Though Microsoft is the behemoth that everyone loves to hate, the computing world actually owes a lot to Bill Gates and co. And though it's possible that someone else would have blazed the trail to "a PC on every desktop," in our world, it was Microsoft that did it. Update: Now with page breaks! (My fault -- David)
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If it weren't for them, we'd all be running Amigas right now, or maybe OS/2.
Is not fair to thank just one man, there are many who made it possible.
How about "Thanks, Microsoft. Now please go away."
The author should consider the use of paragraphs -- it will make his article easier to read.
And ending it with, "We may never know," doesn't exactly reinforce his point.
"An inexperienced user may not even notice the difference between WindowsXP and distributions such as Lycoris, Linspire formerly Lindows and ELX (Everyone's Linux) These distros and several others, deliberately copy a Windows scheme. Providing similar desktop backgrounds and familiar icons to those in the Windows world. These upstart Linux distributions are therefore able to ride on Windows' coat-tails, and provide a computing experience that people are familiar with, thanks to the consolidation of the PC industry that Microsoft effected. "
this makes sense from a migration aspect though gnome and many other Desktop environments and work environments are not mere clones...
"If it weren't for them, we'd all be running Amigas right now, or maybe OS/2."
os/2 wasnt a bad operating system to be using..
It should also be noted that UI itself in different operating systems are not much different from each other anymore.
Mac OS X is immediately familiar if you have ever used any GUI. so is anything like CDE or syllable.
The reason why everyone started using PCs was because hardware was cheap and capable enought. Microsoft put the operative system, but any other company (apple, ibm) could have put theirs.
If hardware were too expensive and it wasn't able to draw windows 95-like desktops or it were to slow windows 95 would have never succeed. Hardware was the key, along with it's capatibility to run older programs (msdos programs)
I was using a machine that had OS/2 on it today at work, OS/2's not dead :-)
Hmm .. let's see ..
Mirosoft has how many billions in cash/rainy day money??
Bill Gates is the second richest man in the world (after that IKEA guy)
Paul Allen is a billionaire
And Microsoft has minted more millionaires than any other company I know.
Shouldn't Microsoft be the one thanking its tax payers?
That Microsoft is at the top right now is due less to its own competence, and more to the incompetence of its competitors.
If OS/2 had succeeded, people would be complaining about IBM ( and I very much doubt IBM would be selling a cheap OS ). Atari, Commodore both failed not so much because of competition, but more because of their own executives. And Apple isn't in top spot right now because it is not a software company, but a hardware retailer; it could not supply the entire market with machines, and it certainly does not want to supply the marktet for low-end machines.
We'd have been better off if they had the monopoly.
Mmm, not that bad an article... However, I think that the revolution that took place (getting a computer into everyone's home) wasn't dependant on MS at all-- If MS hadn't been there, Apple would've done it, or, Be for that matter.
PS: Maybe Eugenia or David can throw in some p tags?
My comment above doesn't mean I hate Microsoft, nor do I respect Gates any less.
My point is that whoever was at the top, the little whiners would try to put them down, and that often competitors die not because of competition, but because of their own faults.
but please give us some paragraphs.
The article is simply unreadable now.
the first electronic computer was the Z3(built with relays), the first computer with tubes was the ENIAC
"The reason why everyone started using PCs was because hardware was cheap and capable enought. Microsoft put the operative system, but any other company (apple, ibm) could have put theirs. "
The question is obvious. Why didn't they? Why didn't IBM trounce MS? Why didn't apple destroy MS? They were both big players with big pockets, lots of marketting people, connections...What made MS succeed above them?
The article points to the fact that MS focussed only on software and took advantage on what ultimately became on open PC hardware market, while many others were still stuck on hte hardware/software package with servicing. It wanted people to have their own PCs, not some terminal that took everything off some server.
Who knows if the unix mentality had won out, would hardware be as cheap? Would we have ended up with a client architecture? Would the inherent complexity of a networked OS hindered the acceptance of PCs to the masses? Would the inherent network abilities have propelled the internet to be bigger and faster, and more connected than ever before?
As the article ends of saying. We don't know what might have been? We do know that many big names had a chance to drive computing to the masses. We do know MS was the one that did it. We do know what is and part of the success of what is...is due to Microsoft.
The dominance of superbly marketed but otherwise mediocre MS software did *some* good, actually.
After all, it was MS bloat that demanded ever more capable hardware to make it run well enough, thus making powerful PCs cheap and accessible. On the other hand, the sound of fans under my desk, struggling to cool my system down is getting kind of annoying, lately.
Diversity is always good and neccessary. We still do have it, but looking back at the 1980's and early 90's the diversity and distinctivness of personal and home computers was just a joy to look at.
I, for one especially miss the now virtually extinct species of home computers. Those systems could teach modern PCs a lesson or two on what a computer as an appliance should look like. Easy, stable, lightweight, always ready to go. They'll be back!
Apple and IBM got the computers on the Desktops but still Joe and Jane average don't all have computers. It's going to take something entirely different to bring computing to the common man.
> My point is that whoever was at the top, the little whiners
> would try to put them down, and that often competitors die
> not because of competition, but because of their own faults.
Not all companies which are in a dominant position were also convicted (not just accused) of federal anti-trust violations in the process of getting there.
