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

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (172129)	10/7/2005 1:41:18 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

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... This first part has a problem. It was the Apple II line, not the PARC influenced MAC line that had Apple at the lead in the very early days. The DOS based IBM PC arrived prior to the windowing MAC's. Another thing you didn't mention was that the Intel micro's were inferior to the Moto ones of the day as well. IBM choose two inferior products for business reasons. We all have lived with the aftermath. What Bill did do (partly due to the IBM link as well) was advance a business model that was very successful. It is just possible that this contribution was a greater contribution to the industry than the technical deficiencies of MS products vs. the rest of the industry. My gut level feeling says no, that his business practices were also not helpful to the industry as a whole, but I'm more out of my territory there, and certainly the libertarian crowd like M. Winn prefers the now holds barred business approach. What I have always favored myself, is restrictions on patent protection for ANYTHING that requires neural wiring in the competent users brain, except for repair & service or possibly expert user level. I.e. you can patent anything which is hidden from the competent user, but not anything which is part of the user knowledge base. This makes user transparent products possible which is the best definition of anti-monopoly practice that I know. As an example, a microprocessor company could patent circuit implementations, but not instruction set architectures. They could patent the ISA if it was not available to third parties, that is the company might develop an ISA and supply compiler tools which hide the ISA from all users. In that case, they could not patent the compiler user commands & user interface. If they wanted to hide the compiler they could supply applications built using the compiler, but third parties would only see the application interface, which could not be patented, etc. In such a tech world, any user could use any appliance without knowing or caring who the manufacture was. We actually have such an industry in the automotive sector. When I travel and rent a car, I never care or worry about the manufacture or model I get. I can safely and efficiently drive them all, that is I'm about equally productive "out of the box" with any automobile. That model does break down when you change countries because of the non-uniform choice of steering, and sign/language issues. However, even with these problems, the auto/road system is far more user friendly than much of the tech/computer world.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (172129)	10/7/2005 8:28:33 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 281500

You missed a part of the story of Microsoft's rise. When they made the deal to provide IBM with an operating system for their new PC, Microsoft didn't have one that would meet the specs. Instead of writing one, they bought a clone of CP/M that had been written by a bay area programmer/hobbyist, who's name escapes me. I believe they paid $5000.00! (This was after taking 50k from IBM) That has to be the most screwed guy in history! All this is in Robert Cringley's book on the era. pbs.org