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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (76930)	4/6/2000 5:44:00 AM
From: Edwarda	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 108807

Get a grip, Terry! You are in my territory now. Bill Gates is no Hank; he's not even Francisco! He, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer got lucky when the IBM folks went to see Digital Research and Gary Kildall had forgotten about the meeting and was off flying his damned plane over the Santa Cruz mountains. Gary's wife Dorothy didn't want to sign the nondisclosure agreement with IBM without Gary's O.K. Microsoft was their next stop. What Gates et al. sold to IBM for the operating system for "Acorn" (aka the 8088) was Gary's CP/M, transmogrified by another company, Seattle Computer Products, into QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Microsoft paid $50,000 to Seattle Computer Products for the rights to QDOS, whose "developer" admitted to "borrowing" heavily from Gary. Bill was smart: He used the IBM nondisclosure agreement to fudge the heritage of QDOS, suddenly MS-DOS. He risked nothing because he had nothing to lose. It was the guy at IBM, named Lowe, who really took the risk in choosing the operating system. I could waste hours going through the history, but let's "fast forward" to the last Justice Department case, the one that was "blown" by the acceptance of the consent decree. What most people don't realize is that the license agreements that PC manufacturers had with Microsoft for Windows (the third version that finally worked, sort of) called for the payment of a fee not simply on every PC shipped with Windows installed but on every PC, regardless of operating system. If a PC manufacturer filled an order calling for OS/2, the manufacturer still had to pay the fee to Microsoft as well as to IBM, which was providing OS/2; otherwise, hey, no Windows! IBM could subsidize this sort of nonsense; other providers of operating systems could not. Hank Reardon would have vomited at doing business in this fashion. The consent decree did away with this bit of crushing one's competitors, not with a better product but with threats bolstering an inferior product. Unfortunately, the legal process took so long and was so feeble that better operating systems utilizing windowing technology earlier were forced out of business. I watched them go down. Consumers have not chosen Windows; it was rammed down their damned throats. The Justice Department is pushing so hard now IMO because it recognizes that it screwed up so badly last time. The case is not as clear as it was last time. However, I know the technology well enough to know that the browser is not integral to the operating system even now. And I have watched Microsoft systematically put competitors, even potential competitors, out of business using precisely the tactics that sent Dagny Taggart to the wall. In this case the Justice Department is--amazingly--trying to do its job, curtailing a powerful company's ability to smother innovation and creativity that might benefit consumers and give them the opportunity to choose. What Microsoft is trying to do is make sure that you never see or know about Reardon Metal.