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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems
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To: Stormweaver who wrote (19147)9/1/1999 9:47:00 PM
From: QwikSand  Read Replies (1) of 64865
 
The public has choosen Windows since it is the best provides the best desktop metaphor

Oh come now, James. Do you remember 1981 when the IBM PC came out? Maybe at that time your were still more interested in Playboy than PC Week. Anyway, the original IBM PC had 3 operating systems. The consumer had a choice! It was good old market Darwinism! One was MS-DOS. It was free in the box with the system unit. One was CPM-86. It cost $60 in 1981 dollars, about $150 today. The third was the intrepid UCSD P-System, which also cost you some money and would do even less than the other two, only slower (but it was platform independent!). Guess what happened. I bet you can do it in one guess.

If we had been discussing this at that time, a Microsoft admirer might have said: "The public has chosen Microsoft because it provides the best command-line A-prompt experience." (Remember there were no hard disks at first.) That would have had as much meaning as your statement about Windows. Microsoft has done nothing for 18 years but artfully exploit the critical market mass that IBM handed to Bill G. on day one of the Intel PC industry's existence.

Part of this exploitation, a large enough part to attract the attention of the U.S. Government on not one but multiple occasions, has relied on illegal contract provisions in restraint of trade, using the premier position they were handed to bully their partners and customers into making sure that competing products were never given the same accidental advantage that they got in 1981.

Microsoft is not known, or chosen by anyone, for the quality of its products. The "choice" that you can point to is window dressing on the truth of Microsoft's monopoly.

Regards,
--QwikSand
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