Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Xah Lee]

Microsoft Hatred, FAQ

Xah Lee, 20020518

Question: U.S. Judges are not morons, and quite a few others are
not morons. They find MS guilty, so it must be true.

Answer: so did the German population thought Jews are morons by
heritage, to the point that Jews should be exterminated from earth.
Apparently, the entire German population cannot be morons, they must be
right.

Judge for yourself, is a principle i abide by. And when you judge, it
is better to put some effort into it.

How much you invest in this endearvor depends on how important the
issue is to you. If you are like most people, for which the issue of
Microsoft have remote effect on your personal well-being, then you can
go out and buy a case of beer on one hand and pizza on the other, and
rap with your online confabulation buddies about how evil is MS. If you
are an author writing a book on this, then obviously its different
because your reputation and ultimately daily bread depend on what you
put down. If you are a MS competitor such as Apple or Sun, then
obviously you will see to it with as much money as you can cough out
that MS is guilty by all measures and gets put out of business. If you
are a government employee such as a judge, of course it is your
interest to please your boss, with your best accessment of the air.

When i judge things, i like to imagine things being serious, as if my
wife is a wager, my daughter is at stake, that any small factual error
or mis-judgement or misleading perspective will cause unimaginable
things to happen. Then, my opinions becomes better ones.

Q: Microsoft's Operating System is used over 90% of PCs. If that's
not monopoly, i don't know what is.

A: Now suppose there is a very ethical company E, whose products have
the best performance/price ratio, and making all the competitors
looking so majorly stupid and ultimately won over 90% of the market as
decided by consumers. Is E now a monopoly? Apparently, beer drinkers
and pizza eaters needs to study a bit on the word monopoly, from the
perspectives of language to history to law. If they have some extra
time, they can sharpen views from philosophy & logic contexts as well.

Q: What about all the people in the corporate environments who are
forced to use MS products and aren't allowed the option/choice to use
Mac/Linux/UNIX?

A: Kick your boss's ass, or, choose to work for a company who have
decisions that you liked.

Q: What about MS buying out all competitors?

A: Microsoft offered me $1 grand for saying good things about them.
They didn't put a gunpoint on my head. I CHOOSE to take the bribe.
Likewise, sold companies can and have decided what's best for them.
It's nothing like under gunpoint.

Q: Microsoft forced computer makers to not install competitor's
applications or OSes.

A: It is free country. Don't like MS this or that? **** MS and talk to
the Solaris or BeOS or AIX or HP-UX or Apple or OS/2 or Amiga or NeXT
or the Linuxes with their free yet fantastically easy-to-use and
network-spamming X-Windows. Bad business prospects? Then grab the
opportunity and become an entrepreneur and market your own beats-all
OS. Too difficult? Let's sue Microsoft!

Q: Microsoft distributed their Internet Explorer web browser free,
using their “monopoly†power to put Netscape out of business.

A: entirely inane coding monkeys listen: It takes huge investment to
give away a quality software free. Netscape can give away Operating
Systems free to put MS out of business too. Nobody is stopping Sun
Microsystem from giving Java free, or BeOS a browser free, or Apple to
bundle QuickTime deeply with their OS free.

Not to mention that Netscape is worse than IE in just about every
version till they become the OpenSource mozilla shit and eventually
bought out by AOL and still shit.

• Netscape struggles, announced open browser source code in 1998-01,
industry shock
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html

• Netscape browser code released in 1998-03. Mozilla FAQ.
http://mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html

• AOL buys Netscape in 1998-11 for 4.2 billion.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-218360.html?legacy=cnet

• Jamie Zawinski, resignation and postmortem, 1999-04
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

• suck.com, Greg Knauss & Terry Colon, 2000-04, Netscape 6 mockery
http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/04/10/
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_/200004,greg_knauss_netscape.zip

• Xah Lee, Netscape Crap
http://xahlee.org/Writ_dir/macos-talk/58.txt

Q: Microsoft implemented extra things to standard protocols in
their OS so that other OS makers cannot be compatible with their OS
while their OS can be compatible with all. They used this Embrace &
Extend to lock out competitors.

