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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (172128)	10/7/2005 12:08:04 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Bingo! A Short PC History: Apple stole the research from Xerox PARC and became the number one PC manufacturer in the world. IBM wanted a piece of the action, BUT the CEO acknowledged that with IBM's culture it would take years before anything would get out of the door. An engineer (whose name escapes me now) got the ear of the CEO and promised to deliver a PC in a year. To this end they threw away most IBM principles, including closed systems. But IBM still had a problem that there was no software for the PC. They went to Billy G's little shack, that at the time was in the business of selling BASIC interpreters and other little things. They were shocked to realize that while some software could be ported from MS, the OS was non-existent. So they went to Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. founder of CP/M OS. Gary was out on that day and IBM lawyers wanted his wife to sign away the ranch. She said she cannot do that without having her lawyers look at it first. But the east-coast/west-coast culture clash more than anything made them go back to MS and ask if they could do it. It turns out that somebody in a building not too far away had bought a CP/M manual and had rewritten an API compatible OS (i.e. a CP/M clone) for their use, which Gates bought from them to make IBM happy. NONE OF THIS REQUIRED GREAT INTELLIGENCE Because IBM was in such a rush to market, and because they were such a uptight bureaucratic company, they could not tie all the lose ends before the release of the PC and they could not prevent the clone markets from taking off. As a result, MS got rich on the back of the PC clone makers who were taking advantage of IBM's inaptitude. It is important to note that through out the '80s Gates did not make much money off the back of IBM, NOR did he have a big part in the success of clones or the PC market. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MICROSOFT? I am not in the camp of those who think Billy boy is evil incarnate or that he is an idiot. But I do believe the industry as a whole would have been better off without Microsoft. PC's were going to take off no matter who was the front runner. Gates just happened to be at the right place at the right time and was adept at pressing his advantage (with the results of killing several innovative trends). First of all, nothing creative or truly innovative has ever come from Microsoft. In fact, MS has not even been good at figuring out what technology to steal. Here is a short list of things they neither invented nor saw its value right away, nor did they change it for the better in a timely manner: OPERATING SYSTEMS: DOS was a clone of a clone and as far as OS goes was nothing more than a glorified loader (no garbage collection, no memory protection, no...) WORD PROCESSING: Word Perfect, Word Star, AMI Word, etc...Not made by MS. Way too late to the game. Not much in the way of innovation. SPREAD SHEET: VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, VP-Planner, Quatro Pro, etc...Not made by MS. Way too late to the game. Not much in the way of innovation. INTERNET BROWSER: NCSA Mosaic, Netscape, (and these days, FireFox and Opera) etc...Not made by MS. Way too late to the game. Not much in the way of innovation. EMAIL: TO this day they don't have it right! INSTANT MESSENGER: Same as above. INTERNET SEARCH: Same as above. DESKTOP SEARCH: Ditto. OPERATING SYSTEMS: (this needs elaboration) As far as OSes go, Microsoft's has always sucked. I have an archive interview with Steve Ballmer in mid 90's where he admits they suck at it but blames it on IBM's excessive influence within Microsoft. He goes on to claim, "Just watch us! Now that we are free of IBM, just watch what we will build!" So did they come up with Linux? With all their resources and hundreds of millions of dollars spent and all the best and brightest hires, did they make a good OS after they were free of IBM? They did not even have enough intelligence to fallow the Unix philosophy on operating systems and instead made that junk, windows 95...as a result of that mistake and because they kept building on top of that mistake, windows is not broken beyond hope and has to be remade from scratch and be made like...yes like Unix/Linux. The kicker is that Unix was open source to begin with and MS could have at least cloned its methodology quite legally. "This just in from Smartoffice News: Windows is broken and Microsoft has admitted it. Jim Allichin, Vice President and co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division, reportedly has told Bill Gates that Vista is "not going to work". From the article: "[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly." Allichin is spearheading a revolution within the company to change how the software giant works. The solution: a more 'Linux-esque' methodology, of course."