If you Google the phrase “Microsoft’s worst nightmare,” the range of hits you get is entertaining for its breadth. Various pundits have proclaimed that the software giant’s very worst nightmare is everything from Linux, Google and Firefox to software as a service, Cisco’s digital home business and the Sony PlayStation.

They can’t all be Microsoft’s worst nightmare, so which one earns that distinction? The exact reply is none of the above.

The best way to gain insight into what Microsoft truly fears is to research the musings of Bill Gates. I’ve had suitable encounters with Gates by the years to have recognized that the more he dismisses a competitor, the more he fears it. In 1999, when I asked him how concerned he was about Linux, he blew it off as a “darling of the press” that was nothing more than the equivalent of the first Windows NT kernel.

In a 1995 interview, when I asked Gates for

his views on the emergence of Netscape, he derided media interest in the company as an “overreaction” considering “an World Wide Web browser is a trivial piece of software.” Enlightening as that comment was, there was something else Gates said in that interview that revealed his worst nightmare.

I asked Gates what trend or development had occurred in the technology sector in the past 20 years that really caught him by surprise. His deadpan response: “Kaleida and Taligent had less impact than we expected.”

Gates was referring to two software joint ventures formed in the early ’90s by Apple and IBM that were already fading into oblivion. There was something different in his tone — a biting sarcasm — that reflected a degree of scorn that he seemed to reserve for the Apple/IBM combo. And it was telling.

Microsoft’s worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other singled-out…

Orginal post by Top Tech News