A: My perspective is this: suppose you are now a company who's OS sits
over 90% of computers (regardless how this come to be for the moment).
Now, lots of “standard†protocols in the industry is a result of
popularity (RFC = Really Fucking Common), and popularity resulted from
being free, from the RFCs of the fantastically incompetent by the
truely stupid unix tech morons. What can you do if you want to improve
these protocols? If you go with totally different protocols, then the
incompatibility with the rest 10% isn't your best interest. I would
adopt existing protocols, and extend them with improvements. Being a
commercial entity, i'm sorry that it is not my duty to release my
improvments to my competitors. Any of you incompetent IBM/AIX/OS/2 or
SGI/Irix or HP/HP-UX or Sun/Solaris or Apple/AU-X/Mac can do the same,
not that they haven't.

Of course, the universe of moronic unixers and Apple fanatics cannot
see that. The unix idiots cannot see that their fantastically stupid
protocols are fantastically stupid in the first place. The Apple
fanatics are simply chronically fanatic.

Q: Microsoft product is notorious for their lack of security.

A: In my very sound opinion, if Microsoft's OS's security flaws is
measured at one, then the unixes are measured at one myriad. If unixes
suddenly switch popularity with Windows, then the world's computers
will collapse uncontrollably by all sorts of viruses and attacks. This
can be seen for technical person who knows unix history well:

• http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/freebooks.html (e.g.
ftpd/proftpd, inetd/xinetd, sendmail/qmail, X-Windows, telnet, passwd,
login, rsh, rlogin.)

• on the criminality of buffer overflow, by Henry Baker, 2001.
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_/buffer_overflow.html

• Fast Food The UNIX Way:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_fastfood_dir/fastfood.html

• Jargon File: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/

• The Rise of Worse is Better, by Richard P. Gabriel, 1991, at
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

and plenty other pre-90s documents to get a sense of just how
fantastically insecure unix was and is. Unix today is not just
technically slacking in the “security†department, but the unix
ways created far more unmanageable security risks that's another topic
to discuss.

The unix crime, is not just being utmost technically sloppy. Its entire
system and “philosophy†created an entire generation of incompetent
programers and thinking and programing languages, with damage that is a
few magnitude times beyond all computer viruses and attacks damages in
history combined. See also:

• Responsible Software License:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/responsible_license.html

Q: Microsoft products are simply poor quality.

A: Perhaps this in general is true pre-1997. I think the vast majority
of MS products today have better performance/price ratio then
competitors. This includes their operating system, their input devices
(mouse & keyboard), their X-Box gaming console, their software game
titles, their software architectures and languages (.NET, C#), their
technologies (few i know: SMB), and many of their software applications
(suite of Office, which consistently ranked top since early 90s).

e.g. Tom's hardware review on x-box, esp in comparison with Sony
Playstation 2. (2002-02):
http://www4.tomshardware.com/consumer/02q1/020204/index.html

the leading role of MS Office products can be seen in MacUser &
MacWorld magazine reviews through out early 90s.

Q: BeOS was once to be bundled with PC, but MS meddled with it and
basically at the end fucked Be up.

A: BeOS is a fantastically fucking useless OS. No DVD player, No Java,
No QuickTime, No games, no Mathematica, no nothing. For all practical
purposes, fucking useless in a different way than every donkey unixes.
Not to mention the evil Apple computer, refused to pass the QuickTime
technology, and tried to prevent BeOS from running on Apple hardware by
refusing to release their PPC hardware spec. Be founder Jean-Louis
Gassee wrote an article about it. Who's fucking whom?

Q: X inc tried to do W, but MS threatened to depart.

A: Dear X inc., try to find a bigger dick for your needs. If you cannot
find any, too bad! Suck it up to the big brother and hold on to what
you can get! If you have the smarts, milk him dry! Free country, free
to choose partnership. Ladies, previous night's indiscretion is not
rape the morning after.

Q: I'm not a beer bucket or pizza hole, but i want to do research
over the web. Is there any free stuff on the web i can grab? I'm an
OpenSource advocate, i demand free things.

A: •
http://www.moraldefense.com/Campaigns/Microsoft/Antitrust_FAQ/default.htm
(The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism)

• http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v21n2/friedman.html (The
Business Community's Suicidal Impulse by Milton Friedman, 1999-03)
local copy

Q: I'm thinking of putting my wife and daughter on the table. What
do you suggest to begin with?

