Cheryl, Hal, Scotsman; thanks for your comments.
I have a bunch of work to do tonight, so won't be able to respond in detail to all of you.
One comment though (or question rather) to Cheryl, re Assuming that MSFT had marketed MS-DOS on their own, proprietary Microcomputers (ala Apple), I don't see how anyone could complain about anti-trust (given the current complaints). They could have integrated any pieces into the OS & sold the it bundled with pastrami, if they wanted.
But isn't that one of things the DOJ got hot-to-trot about re IBM anti-trust lawsuit? Maybe I'm wrong, but I have the idea that at the time of the design of the original IBM PC/XT, IBM had the DOJ on their back. My guess is that the DOJ was applauding the deal whereby Microsoft would write the OS and sell it to IBM, therefore IBM wouldn't be inclined to have another dominating and all-encompassing product with the IBM PC/XT. I think the reason why Apple gets away with being the sole provider of their hardware and OS is because Apple never got big enough or market-dominating enough to fall in the scope of the DOJ radar.
Something tells me that even if MSFT had marketed MS-DOS on their own, open architecture Microcomputers (Not ala Apple), the DOJ would have broken up MS probably shortly after Win 95 debuted. If the system had been proprietary ala Apple, I think MS probably would have been broken up by the DOJ shortly after Win 3.1 debuted, with vehement and righteous anger. Or at the very least, been forced to publish all HW and SW architectures.
I'm neither a SW developer or a HW developer, but it appears to me tht the DOJ uses market share along with overall size of the company when determining whether or not a company is ripe for trust-busting. IBM was a HW and SW vendor, and still is. But their particular crime was that they dominated the mainframe market with proprietary HW and OS. They simply got too big for the government's comfort level. After all, who cares how proprietary the NeXt computer was: Who's buying it? So the DOJ didn't care about NeXt. But MS, they have only dabbled in HW, making things like mice, trackballs, keyboards and joysticks; "small" stuff. If MS were to merge now with Intel, you can bet the DOJ would be apoplectic. If MS had merged with Intel ten years ago, they would been busted up over five years ago, IMO. Just my observations/speculations. |
