Sometimes it’s better to ignore the "moose on the table", and sometimes not. Niklas Zennstrom has chosen not. Last week he publicly named Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo as his biggest competitive threats. I happen to know, from talking with folks at Microsoft, that they also regard Skype as a threat to their IM business, so it shouldn’t be any secret. How important that threat is, I don’t know.
If I can give you one piece of advice, Niklas, be humble and confident. Build loyalty with your customers, and continue to build a strong and enthusiastic base of users. Don’t focus attention on Redmond. Marc Andreessen’s unfortunate decisions to fight Microsoft head-on, to characterize Microsoft’s Windows as a "badly debugged collection of device drivers", and to position Netscape Navigator as an operating system for the Internet that would replace Windows, were, more than any other factor, the galvanizing events that caused Microsoft to turn it’s guns on Netscape.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
