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Sorry - I disagree on your recollection of events | 115 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Window when it worked
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 06 2013 @ 08:49 AM EST
"This was the era when MS still competed by trying to create better
software, than pursuing ever sharper business practices."

You mean like backstabbing, sorry, "partnering" with IBM to develop
the whole thing?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Sorry - I disagree on your recollection of events
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 06 2013 @ 09:01 AM EST

Even in the 90's MS was only successful because they were heavily into anti-competitive tactics.

As a begining developer in the early 90's ('92) I was already recognizing what MS was doing to the market and personally was moving away from MS.

Taking Wikipedia with a grain of salt, it indicates Windows 3.1 was released in March 1992. It was specifically designed to give a non-fatal error message if it detected someone installing it on non-MS Dos.

1995 roles around and MS decides Netscape is a threat so produces Internet Explorer. IE didn't take the market by appealing to customers - nope. They packaged the software with the OS for "free" taking the market via the agreements with OEMs. Agreements which at the time said that if an OEM sold a computer without a copy of MS OS, they still had to pay MS as though they did sell a copy.

Those are just two examples in the very early '90s where MS had identified "threats" to it's market position and used anti-competitive means to destroy those threats rather then compete on the merits. There's plenty more examples both before and after that point of time. MS has never in its history tried to compete on the merits of the product.

It's my humble opinion that MS didn't commoditise the computer industry. There's plenty of reasonable evidence to conclude that the computer industry was able to be commoditised in spite of MS.

Keep in mind:

    The definition of a commodity is a product that has gotten so cheap and easy to build it's selling for peanuts relative to a non-commoditised product.
And given the OS and Office software have hit a point of maturity that it meets the primary state in the market the average home requires - they should be considered a commodity. Yet the price is well inflated above where it should be.

Except to those of us who have moved to FLOSS.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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