Revisionists of the Corel, Lotus, and IBM history crack me up. They are soooo off the mark. In the early 1990s these guys shot themselves in the foot so often its amazing they're still in business at all.
MSFT absolutely *begged* these companies to write to Windows and their brilliant reply was "nah, we're going to wait and see if it sells" and meanwhile bet the farm on mighty IBM's OS/2. Well, one app group didn't make this colossal blunder...MSFTs.
Then, showing up late to the party *after* all the APIs are coded and out the door they whine that "Gee, MSFTs app group got all this special stuff put in.". Well, duh, MSFTs app group was the only one committed at the time the APIs were defined. Is it any wonder the OS group took pains to put in things their first platform customers needed?
Living near MSFTs headquarters in the Seattle area, I've known many MSFT developers personally for years and years and have observed their work environment first hand on a regular basis. Contrary to the popular misconception, the apps groups for the most part use MSDN on their desktops just like external vendors do. There was a period after the famous "Undocumented APIs" book was published where MSFT actually went thru everything and eliminated the relatively few cases of undocumented API usage such that currently 99% of the MSFT apps call only APIs published in MSDN quarterly (plus constant web updates).
Further, MSFT bashers overlook the hundreds of special hacks in Windows to make non-MSFT products work, even one's that do incredibly sleazy stuff. I know there are slew of them for Lotus code. MSFT does a *much* better job on backward compatibility than, for example, AAPL.
Be sure to take a close look at MSDN, a *huge* collection of knowledge about Windows and Windows programming offered for a nominal fee. Now compare to the piece of crap OS/2 DDK for which IBM charged $600. Gee, what a surprise that more apps were written for Windows than OS/2. Why it must be that unfair monopoly power...not! |
