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To: Alan Buckley who wrote (19031)	5/13/1998 9:46:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

And I'm pointing out that the SparcStation and Macintosh OS industries are totally non-competitive. Yeah, so? Sun was never a monopoly in the Unix workstation market. Apple was never a monopoly in the PC market. Microsoft didn't make the IBM PC cloneable. Once again, I'm suffering from this small mind problem, where people who scoff at Microsoft's OS competition in any other context suddenly think other choices are significant when antitrust comes up. Back to my favorite concise summary article, infoworld.com Popular Idea No. 2: We should let the market, not the government, decide. The market has decided. It's given Microsoft a monopoly in the desktop OS market, and Justice is not trying to reverse that decision. Nothing in any Justice Department action tries to give an artificial advantage to alternative OSes. Antitrust laws kick in when significant competition does not exist in a market. IBM has given up on OS/2, Macintosh sales have collapsed, and most software developers publish solely on Windows. The notion that the operating system marketplace is competitive is a fantasy. Antitrust laws apply to this situation. Back to Alan: DELL, GTWY, and CPQ are billion dollar companies that would not exist without MSFT. And that exist at Microsoft's pleasure, as the Compaq sacred icon episode shows. "They have to ship the machines the way we build them". What do the OEMs do, anyway? Now, of course, they all totally, sincerely love Bill and company, they were just the victims of incorrect thought before. Except for Ted Waite, they all believe the world will collapse without Windows 98. Ted will get the bill for his little independence act later, I'm sure, the next time old Joachim Kempin comes around. I suggest a trip to MSFT's web site to check out the hardware compatibility lists for their systems. The depth is astounding. No one else is providing support on such a scale. Microsoft doesn't provide that support either. Mostly, the hardware vendors do. Drivers for Windows 3, Windows 95, NT4, NT3.51, and who knows what next. I guess nothing new is needed for Windows98, except for USB devices that may or may not have a chance of working reliably, given the integrity and uniformity of the Windows experience. Will old drivers work with NT5, the OS for the next millennium? Will Microsoft be rewriting all the drivers that need rewriting? Will that 30million odd lines of code translate into a system that sucks less, as well as having new features? We'll see, sometime. Cheers, Dan.

To: Alan Buckley who wrote (19031)	5/14/1998 3:12:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Respond to of 24154

SUNW had a chance to be mainstream, and like IBM before them chose to guard their proprietary hardware profits rather than take the painful steps to open up to and test hundreds of hardware options as MSFT did. No, you don't understand. They did open up their hardware, and there is a clone market, and it is somewhat cheaper than SUNW's solutions. But it never caught on to the same extent that the PC cloning did. I believe that SUNW never really had much of a chance to be mainstream, unless if they decided to completely abandon any of their own architecture and been just another PC clone manufacturer. I don't believe that any hardware architecture had a chance to win out over Intel once IBM chose them for the PC. Indeed, if SUNW had made the right design choices in the 80's there would be no need for NT, but now it's here. Wrong. Please tell me what right design choices they could have made that would have made a difference. As NT gains high-end capabilities, SUNW and MSFT will compete head to head more often. Consumers will have to choose between SUNWs mature expensive hardware, and the more varied and less expensive options offered by MSFT. I believe MSFT will slowly but surely eat SUNW's lunch. People can run SUNW's OS on PC hardware, so the market could already have been choosing Solaris OS on PC hardware, so the issue of SUNW hardware costing more does not account for why people ignored Solaris and now are flocking to NT.