Microsoft has indeed been the market winner. It's just too bad that they weren't content to let market forces make the decision for them. Instead, they engaged in a plethora of well-documented activities (some blatantly illegal, others ethically questionable, a few admittedly quite brillant) in order to overcome their competition and dominate the desktop marketplace.
It's sad that we'll never know what might have happened if other companies would have been able to offer their products to the public and have them judged based on their merits. I suspect the desktop computing world would be a somewhat more secure and functional world today...
We would had more innovation in the PC arena if M$ didnt choke all compition thru its monopoly. Thanks to Java and Linux/OSS/GNU we have some relief. I wish OS2 was around then we wouldnt have suffered so much of BSOD and security issue of windows. Windows is the worst OS out there.
Thanks, Xerox PARC
http://www.parc.xerox.com/about/history/default.html
If we understand that m$ maked the computers cheaper and easier to use, I still dont know how they did it. Were they also the people who made the light bulb cheaper? Or cars cheaper?
Through the normal course of supply and demand and miniturisation computers were always going to be cheap. M$ were in the right place with the right contracts at the right time.
Today you still cannot purchase a computer without a M$ licence due to their forsight in contract licencing. When I spec up servers, more than half the price is software and client access licences. When i spec up new mid range workstations, half the price is m$ software licences (office, windows, CAL for filesharing and exchange). If they wanted to make computers cheaper, they would drop their licence charges (ie tax) and make the most expensive part the hardware.
Also, Paragraphs would make the article easy to read. I stopped reading it after the 3rd line. I've read these comments before. Its funny that nowadays there are alot less m$ zealots around.
os/2 wasnt a bad operating system to be using..
Neither was AmigaOS. Personally, i did not found my OS/2 WARP version particulary stable. Most of the time, i hang around in MSDOS as well.
PS: Indeed, paragraphs. One important aspect i urge a writer to become aware is to reflect how the reader will experience the article. Thats possible in some extend; readability is one of them. Especially important if you try to reach a wide audience.
You should thank Intel, and other companies who produced and designed affordable computer parts! Not the people who supplied the software, to which there is better competition.
You absolutely have to be kidding; this is so insulting to every computer engineer (and I'm a computer science major!) out there; I can't believe you let this be posted Eugenia.
Honestly, this is offensive. You're not only giving undue credit, you're stealing it from those who deserve it!
By Darius
If it weren't for them, we'd all be running Amigas right now, or maybe OS/2.
LOL! We would be better off. 
Jim
Yes, MS has pushed the PC into un-parallel growth. They will also push the 64 bit chips to the mass'.
But, they should be admonished for various underhanded deeds:
1) bundling IE with an OS to prevent other browsers from completing.
2) Providing mediocre software at exorbitant prices
3) Not shipping OS' secure by default.
4) Not using open file formats to prevent competition for entering the market. MS should use an open format and let the best product win. Of course, that will not happen because its not in their best interest.
I could go on but what would be the point?
The Amiga had autoconfig in 1987 while the PC had to struggle with a mess of manual jumper settings and that joke called PnP on ISA cards. So we had the worst possible hardware I've ever seen coupled with a junk OS called MS-DOS. Until the advent of PCI-based computers and BSD and Linux this so-called personal computer was a total piece of sh*t. So no, I don't thank Microsoft.
Author Note:
I apologize for the the way this article is presented. It was submitted in paragraph form. I dont know what happened. I do know that Eugenia in on Holiday, and has other staff taking care of business. Once again I apologize.
Kevin Russo
If it weren't for them, we'd all be running Amigas right now, or maybe OS/2.
Commodore and IBM killed their respective OSes far more effectively than Microsoft could ever have dreamed of doing.
Microsoft won the world the day IBM signed a contract stating that every computer they sold should come bundled with an MS operating system. Luckily for Microsoft, the i368 became a wild success, securing DOS as the mainstream OS.
I remember the late 80s and early 90s, when my father had Macs and the few of my friends that had computers at home had PCs running games in DOS and a few simple apps in Win 3.1. The Macs felt truely superiour, both in the hardware and software aspects, although illegally sharing games was easier on the Intel platform.
I'm not even sure Microsoft had to create Windows to "beat" Apple. People would probably be fine with the strictly single-tasking MS-DOS, using fine products such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. It was, however, fortunate for MS that they had taken the step up to a graphical shell when they had to compete with IBM's OS/2 and others later on.
IMO, Microsoft didn't win the Desktop Market with Windows, but rather with MS-DOS in the early days. They should thank IBM, as well as the people that bought IBM's products.
I had just edited this, then I remembered I needed to be at my son's Christmas presentation at pre-school, so I just posted it and ran without double-checking. (Dumb!). So a hearty apology to everyone who slogged through it witout paragraphs.
Author Note:
Mistakes happen. Thank you David for correcting the problem.
