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10 years ago -- "Competition undermining Microsoft"
Ten years ago,
Bill Gates bemoaned competition undermining Microsoft:
"Our DOS gold mine is shrinking and our costs are soaring--primarily due to low prices, IBM share, and DR-DOS."
This evidence came out in Caldera's lawsuit against Microsoft
for predatory practices against DR-DOS. Bill Gates goes on to
say "I believe people underestimate the impact DR-DOS has had on us in terms of pricing"
Update: 03/31 11:36 by S :
More info at Caldera's website is quite interesting,
for instance detailing Vobis' attempts at using DR-DOS instead.
what i liked about DR-DOS was some cool features like password protection of files and directories and rich set of configuration switches (and task swapping, but i never tried it). and it was placed on TWO install disks.
i realy liked it (maybe i can even find those install disks).
what i pitty that by that time i was not aware of what causes DR-DOS to be a very rare used OS
hany
Since I was working for a peer to peer LAN vendor at the time this whole thing was referring to (and since my company at time was buddying up to Mickeysludge), I've got a pretty decent handle on what was going on at the time. Both 'Der Fuhrer' Gates and some posters here have said some things that need a little correcting...
- 'DR DOS was competition eating into their business'?? MY A$$!! DR DOS' high water mark in market share was somewhere in the high SINGLE digits. They NEVER put a real hurtin' on Billy && Co. Hells bells, the original wrangle about per processor licensing was over DOS. When you bought a machine, you paid for MS DOS, PERIOD. I can't recall a single major US vendor who bundled DR DOS with their boxes.
- The only hay DR DOS ever made was in the market for embedded DOS (quite tiny back then). DR DOS was ROMable, MS DOS NEVER was and NEVER became so; a CLEAR SIGN that DR DOS was better written and engineered. I've seen parts of the source for MS DOS and DR DOS, and a LOT of the machine code for both. TRUST ME... MS DOS is a total kludge, whereas DR DOS was written by assembly aces who knew what they were doing.
- Any 'incompatibilities' with apps running on MS and not DR came in only 2 flavors that I saw: dumb a$$ practices on the part of the app programmers, or manufactured by MS (see the infamous AARD 'bug'). Yeah, if you wanted performance and the ability to do certain things, you had to go to the bare metal on DOS. HOWEVER, if you were smart, you tried NOT to look for flags, data structures, etc., in specific memory offsets in the DOS kernel, etc. Heck, we had no real trouble in running our LAN O/S kernel on DR DOS. The only real 'bug' I ever saw was the Win 3.0 AARD check, which was used to deliberately scare DR DOS users back into the MS fold.
- Some of MS's other business practices at this time were fascinating... besides DR DOS, MS decided to deliberately try to compete with FREE memory management add on's to DOS 5.0 with products like 386^MAX and QEMM. It was a market space MS never competed in and essentially just killed these utilities. The real explaination is that Bill wanted NO OTHER VENDOR alive out there that knew how to write O/S level software. Trust me guys, I've seen Billy screw over companies and people LONG before he was in a position for world domination.
Anyway, that's my .02 from an old timer willing to admit he once worked on that stuff...
Using an OS simply because it is "not Micro$oft" is a weak excuse. One of the arguments many people have is that Microsoft software is inferior because of the bugs... how can you defend that position if you're willing to accept buggier software from someone else?
This one always gets me -- You want your operating system to recognize more than 640K - go spend $50 for QEMM. It hardly seems outragous for a memory manager to be "integrated" in the OS (unlike, say, a web browser).
This kind of news offers hope to the folks who think Microsoft might be indestructable. 10 years ago, they had no application market to speak of except on the Mac; they had to give Windows away for free for anyone to use it; and DR had reverse-engineered their goldmine (which was only a reverse-engineered version of their goldmine, to be fair).
(Before DR-DOS, there never was a notion of "upgrading" your PC's OS. You pretty much just ran the customized version of MS-DOS 3.2, or whatever, that came with it.)
Now Microsoft pretty much owns the application and OS markets, has 50% of the e-mail market, and is trying to nip at Oracle and IBM's heels in the big league database market. A lot can happen in 10 years in this industry, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yep, the lamented (but not late!) DR DOS coming on the market and actually being sold to end-users as an installable DOS finally led to M$ releasing MS-DOS 5 ... in a box! ... for end-users! ... with a real install program! ... with useful enhancements like DEFRAG and COMPRESS! ... with modest plug and play capability! ... with a [GASP] manual! ...
Yep, competition was clearly bad for the market.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I believe there was a beta or some other kind of pre-release version of Windows 3.x that, when run on a non-MS DOS, gave a message to the effect that MS could not guarantee the stability of Windows on this OS and there could be big bad bugs FUD FUD FUD.
MS claimed (very reasonably) that it simply wanted to be sure users knew that there were potential incompatibilities.
What was truly insidious (and inspired, if you're a conspiracy theorist) was that it was THIS version of the software that was reviewed by the trade press. Since there was something like a four months between article's submission and its publication, they had to review a pre-release version or else miss out on all the hype surrounding the release of a new version of Windows.
