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To: spitsong who wrote (31778)	1/11/2002 3:11:12 PM
From: Alomex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

However, are you implying that NT uses the OS/2 code base? Not at all, although they do share a few things here and there. One can learn a lot from a blow-up without reusing any code whatsoever. For example, several of Microsoft products have been rewritten almost from scratch during their life-span resulting in better and faster products (Word for Mac is one example familiar to this audience). If would be foolish to say that Word for Mac 2001 does not benefit from snaffus in Word-93-and-a-half simply because they don't share code. In the same way Microsoft made the big mistakes with OS/2 which allowed them to get things right with NT. As they did with Sybase's SQL Server product, they partnered with another technology company for a limited time, and then turned around and stuck in the knife, and outmarketed their former partner afterwards, but kept ownership rights for themselves. That is not quite right (I know the authors of SQL server personally). Microsoft pulled on Sybase one of their typical "million dollar purchase offer". They use to make those offers all the time back in the mid 90's. (For all I know they still do, but there are so few software vendors left that is hard to tell). A million dollar offer went like this: Microsoft: "we want to buy the source code of your successful product for a million dollars plus possibly, a small licensing fee per copy sold. We know it costs a lot more than a million dollars to develop a DB server/disk compression/fax software/search engine/web browser, and we know that we are screwing you with such a low ball offer. However if you don't agree to our offer we'll simply spend $10 million dollars developing our own version --we have the money, we have the resources-- in which case you will get $0 instead of $1,000,000. So what do you say? Do you agree?" Some companies agreed, others didn't. Delrina passed and was killed by Microsoft. Stacker passed as well, as nearly killed by Microsoft, but they had a patent and won a $400 million lawsuit against Microsoft. Spyglass and Sybase accepted and all they got was a million dollars.