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To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (14227)	11/18/1997 3:13:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>>You are starting to contradict yourself. The reason there are more apps available for Windows is becasue MSFT recognized the need for graphical computing and capitalized on it before the competition.<<< What in the world are you talking about here? Which competition? The Amiga folks didn't understand graphical computing? Ever hear of Sun? Evans & sutherland? Xerox? Macintosh? Ever hear of Andrew and M3? X-windows? They all beat Microsoft into that arena. >>>MSFT was not only the first, but hte only significant vendor willing to write productibity apps for Windows 1.0 and 2.0<<< Because these systems were unused and nearly unusable. The tools were atrocious. The OSs crashed hourly. It took Microsoft 10 years to get it right. The vendors had better platforms to do graphics on. PC graphics products vendors wrote to DOS in the 80's, because early Windows didn't cut it. Top-market graphics vendors wrote to other platforms, primarily Mac and Unix, and the low end vendors wrote to Amiga and DOS. By 1994, Microsoft finally had something to offer that worked well enough. Very late in the game. In the 80's there weren't hardly any graphics functions in microsoft compilers or even in the Windows API. (You could paint to the DC and do some text and get the mouse location, that's pretty much it. All the actual graphics manipulations were up to the programmer, and to 3rd party library vendors.) Chaz

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (14227)	11/23/1997 2:31:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Reg, I am talking about choice today, not some past history of Window's rise to power. That is irrelevant now. It does not matter anymore how they got there, it just matters how they handle themselves now that they have arrived. There are numerous products that failed but were superior to MSFT's in almost every category. But most usually did not have much of a chance to survive against MSFT, if MSFT felt that they wanted to own a specific market. The best hope was to be bought out by MSFT. MSFT's products never had to be the best products or even excellent products to win. In some cases they were very good, but they have never had to compete on quality. This is not to say that none of their products had any quality, but that they never competed on the merits of quality. I assume you've read Nicolas Petreley's article about this. It is right on target. BTW, of course MSFT was the company most willing to write apps for Windows. The survival of their company depended upon it. And they won, and they have been handsomely rewarded for it. But because they have become a monopoly (notice that I am now talking about the present), they should not be able to leverage their position in an unfair way to guarantee that they stay on top and crush any possible alternative.