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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (8664)	10/13/1998 10:06:00 PM
From: Hardly B. Solipsist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

I would have said that the decline of IBM was ushered in by the rise of engineering workstations. It was the thin edge of the sea change that made real computers cheap enough to break their stranglehold on hardware. Once I saw the PC/RT, I knew that IBM was finished as the company that defined what computing was about, even though it took the PC converging with workstations to finish them off. (If IBM had managed to hold onto the PC it might have been a different story, but I doubt it. They probably would have crippled PC's so much that one of the workstation vendors would be like MSFT is, only less competently...) MSFT recognized that the internet was a sea change that threatened their dominance, but I think that they have failed to react properly. Maybe monopolies always do, I dunno. Anyway, I think that they are blowing it, and 5 years from now I'll either be explaining this sort of post to the MSFT Inquisitors or thinking how smart I was (and wondering why I couldn't figure out how to make any money).