Uh, 109575000 (109,575,000) is only about 110 million dollars, not billion.
However, you're probably low on the 1000 copies/day guess -- that's only 365,000 copies a year, and the figure is probably a few million a year. The liability may not be 110 billion, but it may well be in the billions.
Look at it another way. Assume Microsoft revenues are 50% OS sales (approximately correct). Ten percent market share (DR-DOS) over ten years would be a year's worth of Microsoft revenues, times 50%, times 3 for tripled damages. Or a year and a half of Microsoft revenues (average revenue over the last 10 years).
Which is probably in the $10 billion ballpark. (Don't have MS's current annual revenue figures handy.)
Even if Caldera's chances of winning the suit are only 10% (and they may well be higher, given some of the evidence), that's (10% x $10 billion)
a billion dollars of liability.
-- Alastair
I remember these days too.
Here in the UK the most significant low-price computer vendor was Amstrad, famous for their monochrome CPM v3 machine the PCW8256 (launched in the mid-80s, with GSX and all). It was on this seminal machine that I learned the syntax for PIP, the silliest COPY command ever written.
When they moved into the 16-bit world it was with the twin 5.25" drive Amstrad 1512. In a moment of madness they launched it with both MS-DOS and DR-DOS, GEM, and the worst ever version of Wordstar. Ever.
At the time I had both affection and respect for Intergalactic Digital Research (they dropped the "Intergalactic"). But on this Amstrad camel, the DR stuff seemed like a struggle, whereas the MS stuff just worked.
For me the battle was fought and won by beastly Microsoft when I found that Ventura 1 needed a special cooked version of DR Gem, when Pagemaker 1 worked fine on regular Windows 1.
I was inordinately impressed when I ran the same binary (fish.exe) under Windows on an IBM-compatible, a Sanyo, an Apricot Xen, and an RM Nimbus (186!). The last three were non-IBM compatibles that ran MSDOS back then.
People today are rightly scathing of MS, but in 1990 they delivered Windows 3.0 which provided both huge leaps in functionality and liberation from the arrogance of IBM, who were then in the business of fraudulently tying OS/2 to their proprietary PS/2 bus.
What a difference nine years makes! Today I find Microsoft's lies and evasions almost as fatuous as those of my own elected leaders...
george
While I defiatly found this article interesting, in the fact that they received more evidence. I am personally offended to the fact that more quotes, or even a copy of the email was not included. The article stated that the email was released to the public today. Maby its just me but I assume public to mean more than just the media. I'm hoping its just a matter of time that Caldera will post the full contents on its website. But for now I'm angry
DR-DOS was, and IS, kick-butt! Caldera has brought this great product back to life...
I use it here at our Little League to run a 2-node Personal NetWare LAN on some old 486's. It runs _GREAT_!! I have a DOS-based FoxPro database package we use to manage our league, and it works like a charm on Caldera DR-DOS.
And the security is great, too!
Speaking as an antitrust attorney, but this isn't legal advice . . .
*If* the memo says what sparks says, and it's not just his comment on the effects, this is probably bigger news than anything in the DOJ antitrust trial:
>In one 1990 internal report, for
>instance, Microsoft discussed
>plans to "block out" DR-DOS
>by pushing one computer
>equipment manufacturer,
>Hyundai Electronics, to sign a
>license that required it to pay a
>license fee for every machine it
>shipped, regardless of whether
>the computers ran on Microsoft
>products.
> The practice "acted as a tax for
>any other viable alternative" to
>DOS, Sparks said.
*If* the memos show that the tax or lockout was the intent, the fat lady's sung. This would be *use* of monopoly power, whether the underlying monopoly was legal or not. (This is not to say that the same thing might not be proved without explicit intent in the memos).
The only way that I can see for MS to win in the face of such memos is to successfully disassociate themselves from the memo (which is no small task).
And with such intent shown, the damages become staggerring. Drdos had about 10% of the market, and climbing. 10% of windows/dos revenue for the last 10 years, which is then tripled for antitrust violations, is a staggering figure . . .
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
yes and no. There was documentation that some Engineers VOLUNTEERED to write in code to harm the operation of Windows and apps IF it was run on top of DR-DOS.
I don't know if they actually DID this, but the email of the suggested "fix" survives as evidence.
I do know that a product I once supported would crash more often under DR-DOS/Win3.1, and middle management decreed on the spot we should not support it (the same "power-hungry ex-DEC'er" would refuse to tell Sales about it, naturally).
But hey, like clueless managers will say "it's Microsoft's OS.. of course you should only use their DOS". Microsoft has sharpened FUD as sharp as a razor (a term I wouldn't use to describe the people who BELIEVE them...)
because the pre-shipping version was evaluated by major press sources and when it balked, DR-DOS was the fallguy.
That is how it was reported and that is how the public percieved it; Windows doesn't like DR-DOS.
As far as I'm concerned, this exclusivity is concrete proof of anticompetitive behaviour: programmed instability.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.