A: Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell:
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/jdini/basic_economics.html

Q: Are you confident enough to bet your wifes and daughters for
what you say?

A: No. But I put my reputation in.
-------
This post is archived at:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/mshatredfaq.html

Xah
(e-mail address removed)
∑ http://xahlee.org/

 

[Roedy Green]

Q: Microsoft's Operating System is used over 90% of PCs. If that's
not monopoly, i don't know what is.

They got where they are by CHEATING. That is why they are evil, not
because they have a large market share.

 

[kasimir.g]

Hm... What does this have to do with Perl?

Why did you post this in comp.lang.perl.misc?

 

[Keith Thompson]

Hm... What does this have to do with Perl?

Why did you post this in comp.lang.perl.misc?

He posted this in comp.lang.python, comp.lang.perl.misc,
comp.unix.programmer, comp.lang.java.programmer, *and*
comp.os.linux.misc because he's a troll.

I wish I could say that he'll go away if we ignore him. I can say,
however, that ignoring him will minimize his impact. In the past, his
rants have led to long rambling arguments across multiple newsgroups,
none of them relevant to any point that might be made -- which is
probably exactly what he wants.

 

[Tim Hammerquist]

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.perl.misc.]

They got where they are by CHEATING. That is why they are
evil, not because they have a large market share.

Mr. Lee is a troll. And an increasingly obscene one.

I think his mother didn't pay him enough attention.
Perhaps she locked him in the basement... and he never left?

IAC, I've had enough. I don't killfile many people... but Mr.
Lee seems to have gone above and beyond. His arguments are
nothing but incendiary, and he doesn't even know Perl well
enough to bash it as he does.

*plonk*

Tim

 

[Jeroen Wenting]

They got where they are by CHEATING. That is why they are evil, not
because they have a large market share.

no, they got their by clever marketing and generally having a product that
was easier to use for the average user than anything the competition made
and a lot more powerful than other products created for their main target
market.

Microsoft isn't evil, they're not a monopoly either.
If they were a monopoly they'd have 100% of the market and there'd be no
other software manufacturers at all.
Prices would be far far higher than they are today, like they were back in
the days before Microsoft started competing with the likes of Ashton Tate
and WordPerfect corporation by offering similar products at 20% the price
(which is the real reason they got to be top dog, they delivered a working
product for a fraction of the price their competition did, and the
competition couldn't drop their prices that much and remain profitable).

Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more powerful
than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used only dumb
mainframe terminals.
IBM's prediction that there would be 5 computers (not counting game
computers like the Comodores and Spectrums) by 2000 would likely have come
true.

 

[Jim Moe]

Question: U.S. Judges are not morons, and quite a few others are
not morons. They find MS guilty, so it must be true.

Answer: so did the German population thought Jews are morons by
heritage, to the point that Jews should be exterminated from earth.
Apparently, the entire German population cannot be morons, they must be
right.

Extremely lame.

 

[Peter T. Breuer]

Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more powerful
than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used only dumb
mainframe terminals.

Uh - when microsoft produced dos 1.0, or whatever it was, I was sitting
at my Sun 360 workstation (with 4M of RAM, later upgraded to 8M),
running SunOS 3.8 or thereabouts.

And a mean game of tetris it played too. Chess wasn't worth the
humiliation at level 5.

I believe every researcher in britain got one as a matter of course, but
they only replaced the perq machines that everyone had had to put up
with before then. The vaxen running hpux or so were plentiful too, and
had fine monitors, tending more to the PC shape. We'd made our own word
processor machines and spreadsheet automatons before that. It didn't
take that many components, just a good engineer and a room full of
lackeys with soddering irons. The BBC were selling kits too (what were
they? Ataris?), not that I ever fell for that.

Maybe five years earlier I'd designed and built my own computer from
scratch using the MC 6802 chip as processor. Somebody really should
have told me about assembler - I wrote in machine code, flashing the
code into prom with a 100ms pulse from a 16V battery. Goodness knows
how much memory I had ... maybe a few KB.

I think the Suns were abut $30000 each when they first appeared, but
prices dropped rapidly so that after maybe three years the standard
price was about $8000. PCs had appeared and came in at about $4000, if I
recall right, so there was a price differential but it wasn't huge,
especially when a Sun could support a whole research team via vt100
lines, and a PC was a one-person job, thanks to the o/s.


