DDR prices back up in the stratosphere compared to say, a month or two ago
When did DDR prices go up? I just looked at the price list of one of the local parts stores (www.laboratorycomputers.com), and a 128M DDR is $38 vs. $31 for a 128M PC133. That is only a $7 difference. The difference is percentage wise the same on 256M modules, which are $69 and $55 respectively. The difference is percentage wise less on 512M modules, which are $138 and $122 respectively for a difference of only $16.
Probably the biggest difference in price if you go with DDR is in motherboards which are about $35 or $40 more for boards with DDR support.
I don't know how a Celeron 1.2GHz can be discounted that much, as it is just over 1/2 the street price locally (Austin, TX) while the AMX XP 1.5GHz price you quote is not that much lower than the local street price. The pricing at a local place (www.laboratorycomputers.com) looks like this:
Celeron 1.2GHz $115
AMD XP 1.5GHz $133
For comparison:
Duron 1.2GHz $99
TBird 1.2GHz $112
If Intel is trying to compete with AMD, it sure looks like a no-brainer choice to go with AMD. The only question is which AMD is the best value.
On the other hand:
P3 Tualitan 1.2GHz $273
So if you have to have "Intel Inside" and you want a "1.2GHz computer", then the Celeron looks like a good deal in comparison to the P3.
Texas already requires you to provide both thumbprints in order to get a license. I don't know what they do for people with one or more prosthetic hands...
I respect gnome guys but still dont know why not go with java that was tons of support from big companies.
Perhaps because IBM and others are already working on Java for Linux, as well as official Java SDK support from Sun for Linux. I look at what the Gnome guys are doing more from the bet hedging aspect than anything else. The open source community can probably afford to work on two things at once more than a company could. That being said, I am still looking at the whole thing with a certain degree of suspicion.
Seriously, nothing against SuSE or RedHat (Slackware is unapologetically old fashioned, so I don't know why you'd use it as an example for desktop ease of use), but Mandrake beats both of them when it comes to ease of installation and configuration for desktop GUI users. Mandrake includes most of the things a desktop user would want, comes more preconfigured and pre-set up and includes more little GUI utilities to configure things than most other distros do.
It also doesn't sound like you've tried StarOffice 6.0, it is a big improvement over 5.2.
Seriously, if you want a hand-holding Linux distro for Windows orriented newbies, I think Mandrake is the way to go right now.
Absolutely true, but it is more complex than that. There are always differences of opinion as to what is "best" and what criteria are used to make that decision.
Consider BetaMax versus VHS
Everyone always brings that up... But Beta wasn't better than VHS in every way. Beta did have slightly better picture quality than VHS, but VHS had a larger tape capacity and slower tape speed modes that let people record more on the same tape. A lot of people were willing to sacrifice a little picture quality (especially given the fact that most TVs weren't that great back then, so you might not notice that much difference) in order to be able to fit a whole movie or a whole week's worth of their favorite soap opera on a tape.
But I personally believe the real reason Beta lost to VHS was licensing. The licensing for VHS was much cheaper and more open, so lots of companies built them and made tapes for them, so they came down in price faster. I only remember Sony and Hitachi making Beta decks, and a lot fewer choices on tapes too.
Now, Linux is more like VHS when it comes to the money -- even more so, it is essentially license fee free, whereas Microsoft is all about collecting ever more and larger license fees. So I am not sure the Beta vs. VHS comparison works. Linux is both cheaper AND better.
I do agree that spending a lot of time trying to kill Microsoft isn't necessarily productive. I personally just want to see a world where there are a number of viable competitive choices in every market. Building the best alternatives you can, and when possible giving them away for free is probably a good place to start, but I think Linux also needs to answer needs Microsoft isn't able to or interested in filling.
That being said, a certain amount of 'us-versus-them' is inevitable and checking your products against the competition isn't always bad, it is just a matter of making sure you put that to productive use rather than wheel spinning.
The question that comes to mind regarding those rationing vouchers is why they don't make a point of destroying the ones they have, and destroying any that show up from circulation. If the supply dried up eventually these things should have a collector value greater than a buck, then the likelyhood of them showing up in change machines would be small and change machine operators who did run across one would have a pleasant surprise instead of being cheated.
Given this theory, I am quite amazed that they haven't put a bar code on paper bank notes to make it easier to scan them using readily available hardware.
Snide? If I wanted to be snide, I would have been meaner than that...:-) I never said it wouldn't be hard to find a good Linux admin for what school districts want to pay -- just that I don't believe it to be any harder than finding a good MS admin for what they want to pay. Good admins aren't cheap regardless of platform. Idiots are cheap regardless of platform. I just don't see any advantage on Microsoft's side when it comes to the real costs of getting your sysadmin needs fulfilled, and I will stick by that.
How many people need the "wealth of features" of Microsoft Office? I can't ever get anyone to tell me what it has that StarOffice doesn't. For that matter, from what I see 90% of Windows and MS-Office users use only about 10% of those features. Not always the same 10%, but there are a lot of those features that just about nobody uses. How many of them would be happy with something that was smaller, cheaper and faster? I've been using StarOffice for quite a while, and I have to say, it has always done what I wanted. If anything the complaint I had about the 5.x versions was that it was too much like MS-Office in that it was big, used a lot of resources and was slow. 6.0 has made a lot of improvements on that in that it seems much faster, especially on startup. StarOffice hasn't failed to open up the MS Office format documents people send me (unlike some of my co-workers who were using MS Office 95 and couldn't open some documents created in newer versions of MS Office -- they've since switched to StarOffice), so I just don't see the point in paying money for Microsoft Office.
