Windows 8

In my time I have seen numerous companies that have, "owned" various segments of industries, become arrogant, complacent, self-important or however you wish to describe it--and loose that hold, sometimes even fail completely.

IBM invented and owned the open architecture Intel based PC market. Then they got greedy and introduced the re-engineered and hardware incompatible PS2 models, and never recovered from the massive NO that was the market's response.

Lotus Development's 1-2-3 was at one time the undisputed king of spreadsheet software, with the name "Lotus" being synonymous with electronic spreadsheets. They stuck their head in the sand and ignored the competition; Visicalc, Quattro, Supercalc, MultiPlan and then Excel--we know what happened to them. I believe Windows would not have "arrived" if not for Excel, in which Windows 1.0 was just as runtime environment for Excel...

Novell owned small system networking; completely ignored the Windows desktop, in fact went out of their way to make using Windows a grans PITA. So Microsoft got the desktop and eventually the operating system as well. If Novell had relinquished the desktop and embraced Windows 3.1a Windows NT Server would have never got off the ground (BTW the early versions of NT sucked, big time).

Polaroid owned instant imaging, lock stock and barrel. They too stuck their heads where the sun don't shine and ignored digital imaging. When they did finally get on board they took some cheap largely worthless Vivitar cameras and stuck a Polaroid sticker (yea, literally a foil sticker) over the Vivitar branding. The went the way of the dodo as well...

There are many many other examples, my gut tells me Microsoft is not invincible to this. It is true that big organizations die hard, but they do die...

Oh, and then there was New Coke...