If you don't use M$FT I won't use $un, OK? It's childish and contributes nothing to the debate.
Gerry, even you can't deny that there is no competitor
to the IBM-PC in the desktop market. All those CPM
based systems were made by proprietary hardware vendors,
which I clearly stated in the prior posting. Their
market dominance was easily eclipsed by the cheaper,
faster PC. This point was not lost on the opportunistic
Mr. Gates who jumped at the chance to get aboard the
IBM marketing engine before it left the station.
The IBM PC was a $6,000 beast. It stayed very expensive even as cheap (if you can call Compaq cheap) clones were marketed as IBM intended the machine to be an office machine. As far as your rewriting of history, Gates sent IBM to Digital Research because Microsoft could only provide a BASIC interpreter. Digital Research, for reasons that dissolve into the mists of legend, declined to develop an OS so IBM went back to Microsoft. Microsoft purchased an OS and dressed it up a little. Hardly an "opportunistic" Gates "jump[ing] at the chance".
How convenient for you that you can label a "proprietary" hardware and software maker as a non-competitor to Microsoft. This means that Apple must have never competed with Microsoft. This means that Sun is not competing with Microsoft, either by giving away PC Solaris or by trying to maintain and expand its server market share despite Microsoft's moves into those areas. The truth is that any hardware/software combination is a competitor to the Wintel platform. Even now the advice given is to determine which software you need to run and then to buy the machine that will run it.
The DOJ lawsuit, Gerald, is NOT about the 15% or so
marketshare owned by Apple and it customers. It is
about the 85% marketshare owned by M$FT and its customers.
Funny you should mention Apple as Apple screwed themselves by going for maximum profit per unit instead of marketshare when they had a real chance to capture the market. Microsoft went for marketshare and now ends up being accused of harming the consumer while the company who really tried to gouge the consumer, Apple, is held up as one of Microsoft's poor little victims.
It is also NOT about the Intuits who make software that
M$FT has not attempted to trump (though they did try
to buy Intuit and that was blocked by the gov't).
Ever heard of Microsoft Money? Various reviews have rated Money and Quicken as pretty even for the last two years yet Quicken still enjoys the monster's share of the market. (I use Quicken myself. I used to use Managing Your Money until they dropped the ball a few years back.) Microsoft also tried the Tax market this year and failed miserably with a lousy product even though many stores had the software for Free After Rebate. Microsoft has completely withdrawn from that market in total defeat. Hardly the unbeatable giant, huh?
The tax software market. Now there's a racket. You have a forced upgrade every year due to government-mandated obsolescence. Do you think that Microsoft wouldn't want that market if they were capable of capturing it?
It is about the apps M$FT produces for their customer base. It's about how those apps get to market, how well they work, and about what M$FT does to prevent other competitive apps from getting equal share in the marketing
arena.
When Microsoft has a product that's lousy, people don't use it. When Microsoft has a product that's pretty good then people use it. Who used IE 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0? They were pretty damn bad. IE 4.0 was as good as Netscape 4.x and better in some ways, and IE 5.0 is superior (for me) in so many ways that I can't remember them until I try using Netscape again. (BTW, does anyone else think it's funny that Netscape is skipping from 4.x to 6.0? I guess they think the consumers are such fools that they'll believe Netscape must be better than IE because it has a higher version number.) |
