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Microsoft is worse, I don't think so...

Posted by Thorsten (M) on August 15, 2012 at 01:23:05

In Reply to: RE: Everybody copies. Apple especially. They have never invented posted by Paully on August 14, 2012 at 05:13:03:

Hi,

> Microsoft is worse. Bill Gates never came up with an original idea in
> his life, not even DOS. Dos was bought when they failed to write their
> own, Word, Excel, Explorer, Money, etc... were all basically stolen
> from what I understand.

If you call buying a company and merging their products into your own product line stealing, then Microsoft indeed did that. As did Novell, Corel, Adobe and IBM.

> They stole everything and leveraged their monopoly to drive the
> innovators out of business.

I was working in IT during the time Microsoft gaining a near Monopoly, when businesses transitioned from a mismatched mix of Novell Netware, Word Perfect, Lotus on top of DOS & Windows etc. to pure Microsoft Infrastructures.

We resisted this change, but the fact is that the competing products where SO BAD, they where unusable and had to be ditched ditched. We may argue why this was (did MS sabotage their own OS?). But given that there was also very good non Microsoft software on Windows the answer is that Market Leaders like Wordperfect, Lotus and Novell simply felt they could rest on their Laurels and would always have their customers, no matter how bad their products where.

By comparison M$'s products where less expensive and actually worked mostly as expected (Word crashed around 1/100'th of the time Word Perfect did), with M$ giving organisations excellent bulk licencing deals on top. The truth, M$ was simply better all around.

As for the story with DOS, IBM originally went to Digital Research to get an OS for their PC. Exactly what happened is disputed (some say the Boss was out flying his airplane and left IBM's people wait for hours before not turning up at all), but IBM's people left fuming and vowed not do business with DR.

Next they visited Microsoft to get a Basic Interpreter and mentioned the whole story and asked if Bill knew anyone else they could get an OS from. Unlike his competitors he decided not to turn business away from his door when it came knocking and promised IBM an OS from Microsoft.

All that said, Microsoft later did behave in ways that stifled competition and was rightly investigated for it, fined and made to change it's business practices. But even at the most extreme, most brazen Microsoft never managed to be halve as bad as Apple now is.

Apple combines hardware, software, seeks to retain market domination by suing everyone and most crucially prevents it's customers from buying media and software through any other source than Apple, essentially forcing an "Apple Tax" of 30% on any piece of software or media a Apple customer buys. And it should be noted that a number of probes into Apple's behaviour are now in progress.

Ciao T

Thor

At 20 bits, you are on the verge of dynamic range covering fly-farts-at-20-feet to intolerable pain. Really, what more could we need?

Edits: 08/15/12

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