Kevin Russo
Bill Gates stole computer time to produce his BASIC interpreter. Bill then bought a cheap ripoff of CP/M from another company and licensed it to IBM. Continuing with this theme Microsoft stole Apple's GUI (yeah I know they took it from PARC). Microsoft proceeded to make unstable and unsecure software with a habit of being incredibly late. Microsoft also probably has the largest "library" of vaporware. Why am I supposed to thank them again? Because they made their own software the standard at the expense of others? Only now are people really pushing for open documents and other standards. If the OS business wasn't so monolithic we might have had these things long ago, and maybe, just maybe, someone else would have had the incentive to actually build a better system, with complete compatibility. Instead everyone who doesn't use MS products are stuck reverse-engineering hardware and software and then being treated like criminals for just trying to get our stuff to work. If anything I think Bill set us back ten years or so.
The question is obvious. Why didn't they? Why didn't IBM trounce MS?
IBM screwed it up. They never treated "home computing" seriously and never really tried to sell OS/2.
Why didn't apple destroy MS?
Apple priced themselves out of the "mass market". People think Macs are expensive now, but they're dirt cheap compared to historical pricing.
They were both big players with big pockets, lots of marketting people, connections...What made MS succeed above them?
They were cheaper and better supported.
Who knows if the unix mentality had won out, would hardware be as cheap? Would we have ended up with a client architecture? Would the inherent complexity of a networked OS hindered the acceptance of PCs to the masses? Would the inherent network abilities have propelled the internet to be bigger and faster, and more connected than ever before?
These are interesting questions, but ultimately technology is cyclical. For example, there's quite a shift at the moment back to the "dumb terminal" model of computing and even things like games are becoming reliant on the client-server model (ie: Steam & HL2).
Microsoft has indeed been the market winner. It's just too bad that they weren't content to let market forces make the decision for them. Instead, they engaged in a plethora of well-documented activities (some blatantly illegal, others ethically questionable, a few admittedly quite brillant) in order to overcome their competition and dominate the desktop marketplace.
It's worth pointing out the difference between standard business tactics (ie: "market forces") and "monopoly abuse" is nothing more than a largely arbitrary legal judgement - and that you don't actually *know* you're committing "monopoly abuse" until that judgement is made.
Don't forget: NT, 2000 and XP all are based on OS/2.
Well, at least NT 3.5 was mostly based on OS/2. There are still some lines of code that IBM "owns."
Quote:
"Initially, the companies agreed that IBM would take over maintenance of OS/2 1.0 and development of OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft would continue development of OS/2 3.0, then known as "NT OS/2". However, Microsoft decided to recast NT OS/2 as Windows NT, leaving all future OS/2 development to IBM."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
I never understood some of the claims people have against MS. What is so wrong about bundling a browser into one's OS? If I make the software, its MY right to do what I want with it, and if that so includes bundling an internet browser, an office program, etc so be it, ITS MY RIGHT.
In regards to providing "mediocre software at exorbitant prices" that is related to the issue above. Being my software, I can charge any damn price I want for it, even a million if I am so inclined. That does not mean I also have the power to force people to buy it and in fact they probably wouldn't, and I would be bid out of the marketplace. If you don't want MS software, dont buy it, it's that simple. Go buy your own parts from a computer shop and build your own machine. Last time I checked there was no Microsoft guard standing outside of Bestbuy preventing you from doing just that. Regarding the security issue - buying a piece of software is similar to buying others goods in the sense that there is no guarentee that the good will meet your need. You could request the developers/manufacturers to change their product but you have no right to force somebody to make the good as you see fit at the price point that you desire.
Another point I'd like to address is the claim that "MS doesn't let people compete, it doesn't let the market work, it is a monolopy, etc... To this I would have to ask you a question - what is your definition of a free market and of competition? A free market does not in any way guarentee that your company will not be put out of business. In fact, it's quite the opposite, in a long run free market economy the companies that are inefficient will be bid out of the marketplace and the companies that are more efficient will survive. This in turn also lowers the consumer's cost because their dollars are not spent on inefficient products. Your definition of competition seems to exclude just that - competition. The concept of competition relies on the concept of winning. The idea of competition in which there is no clear winner is absurd, and blasts the idea of competition away. If you ever operated a small lemonade stand as a child the same principle is in effect. If you catch wind that your competitor across the street is going to lower his price, you may choose to lower your price even further. I suppose by your reasoning that the other person should say that this is a ruthless and unfair monolopizing practice and run to their mommy (or the government) and complain and try to pass laws to see that you are destroyed. The only way to truly monolopize a market is to ask for government intervention into the market - but that would require a whole seperate topic.
Thank you MS!
For some humor: http://savethehumans.com/stupidity/how_to/microsoft/index.shtml
You should thank Intel, and other companies who produced and designed affordable computer parts!
They wouldn't have produced those parts if there wasn't software out there to make them useful.
"The question is obvious. Why didn't they? Why didn't IBM trounce MS? "
Marketing incompetence.
I really don't buy that "microsoft made possible to have a PC in each home". But Microsoft was put in every home PC out there, that's true
When Microsoft was playing with MSDOS, Apple already had a operative system with a user-friendly GUI.
If "user friendliness" is the reason why Windows succeed, *WHY* people kept buying PCs with MSDOS when Mac's where available with nice GUIs? Perhaps people liked more the MSDOS obscure command line than Mac's user-friendly GUI? I mean, graphic interfaces were available *years* before windows come out...
