How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 478.53

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Dec 12 9:30 AM EST

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To: Dave who wrote (67216)	4/12/2002 11:52:50 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) of 74651

Dave - talk about clueless, this is about the most mangled history I have seen. Kind of like "The revolutionary war was fought because George Washington threw tea into the water while crossing the Delaware River, and John Hancock was signing the articles of confederacy." Let's just look at some of the statements. They bought DOS. - so far so good. Their DOS monopoly was gained through an amazingly one-sided exclusive deal with IBM, who was fighting its own antitrust prosecution at the time and needed to give somebody else control of the software (not to mention that IBM had no idea how valuable the PC market might become). The group doing PC development was not at all constrained by the legal issues facing IBM, which were about bundling mainframe hardware and software in a single package. The PC team followed a total outsource model in order to keep development costs down and speed time to market. Your last statement is true - IBM had no idea how successful the PC would be and targeted 500,000 units over 3 years as a big win. Windows was a port of Mac OS to DOS, and was only legal because Microsoft's lawyers at that time were craftier than Apple's. A little confusion here. Gates and Jobs BOTH lifted the concept of Windows from the Xerox PARC Star workstation. Both saw Star at the same time. Neither had any access to source code. This was typical "reverse engineering". The code base for the MAC bears no resemblance to Windows, and both were developed, independently, at about the same time. The Apple lawsuit fell on its face on basic discovery, not clever lawyers. Their license agreement with Apple allowed Microsoft to incorporate major portions of Apple's Mac OS source code directly into Windows. There was no OS source code... the licensing was to incorporate enough links into the Microsoft applications developed for the MAC to make those apps reliable. The documentation of those events available on the web is prolific and there is no excuse for ignorant revisionist history.

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