Sure, and it's arguably happening right now to some of the companies I mentioned (Dell, Yahoo) but if/when they recover it will likely happen again. Apple will likely face bad times at some point in the future.
Don't tell anyone, but I think it's happening to Google right now. It's just early stages (like MS in 1995), and Google still has more good products than bad, so it isn't exceptionally noticeable.
But the recent, high-profile launch disasters, the clutter that's slowly creeping into the result pages, and stuff like the search page background goofiness...they sure feel like early MS-style mistakes.....
MS in 1995 still had many, many years of good work ahead of it. Remember that they won the browser wars, after everyone had written them off as being too big and clumsy to adapt to change. That was also when we got Win2k and WinXP (arguably the best versions of Windows ever) and their Office product matured into its familiar form.
I'd say Microsoft started going downhill after 2002, when they disbanded the IE team and embarked on the disaster that was Vista. But I remember that when I started college in 2001, I hated Microsoft and yet virtually all the software on my computer was by them. It's a sign of market dominance when your customers hate you and yet use your products anyway. ;-)
"MS in 1995 still had many, many years of good work ahead of it. Remember that they won the browser wars, after everyone had written them off as being too big and clumsy to adapt to change. That was also when we got Win2k and WinXP (arguably the best versions of Windows ever) and their Office product matured into its familiar form."
Eh. We also got WindowsME in 2000, which was arguably the worst version ever. And to be fair, Office has been mostly re-arranging the furniture and re-painting the walls since Office95. And...let's not forget Bob. Bob was Microsoft's Buzz, circa 1995.
That said, sure, it's not like MS got to their current state on January 1, 1996. And there's no way I'd argue that they (or Google) are going away soon. My point is only that Google is starting to show signs of lumbering corporate giant-hood, and that it has happened pretty quickly, in comparison to MS.
Google is probably past an inflection point, they've still got plenty of upward momentum and almost certainly won't peak for many, many years. However, Google seems to have empire-itis just like any other big company. Eventually they'll start believing their own BS more than they will external truths, they'll become process bound and bureaucracy bound, they'll start to saddle themselves with more and more strategy taxes until they become increasingly like any other big company.
There's still time for that not to happen, but all the signs are pointing that way.
Apple's products weren't highly regarded through most of the 90s. The survived on a niche market at the time, but weren't highly regarded during this phase either for their design or technical architecture. Pricing wasn't their problem -- their products were the problem.
It wasn't until 2000 or so when they got their mojo back.
They were highly regarded in their niches. If you needed a computer to edit photos or to assemble a print publication, a Mac would be your obvious choice. In the PowePC era, it was the fastest computer you could buy that ran off-th-shelf productivity software and many found their way into labs as instrument controllers. Considering the size of their lineup, a couple lemons (pun intended) were to be expected. Still, considering how many models were made, I saw more bad computers coming from PC makers.
And, until the arrival of NT4, PC GUIs had little to no advantage over what Apple was offering. Windows was ugly and crash-prone. In retrospect, NT4 was also very crash prone, probably because MS moved graphics drivers onto kernel space. Windows only became more acceptable (some would prefer "less offensive") visually with the NeXT-like visuals of 95.
That's not the history as I remember it. Windows 95 came before NT4, and it was the first to introduce the famous "start button" visuals. 95 however was still based on the old kernel and it crashed a lot. NT4 came later, with the same visuals, but due to the NT kernel it was remarkably stable.
Windows NT4 was much more stable than the previous Win3.11->95->98->Me line, but - primarily due to moving Graphics drives into the kernel for performance - was considerably less stable than its immediate predecessor in the NT line, Windows NT 3.51.
While 95 introduced long filenames to a mainstream audience, it was very unstable. MacOS 7.5 was not perfect (and the PPC migration brought some instability), but it was not nearly as bad as 95. NT4 had a kernel internally more advanced than MacOS classic, but most users wouldn't be able to tell.
Microsoft's GUI offerings started to really compete with Apple's with 95 and matured through NT4 and 2000.
Apple had a good product, if you compare it with what the PC market was offering. OS8 and 9 were well-rounded OSs that competed mostly against the 9x family, as XP, which made the NT kernel mainstream, wasn't launched until after OSX.