The right answer is: PCs were cheaper than Macs. That's the only reason. People ignored the user-friendly Apple computers because the equivalent commandline-based PC's were cheaper. Any OS maker that would have put a cheap OS with a nice GUI in the Peecees before Microsoft would have kicked them, and that OS *would* have happened regardless of Microsoft. IBM managers just needed a kick in their butt to realize they could sell OS/2 as a "desktop OS", however they didn't and so Microsoft won the market. I don't really understand why people says we should "thank microsoft". Thanks for what? For being good at marketing?
If anything, I'll thank Intel because their price/performance ratio was great. Cheap enought, fast enought, that was the only reason PCs took the world, and that's the reason they're taking the server world today with the amd opteron, except that the server market is already there and the user one not.
We would have had a PC in every house *even* if Microsoft would have kept developing MSDOS and no OS maker would have launched a "GUI desktop OS" for the general public. I will NEVER thank Microsoft for putting "a PC in every home". It's just not true, hardware price *was* the true key.
If we understand that m$ maked the computers cheaper and easier to use, I still dont know how they did it.
By selling a dirt cheap [D]OS separate from specific hardware, targeted at a largely open platform built from easily available off-the-shelf parts and fostering a _massive_ developer community.
M$ were in the right place with the right contracts at the right time.
Undoubtedly. So was every other company who was the driving force behind an industry.
Today you still cannot purchase a computer without a M$ licence due to their forsight in contract licencing.
Rubbish. It's trivial to purchase PCs without _any_ OS and always has been.
Just because you can't buy one from Dell and Compaq, doesn't mean you can't buy one.
When I spec up servers, more than half the price is software and client access licences.
Entirely possible. Hardly an issue restricted to Microsoft, either.
When i spec up new mid range workstations, half the price is m$ software licences (office, windows, CAL for filesharing and exchange).
You are free not to purchase them.
Added to that, if ~AU$1000 is "half the cost of the machine", it's not a "mid range workstation".
If they wanted to make computers cheaper, they would drop their licence charges (ie tax) and make the most expensive part the hardware.
Computers already _are_ cheap. You are free not to purchase their software if you don't want to.
"Bill Gates had a goal in mind. That goal was to put a Windows based computer on every desktop."
Wow, and all the while i thought he was just trying to squeeze as much money outta everyone as he possibly can! How wrong am I.
Thanks Monopoly....Bill you should be on the Monopoly Board game box..I still hate Dos...hated it from day one.......
Microsoft arguably did do a great job, but in the end wouldn't every company they ruthlessly crushed have done so also ?
Not just Amiga and OS/2, but even before that Gem and Geos which were more advanced than Ms offerings of the time. Ms really did very little innovating, they make good, but not great, products that really just take an existing concept and run with it (the windowing os, the office suite, application scripting, etc) Not to mention that the biggest killer app of the last 2 decades - the internet - would have happened regardless since it originated on Unix.
All in all they made a decent job of it, but I prefer people who don't walk over dead bodies to make a buck.
Thanks? Not from me. Bill Gates and Microsoft got where they are today with a pint of good marketing and bushel of good luck. Plus a lot of stuff that got them convicted as felons.
http://steve-parker.org/articles/microsoft/
for finally putting out a stable consumer OS (XP), .NET, and good dev tools.
No thanks for giving us the clusterfuck that is win32 api and MFC.
I'll remain neutral on IE since it quickly blew away the piece of shit that is Netscape, but then stagnated for whatever reason.
An interesting point of view, even more readable with the paragraphs 
Perhaps its false to assume, but reading your article I get the impression that you started using computers with Windows. Thats OK, but one can and should not "judge" Windows without any "historical" knowledge about the computer industry. Looking back I cant see anything we should MS be thankful for. IMHO they where just at the right place at the right time - selling "their" DOS to IBM. If we have to thank someone in the computer industry its either IBM or Intel for the PC Platform, perhaps even AMD/Cyrix for competition in the CPU market.
Bill Gates, as a business man, had one vision only: to sell his product and make money. Lots of it. And sometimes with methods not only morally questionable but straight illegal. Lets not forget that MS has violated several laws and - as a company - is a convicted criminal. But thats only one aspect why people just love to hate M$. AZ
It's worth pointing out the difference between standard business tactics (ie: "market forces") and "monopoly abuse" is nothing more than a largely arbitrary legal judgement - and that you don't actually *know* you're committing "monopoly abuse" until that judgement is made.
Ever heard the phrase "Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law" ? Some of the things Ms pulled were just so dirty I seriously don't believe even they could have been ignorant of the illegality/immorality. Then again who can understand MBA's these days, they'd probably sell their mothers into slavery if it would make their stock go up.
Don't forget: NT, 2000 and XP all are based on OS/2.
Well, at least NT 3.5 was mostly based on OS/2.
Assuming you mean the OS/2 most people know as OS/2 2.x, and later Warp, false. OS/2 and NT have _nothing_ architecturally in common. They are separate codebases.
There are still some lines of code that IBM "owns."
There's a hell of lot more code Microsoft owns in OS/2 than there is code IBM owns in NT. Indeed, I'm not I've heard about _any_ IBM code in NT.
"Initially, the companies agreed that IBM would take over maintenance of OS/2 1.0 and development of OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft would continue development of OS/2 3.0, then known as "NT OS/2". However, Microsoft decided to recast NT OS/2 as Windows NT, leaving all future OS/2 development to IBM."