Peter

 

[Mike Meyer]

no, they got their by clever marketing and generally having a product that
was easier to use for the average user than anything the competition made
and a lot more powerful than other products created for their main target
market.

What you call "clever marketing" the DOJ calls "monopolistic
practices". The courts agreed with the DOJ. Having had several large
PC manufacturers refuse to sell me a system without some form of
Windows because MS made it impossible for them to compete if they
didn't agree to do so, I agree with the courts and the DOJ.

MS didn't start chanting the "Ease of Use" Mantra into it after Apple
did - which happened long after MS had a sufficient stranglehold on
the industry to force anti-competitive contracts down the throats of
their "partners". Ease of use is something that Apple is much better
at than MS, which is why Apple is dominating the market, right?

Prices would be far far higher than they are today

I disagree. Before Gates decided to sell BASIC, software was very
cheap. It started getting cheap again in the late 80s. Now that cheap
software is threatening MS, they're doing their best to shut down all
the sources of quality cheap software, with there usual disregard for
truth, legality, ethics or the good of either the customer or their
business partners.

Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more powerful
than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used only dumb
mainframe terminals.

Oh, horseshit. You clearly weren't paying attention to what the rest
of the microcomputer industry was doing while Gates was selling IBM
non-existent software. While IBM was introducing 16-bit processors and
DOS was doing a flat file system, Tandy was selliig systems - for a
fraction of the price of any MS-DOS based system - that were
multitasking, multiuser, had an optional windowing system that came
with a complete (for the time) office suite. Of course, that was while
Tandy still thought they could sell computers by selling better
computers than you could get running MS software. But it was already
to late for that. MS single-handedly set the industry back 20 years.

IBM's prediction that there would be 5 computers (not counting game
computers like the Comodores and Spectrums) by 2000 would likely have come
true.

I see. You're a troll.

<mike

 

[George Sakkis]

He posted this in comp.lang.python, comp.lang.perl.misc,
comp.unix.programmer, comp.lang.java.programmer, *and*
comp.os.linux.misc because he's a troll.

I wish I could say that he'll go away if we ignore him. I can say,
however, that ignoring him will minimize his impact. In the past, his
rants have led to long rambling arguments across multiple newsgroups,
none of them relevant to any point that might be made -- which is
probably exactly what he wants.

Exactly, Mr. Lee is a self-proclaimed troll
(http://xahlee.org/Netiquette_dir/troll.html). Actually he seems to be
more than a plain troll; the style of many of his posts is indicative
of one or more mental disorders, so he'll probably continue trolling
even if he's ignored. Nevertheless, I agree that ignoring him will
minimize his impact.

 

[John Bokma]

no, they got their by clever marketing and generally having a product
that was easier to use for the average user than anything the
competition made and a lot more powerful than other products created
for their main target market.

I agree with the first part of your sentence, the rest is BS of course.

Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more
powerful than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used
only dumb mainframe terminals.

More BS of course.

IBM's prediction that there would be 5 computers (not counting game
computers like the Comodores and Spectrums) by 2000 would likely have
come true.

Yeah, sure, and we all would be living in caves.

 

[Michael Heiming]

Uh - when microsoft produced dos 1.0, or whatever it was, I was sitting
at my Sun 360 workstation (with 4M of RAM, later upgraded to 8M),
running SunOS 3.8 or thereabouts.

And a mean game of tetris it played too. Chess wasn't worth the
humiliation at level 5.

I believe every researcher in britain got one as a matter of course, but
they only replaced the perq machines that everyone had had to put up
with before then. The vaxen running hpux or so were plentiful too, and
had fine monitors, tending more to the PC shape. We'd made our own word
processor machines and spreadsheet automatons before that. It didn't
take that many components, just a good engineer and a room full of
lackeys with soddering irons. The BBC were selling kits too (what were
they? Ataris?), not that I ever fell for that.

Yep, Atari 400/800, Atari ST/etc, Commodore VC20/C64, there were
quite some systems much more stable/powerful then anything M$ had
to offer.

