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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ojai who wrote (908)	5/29/1998 10:16:00 PM
From: Spots	Respond to of 14778

Yeah, MSFT is in denial. I understand how they've been able to get away with it, though, based mostly on luck. IMHO the reasons are (1) Apple's and IBM's arrogance and internal politics let MSFT become the de facto standard as the alternatives closed their systems to outside developers. Similarly, the johnny-come-lately (in the commercial market) Unix vendors displayed a similar arrogance in the high-end server market. I can remember very clearly when no commercial organization would touch UNIX with a 20 foot pole, but then embraced it as the ONLY open alternative. Finally, the PC revolution caught everyone by surprise, including (IMHO) Intel and MSFT, but these two were in the right place at the right time. Now NOT to detract from Andy and Bill; they had the vision to realize where they were and where things were going, or in short, they recovered best from the surprise. This is what entrepreneurial genius is all about, and I do not in any way think that's unlaudable or that their success from that point on was an accident. But it's an accident it happened that particular way, and that's why we are where we are. I also think if it hadn't happened that way, it would have happened some other, and we might be saying exactly the same thing about Jobs and the MAC interface today instead. Or XWindows. Or XPARC or whatever it was that Apple swiped from Xerox way back when. Or if I'd only followed up on some ideas I had in the 70s we'd have had SPOTTED windows for the last 20 years (altogether, now, YUKYUKYUK)... Sorry. Anyhow, MSFT hasn't been taken to task on it yet. But if DOJ will get the hell back into their holes they will. The marketplace is plenty capable of handling MSFT in due course (IMHO again). Spots