Correct information, but used out of context. OS/2 2.x and (then) "OS/2 NT" (later renamed to Windows NT after the surprise success of Windows 3.0) are completely different OSes. Certainly, the OS that became Windows NT was originally destined to be OS/2 3.0, but it was a from-scratch project run solely by Microsoft (with ex-Digital employees Dave Cutler & Co.).
NT is _not_ a derivative of the OS/2 everyone knows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
You should know better than to rely on Wikipedia as a primary source. Indeed, whoever has written that Wikipedia article has made some poor logical deductions:
"Windows NT's OS/2 heritage can be seen in its initial support for the HPFS filesystem (although write support was dropped in Windows NT 4.0 and read support was dropped in Windows 2000) and text mode OS/2 1.x applications (support dropped in Windows XP)."
This is a like saying you can "see FreeBSD's Linux heritage" because it supports EXT2 and can run Linux binaries.
"They wouldn't have produced those parts if there wasn't software out there to make them useful."
Thanks for showing us you've never read a history book.
Intel developed the 4004 while Bill Gates was....well not running Microsoft yet.
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the motorway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask: "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
if anything windows nt (kernel) is based on vms: http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4494
If anything, I'll thank Intel because their price/performance ratio was great. Cheap enought, fast enought, that was the only reason PCs took the world, and that's the reason they're taking the server world today with the amd opteron, except that the server market is already there and the user one not.
Except back in the day Intel's price/performance wasn't particular good. You'd be more correct in thanking IBM for using off the shelf parts.
We would have had a PC in every house *even* if Microsoft would have kept developing MSDOS and no OS maker would have launched a "GUI desktop OS" for the general public. I will NEVER thank Microsoft for putting "a PC in every home". It's just not true, hardware price *was* the true key.
Seems a bit churlish not to give kudos to Microsoft just because some other company would have done the same thing at the same time. I mean, by that line of reasoning you'd never give the appropriate kudos to _anyone_ "because someone else would have done the same thing". The main reason hardware became so cheap was the easy availability of an OS from someone other than the hardware vendor. While that idea wasn't entirely revolutionary at the time, it _was_ a fairly uncommon practice.
A lot of the desktop versions of GNU/Linux we use today are Microsoft look-a-likes and function similarly to Windows.
What a load of fluff. Microsoft (Win95) was not the first OS to have a taskbar, so calling all other OS'es that use a taskbar / desktop layout a Microsoft look-a-like is not fair.
How about we refer to them all as RISC OS/Arthur look-a-likes?
/waits for someone to tell me that RISC OS/Arthur wasn't the first.
yeah.. thanks microsoft. thanks for single handly stagnating the industry
thanks for making my life harder
thanks for making my friend's live's harder
thanks for writing crappy softawre and forcing it on the general public with your monopoly
and last of all, thanks for keeping me employed thanks to your terrible software
Ever heard the phrase "Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law" ?
I have, and I think it's a load of crap spewed forth by people who a) want to feel superior at not getting caught or b) want to be able to lock up anyone they want at a whim.
However, the point wasn't "ignorance of the law", the point was that perfectly normal, common and lawful business practices like product integration and sole-supplier contracts can be very suddenly illegal one day (ie: the day after you get ruled a monopoly). Actually it's even worse than that because it goes back to the day you were *accused* of being a monopoly.
I should probably make it extra clear here that my gripe here is not with laws against monopoly abuse, it's in the way they are defined and applied. It's quite possible to be "abusing monopoly powers" without actually knowing you're a monopoly (since that state can only be ruled by a court).
Added to that I don't agree Microsoft was ever a monopoly. There are, and always have been, alternatives available of equivalent - if not superior - functionality.
Some of the things Ms pulled were just so dirty I seriously don't believe even they could have been ignorant of the illegality/immorality.
For example ?
As an aside, the "immoral" argument is meaningless. [For-profit] Businesses are inherently immoral (or, at best, amoral).
Then again who can understand MBA's these days, they'd probably sell their mothers into slavery if it would make their stock go up.
That's hardly a recent phenomenon.
Exactly,
MS treated home computing seriously when others did not. MS chose to be cheaper and better supported. Both conscious decisions that turned out to have a huge payout. That is what MS did right and I think is the point of the article. MS chose right, other chose wrong. MS led the way to the desktop home PC. Others did not. Others *COULD* have, but they didn't. Linux wasn't even started before 1991...it missed the first voyage of the home PC so to speak...MS was a busy bee back in the 80s. Other's priced themselves too high, didn't make the right deals, didn't put in the investment needed...
People can view it as 'what IBM/MAC did wrong' or 'what MS did right'. In either case, MS did end up leading the way.
It's like athletes in a race. If one runner who people expect to win makes a bad decision and stays out late the night before, and some upcomer wins the race, you have to give the upcomer the credit he is due for not making the wrong decision and being good enough to beat the rest of the pack.
On a side note:
Yeop, the network model is now coming back as the infrastructure is here for everyone. I guess we get to see if MS misses this boat with bad decisions or not. <twiddling thumbs waiting for longhorn and praying they fix windows networking>.