Maybe five years earlier I'd designed and built my own computer from
scratch using the MC 6802 chip as processor. Somebody really should
have told me about assembler - I wrote in machine code, flashing the
code into prom with a 100ms pulse from a 16V battery. Goodness knows
how much memory I had ... maybe a few KB.

I think the Suns were abut $30000 each when they first appeared, but
prices dropped rapidly so that after maybe three years the standard
price was about $8000. PCs had appeared and came in at about $4000, if I
recall right, so there was a price differential but it wasn't huge,
especially when a Sun could support a whole research team via vt100
lines, and a PC was a one-person job, thanks to the o/s.

The only thing positive about M$ entering the market, probably
due to their ineffective programming style they pushed Intel into
producing pretty fast while cheapo CPUs. Ironically exactly this
is the key to Linux/*BSD success in the unix server market.

 

[Roy Schestowitz]

__/ [Xah Lee] yelled on Saturday 15 October 2005 03:01 \__

Microsoft Hatred, FAQ

[The world is actually round]

Hmmm... 3 year-old 1-pager... PageRank 5.

I sure hope it's not a troll, as some other responders suggested, because I
cited that site in my blog several hours ago.

Remove? leave out link? It's rel="nofollow"ed for the time being.

Roy

 

[Martin P. Hellwig]

Jeroen Wenting wrote:

Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more powerful
than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used only dumb
mainframe terminals.

<cut>
At the time you "PC" guys where hacking around monochrome green and a
bit lighter green screens I was doing multi-media editing on my Amiga 600.
So perhaps we should state that we would have been a lot further if not
an incredible amount of cool technologies where bought by MS and then
simply put in the freezer to protect their future market share.
Although Commodore where never serious competitors, they had some
"intern" difficulties, too bad but life goes on.
To go on, stable version of truly free unix likes where released around
1994 that was in the same time MS was working on their super stable
released windows 95 and a slightly better NT 3.5 and let me not forget
OS/2 warp 3.0 .

I'm not a MS basher, hey I make money of them administrating them,
however to state that if we didn't had MS we would been in the IT stone
ages is blatantly wrong, I think we would have been a lot further then
where we are now. Perhaps we even had a other mainstream architecture
like sparcs and powerpc's.

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

I was going to sit this one out, as being obvious flame-bait, but Jeroen's
post appears to be reasonable, and yet so utterly wrong that it needs to
be responded to.

no, they got their by clever marketing and generally having a product that
was easier to use for the average user than anything the competition made
and a lot more powerful than other products created for their main target
market.

That's what Microsoft would like us to be believe, but it isn't what the
historical record shows.

The historical facts show that Microsoft had one piece of good fortune,
which they leveraged into the massive corporate empire they have today:
the US Justice Department investigated IBM for abuse of monopoly position.

That investigation lead to IBM playing it safe when they decided to move
into the personal computer market with the IBM Junior. Instead of making
their own operating system, they went out and licenced one from Microsoft.
And because they were desperate to licence something *quickly*, they
foolishly signed an agreement with Microsoft whereby Microsoft got paid
for every PC that they shipped *regardless of whether it had PC-DOS or not*.

IBM did the work to make PC-DOS a de facto standard, which allowed
Microsoft to foist that same sort of agreement on PC clone manufacturers.
This was anti-competitive in the extreme. Who in the highly competitive,
low-margin PC business would commit economic suicide by paying Microsoft
for DOS, and pay another operating system manufacturer as well, unless the
customer asked for the other operating system? The result was, everybody
shipped with MS-DOS, and competition got a bullet in the head.

This was illegal, and in the early 1990s the US Justice Department slapped
Microsoft with a consent decree where Microsoft agreed to stop breaking
the law and the DoJ agreed not to prosecute.

(To see how much they have stopped, you just try buying a laptop or
a Tier One PC with no operating system or something other than Windows.
The Tier One vendors won't do it, or if they do, you pay just as much for
the operating system free PC as the one with Windows. Hands up anyone who
thinks that Dell gets Windows for free?)

Even with the luck of IBM's foolish mistake, Microsoft couldn't quite
knock out their last operating system competitor, DR-DOS. And that's where
they got really dirty. Months before Windows 3.1 was released, they
started sending out test versions of Windows to journalists to review. In
those days, Windows ran as an application on top of DOS. Journalists
discovered that Windows generated an error on DR-DOS. In their reviews,
they of course reported that Windows wouldn't run on DR-DOS. This
effectively killed DR-DOS -- consumers wanted an operating system that
would run Windows.

