Back in February 2004, just after the Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard Dean crashed and burned in an an Iowa corn field, I wrote a much-admired (Doc Searls linked to it) piece for a political blog called The Internet Does Not Scale/The Internet is Not Random (scroll down to find it or skip it altogether if liberal commentary makes you angry). The piece attempted to explain how a slam dunk so quickly became a disaster. 

Dean, you may recall, was the first presidential candidate to discover the power of the web to create buzz, organize MeetUps and raise money.  He had used the internet to build what seemed to be unstoppable momentum.  Why did he lose?  Here’s what I wrote at the time: 

The simple answer, I suspect, is that those of us who spend an unhealthy amount of time using the Internet are not as numerous, smart, or powerful as we thought we were. The more complicated answer is that the Internet is not an accurate model of the real world because it still lacks the scale and diversity to be a reliable predictor of real life behavior.

The character of the web has changed a lot over the past two years, especially with dramatic increases in the numbers of women who use it regularly.  Despite more diversity, however, the two loudest, most passionate and popular topics of commentary on the web–politics and technology–continue to be dominated by college-educated, technology-loving middle-aged white males.   In short, the web is still not a reliable indicator of mainstream opinion on politics and technology.

I mention all this because if you got your information only from the web you would believe that Microsoft was the most stupid, inept, evil corporation on the planet.  You have to read long and hard to find an online “expert” with anything positive to say about the Evil Empire of Redmond.  Articles that suggest that the company may be doing some things right, like Rod Boothby’s  Inside Microsoft’s Enterprise 2.0 Battle Plan, are greeted by hoots of derision.

The web technology gurus have never forgiven Microsoft for not being Apple, for easily capturing the OS war from what they believed to be a superior offering, for coming late to the web party and bullying its way into browser dominance, for littering the world with clunky office software, for being taken more seriously by enterprises than cooler rivals.

While all of these things may be true, or partly true, it’s important to remember that Microsoft has not only survived more than a decade of nearly universal badmouthing on the web but has become the second most powerful brand on the planet (after Coca-Cola).  It isn’t all just because Microsoft is a monopoly; the enterprise software market, especially, offers lots of alternative choices. 

Bitch all you want, but Microsoft, warts and all, is the mainstream software market leader–the people’s choice.  It is easily the dominant company of the early phase of the personal computing revolution and it didn’t get there just by playing dirty. It is one of America’s greatet entrepreneurial success stories.  That should be worth a little respect, don’t you think?

What’s your view?  This is not meant to be one of those blogs where I talk and you listen.