[QUote=Darius] (IP: ---.dmotorworks.com) - Posted on 2004-12-15 19:46:37
If it weren't for them, we'd all be running Amigas right now, or maybe OS/2.[/Quote]
Hey, OS/2 at the time was 10000000000000000 times more powerfull then Windows ...
Jesus Christ ... what we hear this days is funny ...
If you want to talk about something, be carefull with what you say ...
Windows just have markting and money, inovation = 0 !
Intel developed the 4004 while Bill Gates was....well not running Microsoft yet.
It was a long, long, *long* way from the first microprocessor to economically feasible personal computers.
Imagine that Linux would grow up eventually, there might not be that many companies wanted to compete with microsoft for server. But if there is no windows, what do you think the home users will use? I don't have an answer, but in my opinion, hardware and software development will not go so quickly; but is this a bad thing? Software development might be slow down comparing to now but open source community would have been much larger, the good thing is that all kinds of software would be more concrete because proprietary software uses open source as the base like Mozilla or Netbean, which has a huge community to find out the bugs for the commercial products. Games would have been developed for Linux or other platforms, the market may be even bigger because Linux is free, so games makers would have more customers than now.
It's just my imagination, it might be wrong, but I don't really appreciate Microsoft, who is really a trouble maker.
[quote]I'm not even sure Microsoft had to create Windows to "beat" Apple. People would probably be fine with the strictly single-tasking MS-DOS, using fine products such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. It was, however, fortunate for MS that they had taken the step up to a graphical shell when they had to compete with IBM's OS/2 and others later on.[/quote]
OS/2 versions up to and including 2.x were written by Microsoft. Microsoft and IBM wrote OS/2 as the successor for DOS. It wasn't until the GUI versions of OS/2 were being developed and IBM started dragging their feet that MS started developing Windows.
OS/2 Warp was the first version completely developed by IBM.
MS thought OS/2 was going to be the future, and the OS/2 Workplace shell was going to be the default GUI for Windows NT. It wasn't until Windows 3.1 took off that they added the Windows GUI to Windows NT. (You can actually run OS/2 binaries on Windows NT 3.x and 4.x; the OS/2 subsystem was removed from Win2K.)
IOW, they didn't have to compete with OS/2, as they were the ones who built it. Once the GUI wars began, though, things changed. Too bad the 16-bit graphical shell called Windows seemed to appeal to the most people. 
uh, m$ didn't have that much to do with it they weren't they only ones who had an o/s. IBM had their version of DOS, there was DR.DOS, Apple had there's and for the longest time Apple ruled the desktop in school, print, and home (some say it still does). The pc history has a myriad of contributors. The only difference between the early days of it and now, is that in the beginning the USERS pushed the industry foreward which led to hardware increasing in capacity, speed etc... but now M$ tells US what we should have. (DRM, cpu locked drm schemes, still using stupid carpel tunnel causing mice instead of voice or vector based intuitive UI's...add on to this the list could go on).
I wrote the software that ran a company that had 100's of millions of dollars exchanged. Let's see - we ran mostly on 386's. Ya we used ms-dos - thanks microsoft - but I had to use the dos extender 386max till ms-dos 5 came out - no microsoft there. The primary software was written in rbase - no microsoft there (microrim still sells a dos version). Our spreadsheets were 123r3.1 - no microsoft there. Our documents were Wordperfect - no microsoft there. Our network was a mix of 10net and Novell - Nope no microsoft there. I used pctools for maintenance - no microsoft there. In fact - the first company that I worked with that immersed itself in microsoft was in 1997. Nothing but ms since. I think giving away their operating system with new systems is not really a pc revolution - nor is it something to thank microsoft for.
"I'll remain neutral on IE since it quickly blew away the piece of shit that is Netscape, but then stagnated for whatever reason."
Newsflash. Not only is IE a piece of shit, but it's not even MS's piece of shit. They had to buy it first from Spyglass and then ensure it remained a piece of shit. This from the biggest software company in the world. Not very impressive.
Not all companies which are in a dominant position were also convicted (not just accused) of federal anti-trust violations in the process of getting there.
Microsoft has indeed been the market winner. It's just too bad that they weren't content to let market forces make the decision for them. Instead, they engaged in a plethora of well-documented activities (some blatantly illegal, others ethically questionable, a few admittedly quite brillant) in order to overcome their competition and dominate the desktop marketplace.
It's sad that we'll never know what might have happened if other companies would have been able to offer their products to the public and have them judged based on their merits. I suspect the desktop computing world would be a somewhat more secure and functional world today...
"QUOTE"
There have been plenty of monopolies and there still are, all businesses eventually merge to stay alive, and then before you know it they have to be broken up, it happened before to the Bell phone companies and look what happened, they are merging all over again.
Apple messed up, Unix messed up, in fact pretty much all computer manufacturers at the time could not let go of the hardware/software bond. Microsoft did it first and succeeded. Of course they did unfair business practices along the way but Intel tried doing it to overseas markets to beat down AMD, and it is something that is always going to happen.
It's called "business"
"Today you still cannot purchase a computer without a M$ licence due to their forsight in contract licencing.