When Windows was released, a few IT professionals noticed that it would
run under DR-DOS. Of course it was too late now: the DR-DOS market was
effectively gone, except for a few diehards. One of these people was
Andrew Schulman, who wondered why there was a great big piece of encrypted
code inside the review version of Windows 3.1, with a flag that shut the
test off in the release version.

Schulman wrote:

"Whether in spite or because of the books Undocumented DOS and
Undocumented Windows, I've often had to publicly defend Microsoft against
what I felt were acts of scapegoating from whining competitors ..."

No enemy of Microsoft is he.

Schulman discovered that this code had no purpose except to detect DR-DOS,
and then put up a misleading and pointless warning message.

For details, see: http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=1030/ddj9309d/9309d.htm

See also:

http://www.maxframe.com/DR/Info/fullstory/factrel.html
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Microsoft#Monopoly_and_legal_issues
http://www.base.com/software-patents/articles/stac.html

Microsoft has *repeatedly* been found guilty of engaging in illegal
practices, including outright theft of code, perjury ("oh no judge, this
is not a doctored video"), breaking non-disclosure agreements, misleading
conduct, patent and copyright infringement, and breach of contract. In
addition, they have engaged in unscrupulous and unethical behaviour,
including "astro-turf" media campaigns where they have written letters on
behalf of non-existent and dead people to pretend that they had more
community support than they really have.

Perhaps my favourite example of Microsoft's behaviour is what they did to
the inventors of Internet Explorer. IE was originally called Mosaic, one
of the first graphical web browsers in existence. Mosaic was licenced from
Spyglass, on the basis of a percentage of sales. Microsoft then promptly
bundled the re-named Mosaic/IE with Windows, making IE sales equal to (can
you do the maths?) zero.

Let's see now... some percentage of zero is... zero.

Microsoft isn't evil, they're not a monopoly either.
If they were a monopoly they'd have 100% of the market and there'd be no
other software manufacturers at all.

So according to Jeroen, if every computer in the world ran Windows,
except for one thrity-year-old Amstrad in somebody's basement, Microsoft
wouldn't have a monopoly. Yeah, right.

In law and in economics, a monopoly does not mean that there are
absolutely no competitors to a supplier. That is an overly literal
definition, and is about as sensible as arguing that a fly swatter isn't a
fly swatter because you can also use it to squish spiders.

At the time the US Justice Department tackled Microsoft (for the *second*
time, I should point out) Microsoft had approximately 98% of all desktop
PC operating systems in the USA, and approximately the same around the
world. 98% is close enough to 100% to be a monopoly. Economically, 80% is
probably enough market share to be effectively a monopoly (although that
depends on precisely what market we're talking about).

Today, Microsoft's share of the desktop has fallen to perhaps 93% or
90%, still giving them effective monopoly power.

Prices would be far far higher than they are today, like they were back in
the days before Microsoft started competing with the likes of Ashton Tate
and WordPerfect corporation by offering similar products at 20% the price
(which is the real reason they got to be top dog, they delivered a working
product for a fraction of the price their competition did, and the
competition couldn't drop their prices that much and remain profitable).

In Jeroen's dreams. Perhaps some reality check is needed here. In 1989, I
purchased MS Word for approximately $100, and Word Perfect for about $90.
(Prices are in Australian dollars, not adjusted for inflation.) Word
Perfect was discounted somewhat because it was a "cross-grade" from Word.
If I recall correctly, the normal price was about $120. Excel was also
about $100.

By contrast, I paid $4000 for my PC and a dot matrix printer.

Today, I can buy a PC for $500, a monitor for an extra $100, and a laser
printer for another $200 dollars: $800 all up. The recommended retail
price of MS Office is $1000. My PC has plummeted in price, falling by 80%,
while MS Office has gone up in price by 150%.

But who pays recommended retail price on Office? A more realistic price is
the OEM price, which is about $300 here. So while my PC has become
thousands of times more powerful, it has fallen in price by 80%, while
Word and Excel have had only incremental improvements, but have increased
in price by 50%.

