From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Sat Nov 16 2002 - 10:14:03 MST
"Samantha Atkins" <samantha@objectent.com>
> As quite a few very well informed and highly contributing
> people in the software community are of that opinion, it
> can hardly be dismissed as "politically correct" or "nonsense".
> Such simplistic dismissal casts serious doubts on your own
> thinking on the matter.
Quite a few people in the software community work for competitors and are
mad that consumers prefer to buy Microsoft products rather that their own.
They have 4 main complaints.
1) Microsoft charges too much for their products and so is unfair to
consumers.
2) Microsoft charges too little for their products and so is unfair to
competitors.
3) Microsoft products work poorly and so is unfair to consumers.
4) Microsoft products work well and do too much and so is unfair to
competitors.
If is a wonderful testament to the flexibility of the human mind that the
same people can firmly believe all 4 things.
> This is utter bullshit. MS started with one of the first OSes for
> microcomputers ever made. There was almost nothing to it.
>They did not have to be compatible with it in the least.
>There was no restriction
And they did the best they could. In the beginning the restriction was the
hardware and at the time I don't think anybody could have come up
with a significantly better operating system, at least not without a long
and
expensive research program. The trouble with UNIX is that it was far,
far, too big. When the computer revolution started no PC of that day
could even come close to running it, nobody was foolish enough to even try.
When a tiny company called Microsoft came out with DOS ver 1.0 the
average machine it ran on cost about 3 thousand dollars, had 16 K of memory,
a black and white display, no printer no modem and no hard disk. If you
wanted an exotic new gadget called a 5 inch floppy drive that could store a
whopping 180k it would cost you another thousand, many used an audio
cassette recorder instead. I don't think Bill gates or anyone else dreamed
that vestiges of that primitive system would be around for decades.
History is strange however and that's the way it turned out.
Also, Apple , IBM, Sun etc make hardware and have almost total control over
the machines their system run on, Microsoft must make its system work on
computers from thousands of different manufactures and every sort of weird
peripheral under the sun.
>they have freely departed from such compatibility many times.
>From time to time yes, but Microsoft has always treated compatibility with
far more respect that Apple or anybody else in the business, that's why they
won. As I said there is a price for doing this but consumers say it is worth
it, they say it with their wallets.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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