Rubbish. It's trivial to purchase PCs without _any_ OS and always has been. "
Why after all this time can't I walk into a Fry's or Best Buy and buy a whitebox? Why I can't get a discount if I ask them to take Windows off before selling it to me? How long will it be before we're allowed to have choices in a retail store?
eh? Commodore committed suicide, yes. Microsoft killed OS/2, though. It's well documented. They were supposed to co-develop and promote it as the One True Operating system - instead they put some half-hearted effort into one version then bogged off and designed Win95 instead.
Why after all this time can't I walk into a Fry's or Best Buy and buy a whitebox? Why I can't get a discount if I ask them to take Windows off before selling it to me? How long will it be before we're allowed to have choices in a retail store?
Why do you feel that you should dictate how Fry's sells computers to people? Why are you entitled to tell companies how much they should charge? Why don't you buy from somewhere else or start your own company?
'MS treated home computing seriously when others did not."
Eh? What? Commodore, Amiga, Sinclair, Atari, any bells ringing here yet? Microsoft were more unusual in the idea that there should be a *fat* desktop on the desk of every *business* user. The other home players didn't work very well with enterprises, and the enterprise competitors all pushed the old mainframe / thin client model.
Why after all this time can't I walk into a Fry's or Best Buy and buy a whitebox?
Because they don't sell them ?
Why I can't get a discount if I ask them to take Windows off before selling it to me?
Same reason Apple won't let me buy a PowerMac without OS X.
How long will it be before we're allowed to have choices in a retail store?
You're "allowed" choices now. The problem you have is that pandering to those choices is not economical to places like Walmart and hence, the domain of smaller suppliers.
You are complaining because you can't buy fringe products at mainstream shops. Well, you may find this amazing, but that's a situation you'll bump into with just about _everything_.
Just a couple of minor nitpicks...
OS/2 versions up to and including 2.x were written by Microsoft. Microsoft and IBM wrote OS/2 as the successor for DOS. It wasn't until the GUI versions of OS/2 were being developed and IBM started dragging their feet that MS started developing Windows.
Windows development started long before that. Remember, Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, a couple of years before the first graphical shell for OS/2.
OS/2 Warp was the first version completely developed by IBM.
Wrap was just the continued development of OS/2 2.x. It wasn't a new OS. IBM were paying licensing fees to Microsoft for OS/2 code well into the late '90s.
It wasn't until Windows 3.1 took off that they added the Windows GUI to Windows NT. (You can actually run OS/2 binaries on Windows NT 3.x and 4.x; the OS/2 subsystem was removed from Win2K.)
It was actually Windows *3.0* that started the Windows dominance. Certainly 3.1 was a significant improvement, but 3.0 was the version that changed Microsoft's new OS from OS/2 NT to Windows NT.
Also, I think you'll find the OS/2 subsystem was still in Windows 2000, it was Windows XP that finally removed it.
IOW, they didn't have to compete with OS/2, as they were the ones who built it. Once the GUI wars began, though, things changed. Too bad the 16-bit graphical shell called Windows seemed to appeal to the most people.
Very true. OS/2 was great, back in the day. I was a happy OS/2 user right up until NT4 hit late beta.
uh, m$ didn't have that much to do with it they weren't they only ones who had an o/s. IBM had their version of DOS, there was DR.DOS, [...]
IBM PC DOS was just a slightly modified, licensed version of MS DOS. DR DOS was, IIRC, quite a bit more expensive in the early days.
[...] Apple had there's and for the longest time Apple ruled the desktop in school, print, and home (some say it still does).
Apple were way too expensive for the home market. They never even came close to "ruling" it.
The only difference between the early days of it and now, is that in the beginning the USERS pushed the industry foreward which led to hardware increasing in capacity, speed etc... but now M$ tells US what we should have. (DRM, cpu locked drm schemes, still using stupid carpel tunnel causing mice instead of voice or vector based intuitive UI's...add on to this the list could go on).
Rubbish. Users still drive the platform, often to its detriment. If Microsoft were driving the platform we would have been rid of things like ISA, PS/2, parallel ports, Win16 and DOS 5 - 10 years ago.
Voice control is not practical. Even ignoring the poor accuracy rates of voice recognition software, there's no sufficiently advanced AI system to actually interpret what the user means based on what they actually say. Then there's the issue of an office full of people talking to their computers. None of these can be even remotely blamed on Microsoft.
eh? Commodore committed suicide, yes. Microsoft killed OS/2, though. It's well documented.
Sounds like you weren't actually a user. Trying to get any sort of commitment about OS/2 from IBM was like drawing blood from a stone. Not to mention their poor attitudes towards developers.
IBM's approach to OS/2 was often called "anti-marketing" by the OS/2 community and it fitted to a T. OS/2 was always IBM's red-headed stepchild - they never really figured out what to do with it.
They were supposed to co-develop and promote it as the One True Operating system - instead they put some half-hearted effort into one version then bogged off and designed Win95 instead.
Actually they put a great deal of effort into several versions of OS/2 - from 1.0 through to a fair chunk of 2.0 (and what was to become Windows NT).
The famous IBM-Microsoft split happened way back in 1991 (3 years _after_ the beginning of the NT project), because of the (freakish, all things considered) success of Windows 3.0. Microsoft went on to put quite a bit of work into Windows 3.1 and 3.11 before moving on to Windows 95.
