Then why have their products been so mediocre since 1998?
You see, as a software developer who has been forced to work with Indian Business Visas I find I can't trust your judgement on what you consider the best.
For example, I am impressed by Apple and Google and completely unimpressed by MS, IBM and Oracle.
The MS, IBM and Oracle workforce is way over 95% Indian Business Visas.
Heck, even The Wall Street Journal admits such.
MS, IBM and Oracle address issues that are quite different from those of the general public and their desire to play, their general technical inability, their acceptance of close systems rather than the absolute requirement for openness, etc.
And, trying to pin your charge on these companies is absolutely absurd.
As I am in the field for over 30 years, I have followed their endeavors since the early 80s.
They have each failed to enter the world of Open Architecture because they went H1-B crazy and H1-Bs rarely have the skills to accomplish anything.
No, that is absolutely ridiculous.
Apple didn't go "open architecture" either.
The point I was making is that Apple has consistently kept their solutions far more closed than has Microsoft.
Remember that it was about a decade before Apple even so much as allowed a third party to sell a printer. And, Microsoft was putting their entire system on the computers built by anyone in the world, while adding different networking solutions, and other major extensions.
Apple was considered more "usable" because they stayed closed - there just were far fewer options. There was THE printer. There was THE monitor. There was THE keyboard. There was THE network system. There was THE storage device. All hardware was made by ONE company. For a long time there was even a lock so you couldn't even see inside the box!!! Apple considered ONE user for a particular systenm as opposed to the issues and advantages seen in a corporate environment where there is corporate management of information, including information hardware (management that Apple needed to ignore in favor of simplicity for owner-maintained configurations).
And, NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with visas.
It has to do with significant differences in the perceived needs of specific and varied markets.
You're right about Open Architecture.
What I meant to convey was Apple went Open in terms of portability...phones and tablets.
MS, IBM and Oracle tried to do the same and failed miserably.
I laughed my arse off when Steve Balmer introduced to the world the...LAPTOP.
Except the idiot called it Surface not realizing that Apple, HP, Dell, etc... beat him to the punch by a good couple of years.
That's what you get when you surround yourself with people who don't even know how to surf the web and see what's going on.
In terms of software development it has EVERYTHING to do with visas.
If you have an iPhone you'll see how often that Multi-National Corporate Apps have to be downloaded because of yet ANOTHER error.
If these coders knew what they were doing they wouldn't have to fix things like memory leaks every day.
Companies like Apple and Google get it right by spending the money and getting the talent.
Others simply reply on what they sold 30-40 years ago and keep pushing supposed "upgrades" of their software.
Heck, I can't see any reason to upgrade the MS Office since around 2000; there's not ONE feature that would make my life simpler.
It's ironic that nobody under the age of 40 ever heard of IBM or Oracle.