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The Software Monoculture
balster neb writes "CNET News.com has a piece titled 'Seeds of Destruction' on monoculture in software and its effect on security. The article talks about similarities between software attacks such as last year's MSBlast, and agricultural catastrophes such as the Irish Potato Famine. Isn't this another good argument against monopolies?"
Admittedly, this is off-topic. But I did my Ph.D. on the stuff and comments like that perturb me!
It is a common misconception that the disease known as late blight, caused by the Oomycete (Phytophthora infestans) "caused" the Irish potato famine. Yes it is true that the Irish were growing only a few varieties of potato (monoculture), but the REAL reason was the socio-economic structure put in place by those bastard English. Essentially, most of the Irish farmers (which was damn near everyone), "rented" the land from rich English landowners. This meant that they grew vegetables, wheat, etc. to pay for the rent, and grew potatoes for food because they stored well. Late blight reduces crop yield both before harvest (lost foliage) and after harvest (tuber rot), and by removing potatoes as a food source, the Irish began starving. The English did nothing to help the them during this time. In fact, the rental system stayed in place throughout the whole famine.
[oversimplification] Back in the day, Windows was a popular operating system. Not the only popular one, but popular enough that an OEM who didn't offer Windows pre-installed was going to lose a lot of business. MS basically said that the OEM would pay them $fee for every processor sold, regardless of the OS installed, or else the OEM would not be allowed to sell Windows machines at all. Most OEMs recognized that they couldn't afford the hit they'd take if they couldn't sell Windows, so they agreed to this devil's deal. And then, since they were paying for the darned thing anyway, they installed Windows on all of their machines. [/oversimplification]
This is how to turn a merely successful product into a monopoly, while making a lot of enemies as a free bonus!
1. DOS does not equal windows
Check back to the 1995 Consent Decree. DOS won out initially fair and square (DOS cost $100, CP/M cost $200, so people chose DOS). But when Windows came out, Microsoft's licensing agreements stated that if you wanted to include DOS or Windows on any computer you sold, you would have to pay Microsoft for both products for every system you sold, *even if it didn't include MS software*. That is the sole reason that Windows ever became popular. You would occasionally see computers running GEOS or OS/2 in stores, but not very many because of the need to pay for two OS's. The government eventually investigated Microsoft for illegal leverage of a monopoly. The result was the 1995 Consent Decree, but by then the damage had been done and the government action was too little, too late.
2. MacOS, UNIX, AmigaOS, BeOS, Solaris, etc. Operating systems have competed, and lost (so far). Is it because Microsoft practices illegal monopolistic crap? That certainly is likely to be a contributing factor. But so do other businesses that fail.
See above. Bad business decisions were factors too, but by far the largest factor was Microsoft's illegal leverage of their monopoly.
As to DR-DOS and the bogus Microsoft error messages, here's the basic story. After DR-DOS was good enough to compete with MS-DOS, Microsoft began making their products try detecting DR-DOS. If they detected it, the program would print a random error message and return you to a DOS prompt. The most notable program to do this was Windows 3.1. I'm not sure if this is correct, but I seem to recall reading in a magazine that the code to check for DR-DOS was encrypted, and that Microsoft would attempt to disable any debugger that might be running before decrypting the code, making it very difficult to figure out what the code was doing.
Regarding the Netscape trial, Microsoft's contracts with OEMs prevented them from loading Netscape onto computers they sold.