You can hardly blame Microsoft for shifting focus to Windows 3.x when that was the product their customers were clamouring for. Why would they waste resources on a product neither their developers nor customer based was demanding ?
WHERE did my comments go Eugenia. Even the author has admitted to this mistake. What do you expect us to do write "Please" "Thank You" blabla when the article is badly formatted.
I'm too tired to read all the comments, so please excuse me if someone has already said what I'm saying.
1. Yeah, thanks, thanks a lot for the hours/days/months of my life spent cleaning up computers belonging to people who don't know that using IE/Outlook/OE/MSN etc. rapidly fills their box chock full of spyware, viruses, malware and every other piece of crap sw someone wants to push down their throats (ie thanks to the genius who thought up ActiveX).
2. Thanks for DOS for showing me my first CLI (my first computer was an Atari 1040STFM).
3. Thanks for Windows 95, the system so lousy you had no choice *but* to learn how things worked.
4. Thanks for XPSP2, the first effort to actually make Windows user-friendly, and actually, for the first time, decrease the time I spend with (1).
5. Thanks for giving me a platform to surf the web from so I could discover, and switch to, Linux.
6. Thanks for the inability to create a decent web-browser so the rest of us could have mozilla/firefox and opera.
7. Thanks for letting Ad-Aware and SAV *finally* complete their scans with 0 hits, so I can disconnect and go to bed. Oh wait a sec, can't really thank them for that, can I?
P.S. I actually think that everyone should probably thank IBM, they're the ones that really did it, without them there would be no Microsoft, and Intel would've been a lot smaller too. AMD? don't think so. Come to think of it, would my name-sake have started coding on an Amiga or Atari if there had been no IBM-PC? Who knows? I sure as ???? don't. D.S.
Why after all this time can't I walk into a Fry's or Best Buy and buy a whitebox? Why I can't get a discount if I ask them to take Windows off before selling it to me? How long will it be before we're allowed to have choices in a retail store?
Well obviously frys dosen't consider the niche you represent to be profitable enough to bother offering what you want.
Try a small mom and pop computer shop. Basic no OS whitebox systems are available all over the place. Its just not a mainstream market for the stuff because *gasp* most people who buy a computer want an OS with it and *gasp* they probably want that computer with Windows.
For whatever reason Windows is the biggest OS out there. If you can't handle htat start your own company and get busy. Its a free country (in the USA anyway)
"The main reason hardware became so cheap was the easy availability of an OS from someone other than the hardware vendor. While that idea wasn't entirely revolutionary at the time, it _was_ a fairly uncommon practice."
What about CP/M? That was an industry standard before MS-DOS, it was available for various computers using a number of different CPUs. I used it at home on my Sirius 1 (8088 based but not IBM compatible) and later at work on a Z80 equipped BBC Micro. It was also used on the Osbourne 1 (the first portable computer) and many others. There was a large library of software available, including industry standard apps such as Wordstar and Visicalc.
If IBM had bought an operating system from any small software company, they'd have probably become the equivalent of Microsoft. Microsoft's success is mainly due to that lucky event, not the quality of their software. It took Microsoft over 10 years to create a copy of Mac OS that approached it's usability. Much smaller companies created much better GUIs in far less time. Just compare GEM from 1985 (http://toastytech.com/guis/gem11.html) with any version of Windows released that decade.
Overall I find it very hard to think of any reason to say thanks to Microsoft.
I have been involved in the computer industry for 23 years now and I can tell you that MS did not revolutionize anything, they copied lots and marketed better. The main reason for the rise of the PC in the 80's was very simple, VisiCalc and other spreadsheet applications, and Word Star, Word Perfect and the multitude of other word processors. These 2 types of application made the PC the tool that it is today, I would hazard a guess that 80% of all PC's still use some form Word Processing and Spreadsheet (most probably Excel and Word) as their primary function with Internet productivity tools mail and browser next.
MS really didn't have a foot hold on anything until it had Word 2.0 a product it acquired, then Windows for Work Groups was when it all went MS's way. I don't begrudge MS for creating such a market share but to infer that MS made the PC market what it is today is just plain FUD, PC's would be just a wide spread today with or without MS.
Way to change the argument. The argument is who came first, the hardware or the software; and the hardware came first.
Always has (see: x86-64, a year later and no stable Win64), and it always will.
You can't, afterall, write software (completely) for a non-existant system.
Many of these companies might not exist any more, but they are the one that made it possible.
Just to name a few
Let us not forget, some of these software companies
Havard Graphics (visual slides), Lotus 123 (spreadsheet), Ami-Pro (word process), dBase (database), Ventura Publisher / Page Maker (Desktop Publishing), Borland (programming), Novel (networking), Stacker (compression).
Let us not forget, some of these hardware companies
Number Nine Imagine (2D video), 3Dfx Voodoo (3D video), NEC (CGA, EGA, VGA, multi-sync display), Canon (Bubble printer), Tutle Beach (Sound Card), Sony (*CDU-31A* CD-ROM), Xircom /DEC (Tulip) (NIC), US Robotics (modem).
if Appolo hadn't made it to the moon we would never have gone?
right.
the desktop computer was as anavoidable as the mobile phone or fridge, no matter what os it runs
this is not worth a read