia of their monopoly-like companies to bowl over competitors and stifle creativity in the marketplace as a result.

You can get a good lowdown on exactly how Apple is doing today what Microsoft used to do from that article, but there is a point missed in that article that intimately relates to Multitouch.  That topic is how Apple came to replace Microsoft as the major industry player.

In the opinion of many, the reason this happened was that Microsoft’s monopoly-like inertia reached past a critical point.  When this happened, instead of stifling the competition in the marketplace, Microsoft became old news, unable to respond to changes in the marketplace and changes in consumer behaviour.  The Surface Computer (an overpriced flashy item that does nothing for the average person) and Windows Vista (quite possibly the worst operating system in history, especially from a mobile and Multitouch point of view) are very good indications of that.

Since the consumers are mostly interested in mobile Multitouch products at the moment, Apple seems to be top dog.  If they want to avoid Microsoft’s fate however, they need to be more on the ball in responding the next time the tech marketplace undergoes a large shift.