Microsoft wants to help aid in the development of Firefox. It sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? If you're still here, let me tell you that it's not as bad as it seems. Sam Ramjii, Director of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, has extended an invitation to the Firefox and Thunderbird developers asking them if they'd like to visit the company's open source research center. Microsoft's hopes are that, in a four-day span, the company can provide the open source developers with enough information to get the popular web browser running smoothly on Windows Vista.
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Member since:2005-07-12
1. OS/2 mainly lost because of Microsoft's preload deals with OEMs and various underhanded tactics involving key ISVs like WordPerfect, Corel, and Micrografx.
Without access to preloads, OS/2 was forced to be installed by end users, and that doesn't work in most cases (if one wants to gain marketshare).
Without access to key non-Microsoft applications, the OS didn't appeal to users regardless of marketing and technical merits.
2. The Lotus SmartSuite for Windows wasn't sidetracked in any way by OS/2 that I'm aware of.
3. From Warp 3 on (early 1994), drivers were generally not an issue for OS/2. The main problems were market penetration (see point #1) and available software (see #2).
Edited 2006-08-23 17:33
Member since:2005-07-06
Interesting points you raised, but these are all the result of choices made by the parent company, and nothing to do with Microsoft.
These companies CHOSE to charge excessive amounts for their products (in the case of SCO), they chose to abandon the desktop market - Sun gave up early 1990s to focus on servers and lost its dominance in the US government, IBM charged like a wombed bull for their development tools and did very little evangelisation on the merits of people using their kit over the alternatives.
Again, all these were creations by their own company, not Microsoft, Microsoft simply sat back, watch the horror unfold, and chose the best time to enter the market with a product that was 'good enough' to do the job for what 95% of people needed - not necessarily the best, but good enough; if we wanted best, we would be using betamax, the world would have standardised on PAL instead of the US stubbornly sticking with NTSC and the French as backlash to the German invention of PAL, come up with SECAM.
Member since:2005-07-12
Member since:
2006-04-21
All the competition that has died, has died because their products were crap - I challange anyone here to name *ONE* product that was killed because of Microsofts 'anti-competitive' nature - name *ONE*.
UNIX and Linux weren't and aren't crap. UNIX's Common Desktop Environment has about equivalent functionality to Windows 95 (yes, equivalent, not identical), and God knows UNIX/Linux crashes a lot less.
Those companies died for one or more of four reasons, of which the one you cite was simultaneously only one, and the one most directly attributable to Microsoft malfeasance.
1. Their marketing/pricing (CP/M, OS/2, proprietary UNIX) was as crap as Microsoft's products (and MS's marketing twice as good as anyone else's), and/or
2. They were sidetracked by OS/2 (Lotus) (Thanks to IBM, with help from MS), and/or
3. They were starved of drivers (OS/2), and/or
4. They failed to come up with Windows programs as good as the Microsoft offerings (Word Perfect) - hardly surprising since Microsoft knows exactly what goes into Windows, and everyone else only knows what Microsoft wants them to know.
There are two lessons everyone can learn from this. The first is, never bet your company on a closed-source software vendor.
The second, of course, is "never put a slash in the name of your product! ;-) (RMS, are you listening?)
Edited 2006-08-23 12:24