That is a textbook example of monopoly power in action.

Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more
powerful than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used
only dumb mainframe terminals.
IBM's prediction that there would be 5 computers (not counting game
computers like the Comodores and Spectrums) by 2000 would likely have
come true.

Except for, oh I don't know, Apple, Apricot, Amstrad, Wang, Xerox, and all
the other thousands of computer companies that existed before Microsoft
destroyed competition in the software arena.

IBM's prediction, for the record, was well before Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak had invented the personal computer with the Apple. IBM's
prediction at a time when everybody thought that computers would cost
billions of dollars and be as large as a house. Trying to credit Microsoft
for the invention of the PC is foolish to the extreme. Microsoft didn't
even exist when the Apple II was bringing computers to ordinary people.

 

[Rhino]

no, they got their by clever marketing and generally having a product that
was easier to use for the average user than anything the competition made
and a lot more powerful than other products created for their main target
market.

Microsoft isn't evil, they're not a monopoly either.
If they were a monopoly they'd have 100% of the market and there'd be no
other software manufacturers at all.
Prices would be far far higher than they are today, like they were back in
the days before Microsoft started competing with the likes of Ashton Tate
and WordPerfect corporation by offering similar products at 20% the price
(which is the real reason they got to be top dog, they delivered a working
product for a fraction of the price their competition did, and the
competition couldn't drop their prices that much and remain profitable).

Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more powerful
than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used only dumb
mainframe terminals.

IBM's prediction that there would be 5 computers (not counting game
computers like the Comodores and Spectrums) by 2000 would likely have come
true.

I'd be VERY surprised if IBM predicted that there would be only 5 COMPUTERS
in *2000* - perhaps you mean 5 *manufacturers* of computers? - unless the
prediction was made a VERY long time ago. I think you are giving a
badly-mangled version of something I saw when I worked at IBM.

About 10 years ago, when I was working at IBM, there was an employee
newsletter circulated commemorating the death of Thomas J. Watson Jr., a
former CEO of IBM. They cited an old interview with him in which he had
predicted that the world wide market for computers would be 3 in the next
year; in other words, he expected IBM to sell three of their computers in
that year. However, he was not making this prediction in or for the year
2000; the interview had taken place just after World War II - 1946 perhaps -
and was for the next year. I wasn't born then but, from what I recall about
computer history, selling 3 Eniacs (or whatever model they were making that
year) isn't too far out of line with what actually happened.

Of course, we are talking about a time when computers were absolutely
immense, ran on vacuum tubes (the transistor hadn't been invented yet) and
filled very large rooms - and yet probably had less computing power than the
average microwave oven you can buy today. Only very large companies or
national governments would want or need a computer in those days. Everyone
else was still using typewriters - which was IBM's bread and butter in those
days - for their business needs.

Rhino

 

[Drazen Gemic]

I find this article very much off topic.
Send that to some advocacy group, please.

DG

 

[John Wingate]

Uh - when microsoft produced dos 1.0, or whatever it was, I was sitting
at my Sun 360 workstation (with 4M of RAM, later upgraded to 8M),
running SunOS 3.8 or thereabouts.

Peter, if you are serious, and not just pulling our legs, your memory is
failing. MS-DOS 1.0 came out in August 1981; SunOS 3.0 in February 1986.
Sun Microsystems was incorporated (with four employees) in February 1982.
There never was a SunOS 3.8. (SunOS 3.5 was succeeded by 4.0.) And I'm
not sure what you mean by "Sun 360"--a Sun 3/60, maybe?

 

[Real Gagnon]

I'd be VERY surprised if IBM predicted that there would be only 5

COMPUTERS in *2000* - perhaps you mean 5 *manufacturers* of computers?
- unless the prediction was made a VERY long time ago. I think you are
giving a badly-mangled version of something I saw when I worked at
IBM.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." ~ IBM Chairman
Thomas Watson, 1943.

ref : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computers

Bye.

 

[John Bokma]

The only thing positive about M$ entering the market, probably
due to their ineffective programming style they pushed Intel into
producing pretty fast while cheapo CPUs.

Amazing, I thought Xah Lee was the only one able to fit so much BS in one
sentence.

Ironically exactly this
is the key to Linux/*BSD success in the unix server market.

Yeah, right.