"I recall MS pulled some tricks on Borland...something to to do incompatibility between formats."
The only trick MS pulled was that they killed them on price. Borland's original produce was a data base called Dbase. It was the first widely used and sort of best PC data base.
All a spread sheet program is is a front end to a database, no more, no less.
In about 1985, Ms combined a word processor, spreadsheet, and database program along with a paint program and one other and sold the whole thing for $250, or about $50 bucks a program, with dos 6.2 which had a task switcher; and, simultaneously made the commands of each program sort of the same.
Borland missed the boat, they kept the price of dbase at 495, but came up with a new front end switcher. WITHOUT COMMON COMMANDS AMONG PROGRAMS, they figured wrong, only THEN did they borrow visicalc concepts to make quatro pro, but the time was slipping. They missed again, they were still too high in price and the task switcher was too cumbersome AND NOBODY (!!!!!!!!!!!!) liked their attempts on the new graphical interface on DbaseIII or IV. Borland threw in "WordPro" which was alright, but who cared, eveyone was using Wordperfect at the time. Eventually after Borland lost all the money, they sold the family of programs to WordPerfect corporation who lost more money and sold it to Corel, who added a paint program...very cool, very late.
There was no secret conspiracy, they got gready tried to protect there product too much, tried to protect the price AND LOST THE MARKET.
Does this give you a hint of what sun has been feeling and acting like these past couple of years in veiw of the advent of IA64 ???
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