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Compaq Denies Being a Microsoft Victim
whimsy writes "A senior Compaq executive credited Microsoft Tuesday with making computers easier to use, more reliable, and less expensive." It interesting to see how Compaq has been scrambling the past few days to not look like a "victim". This relates to John Rose, Compaq official, who's the next witness in DOJ trial currently going on. The article talks a little about the history of Compaq and Microsoft, as well as some of their disagreements.
Microsoft did reduce the cost of computing - there is no doubt about it. Linux would not exist if Microsoft hadn't help drive down the prices of x86 hardware.
They produced crappy products then and now, and have used snakelike tactics to increase and defend their market share, but there is no doubt that the millions of people buying win95 did in fact make the x86 platform cheap and viable.
It makes me wonder what MS pulled to get someone at Compaq to spout off like this. My understanding was that for the longest time MS hadn't been allowing (per contractial obligations) Compaq to ship other OSs with their machines. Wasn't this covered in a number of articles within the past few months/years?
I'm sure that looking like a "push-over" would not go so well with investors.
signal, noise, to me it's all the same.
If you look at it from the point of view of someone who has never seen or touched a PC before, Microsoft has made them easier to use. It's a lot easier for a virgin user to pick up Window98 than to learn Linux. Or good ol' DOS for that matter. Then again, if they can't use a computer, they could buy a mac, hehe