Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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 . . .