Thanks for your comments, rudedog. I like to needle the friends of Bill about "Cutler's stolen DEC code", but of course it's not like it was a truly valuable property for DEC. They got a lot more out of it the way it worked out than it ever would have been worth molding away on tape. It's interesting what you say about MSFT and DEC vs. HP, I knew both were more or less Microsoft allies, but you tend to hear a lot more about HP.
Digital's truly a sad story, they always had good stuff technically, but were marginal in too many other ways. Well, VAX was the original anti-risc machine, but that's another story. They sure got flumoxed in the OSF fiasco, last one left holding the bag there. Is current Digital Unix OSF derived? I lost track.
Alpha's the saddest part, the first 64bit architecture, tooling along faster and faster since '92?, and everybody's in awe of mysterious Merced, which may or may not ever ship. Merced's supposed to be cost effective for Pentium code too? At $2k-$5k a crack? With the current competitive prices for straight x86 processors? What a joke. Every time I ask CS faculty types about Merced, they just shake their heads, the project's had so many problems. Plus, Merced may well be slower than Alpha when it finally ships Not that Merced won't be important eventually, but it's sort of ridiculous for everybody to be hanging around waiting for an indeterminate product when real, fast, reasonably priced hardware can be had now. Another postmodern economic thing I can't fathom. Digital also seems to have gotten much less, in the end, for its little legal ploy with Intel than with Microsoft. Yeah, a gigabuck ain't nothing to sneeze at, but DEC gave up a supposedly state-of-the-art fab, and the StrongARM stuff, which people say is another good piece of work.
So much for the 'MS breaks the competition' myth IMO - when they had a golden opportunity to hammer the standard, they chose instead (at considerable expense) to enable the vast majority of SW instead. There are still chunks of legacy X86 code but pretty much limited to 16 bit support, virtually all of the core is relatively modern 32 bit code.
Well, my sarcastic rejoinder to that one would be, how many people ever ran Windows 3.x on 286's anyway? Was that ever a reasonable option, performance wise? Why wasn't Windows 32bit to start out with? It only came out 5 years after the 386, right? I know, Bill explained it to that Harlem kid after his Senate date, Microsoft had to wait for the hardware to catch up with the software. And of course, given that there's still plenty of Windows 3x machines running, throwing out backward compatibility might have been problematic in other ways for MSFT.
On the other hand, I got to make a ritual response that I haven't posted in a while, on my long time alleged hatred of Microsoft. Great company, investment wise anyway. Also interesting and important, not to mention entertaining. It's just that I think people should understand what's going on. I don't post stuff from "I hate Microsoft" sites, or even look at them, and I don't read or participate in that "evil empire" thread". Ok, I used to call Bill "the man of wealth and taste", but that was a JOKE! The logic still seems irrefutable.
Nothing personal against the richest man in the world, I know very little about him at that level. How could anybody outside the company, with the PR blizzard that surrounds him? All I can judge is his oft quoted pronouncements in the press, which seem, well, pretty random in their veracity, and overwhelming in their volume. Corporate culture wise, I find Intel a lot more palatable, ruthless though they may be. Intel's PR machine seems wimpy by comparison, and the execs stick to much more of a conventional (for businessmen) reserved public posture. Plus, they got good engineering, and they leave legal matters to the lawyers. No whining crybaby sore winners there. Of course, we all know now who calls the shots when push comes to shove with Bill and Andy. Microsoft must be free to innovate, but that freedom doesn't extend to anyone else, even mighty Intel. Postmodern economics at work again. Or maybe if I just read some Rand, I'd understand the moral imperatives at work here.
Cheers, Dan. |
