No More Microsoft Wi-Fi

It's not often that Microsoft abandons a market, but it does happen. I see on Glenn Fleishman's invaluable Wi-Fi Networking News that the behemoth of Redmond is getting out of the Wi-Fi wireless networking market, not much more than a year and a half after it entered it. I'm not privy to the reasons behind the decision. Microsoft's products had their ups and downs: We liked their initial lineup's ease of installation, but we also heard from customers who complained about reliability problems with the early gear.

At one point, at least, the company had sizable market share, but it was late to the 802.11g game. Microsoft said that it didn't want to rush products onto the market until the spec was ratified, and while that might be an admirable sentiment in theory, it left slow Microsoft kits competing with faster ones from other major manufacturers.

Anyhow, I didn't expect that Microsoft would pull out of Wi-Fi, but on some level it's not surprising. And I'd expect some other companies who aren't mostly networking to get out sooner or later, too. Similar shakeouts have happened countless times before--the MP3 player market comes to mind.

Meanwhile, Microsoft goes back to being mostly a software company, with the notable exception being its keyboards and mice--categories it's been in forever, and ones in which it makes pretty good products. (I'll save my rant about the sorry lot of the left-handed input device user for later.)