As for MS-Office being the standard file formats, that is true for now, but unless you've got some kind of crystal ball, it is dangerous to make a prediction on that not changing in the future. If you went back 10 years, and told people that Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 wouldn't be the standard file formats in a couple of years, people would have looked at you with the same kind of disbelief that you do now regarding MS-Office. If you went back 10 years further it was WordStar and VisiCalc. Things change, and few people will accurately predict the way things will be in the future, especially not those without a view of the past.
Do I have a problem paying for software? No, if it is worth it. Am I going to pay for something I can get free? Probably not. And I certainly don't want to pay money for software that isn't worth it. And frankly, that is what I think about most of Microsoft's products, especially since it seems like their prices have gone up over the years.
Do I expect highly skilled software developers to give their work away? No, at least not unless they want to. But do they? Yes, and I thank them for that.
Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force
Actually I don't believe that is true. I think that most high school graduates go on to attend some form of college. I don't think that a very large percentage of kids learn enough in just high school to get a good enough job that they would be using a computer much. If you only have a high school diploma you are probably going to be stuck flipping burgers, hammering nails on a construction site or bagging groceries rather than working in an office.
And as for children learning one software package and it having no applicability to the "real world" unless it is the exact package that they will encounter later -- I don't buy it. There isn't that much difference between one GUI word processor and another or one GUI spreadsheet and another. Or for that matter one desktop environment and another. Just about all of them have some kind of pop up application "start" menu, and icons on the desktop you can click. Just about all applications have a menu bar, tool bar, etc. If you know one, you can figure out anything else in a short period of time.
As for your assertation that Linux makes a crappy end-user desktop, I think it is largely a myth based on people being told that and not really taking the time to look for themselves. While your typing teacher may not be able to figure out a command line or power user tools like TeX and vi, she probably wouldn't have much more trouble figuring out how to use KFM/Konqueror and StarOffice than Windows Exployer/IE and Microsoft Office.
As someone who uses a KDE desktop on a daily basis, I just can't agree with you about free software not having its place on the desktop. Even some of my Windows using coworkers are using StarOffice instead of Microsoft Office because there is no reason to spend a lot of money on something they don't use all that much.
If there is a shortage of sysadmin resources then Linux is probably an even better answer compared to Microsoft. One central sysadmin can usually maintain a lot more Linux boxes remotely than Windows boxes, at least that has been my experience where I've worked. The only problem I can see is that schools are not as networked as they should be, which means that sysadmins may have to make more personal appearances than is typically necessary in a business environment. But the fact that Linux is generally more secure(able) than Windows or Macs (Macs are fairly network secure because they provide almost no inbound services - but as a broad generality they aren't as secure from the console as Linux is because they aren't designed for multiple users), and more reliable should also make it a win in reduction of need for sysadmin resources as a whole.
As for it supposedly being more difficult to hire a good admin that knows Linux, it just doesn't seem to hold true. There are just as many good admins out there who know Linux as there are that know MS. Chances are it will be difficult to hire a good admin for what school districts pay, but it shouldn't be any more difficult for Linux than for MS. Look around at salary surveys -- experienced admins don't get paid that much differently based on platform.
I think you need to examine your light again because you are buying into too many of the MS marketing promises that don't hold up. They want you to believe that any idiot who buys a bunch of "Exam Cram" books and gets a little certificate (after paying them a nice chunk of change) is qualified to administer your network. But it is a false economy to hire an idiot to administer your network because -- you then have an idiot administering your network.
You probably live in too cold a climate and/or don't have a garage. I would suggest moving far enough south that frost on your windows during the day isn't a problem. In the morning you car will be in your warm garage, so no problem then either...
:-)
Believe me, I know your pain, I just moved 900 miles south of where I used to live. I am getting spoiled awfully quickly with upper 70 degree temps in December... I don't think you could get me back up north for anything now.
At certain periods, hardware vendors had to use middlemen in order to get around restrictions against preloading non-Microsoft OSes. Not only did the customer generally end up paying that middleman a bunch to do a preload for them, they also paid for Microsoft OS licenses for the boxes that they probably never used. Before that there was a period where vendors could preload what they wanted, but they still had to pay for MS-DOS licenses for every CPU they shipped, whether it was preloaded with MS-DOS or not. Microsoft agreed not to do "per processor" licensing as part of an earlier consent decree. But what they started doing instead (exclusionary contracts) was actually far nastier.
Uhh. I live in Austin, TX. We've got lots of asian drivers. I don't think they are any worse than the hispanic drivers, black drivers or rednecks driving their red F150's. Everyone around here drives like fscking maniacs. Either way too fast or way too slow and changing lanes without looking seems like standard proceedure regardless of racial background.
Wow. That is a whole lot of rationalization. I don't think that fear of being crushed by an all powerful bully raises the level of software engineering most of the time. I think in fact it does the opposite. It stifles innovation because a lot of people will just say 'why bother'. In a truly competitive market, where no player has more than, say 30 or 40% market share, there is a lot more room for smaller players to carve out a niche. I think that the level of software (and otherwise) engineering is raised a lot more when there are two or three comparable, credible alternatives to choose from and they have to compete based on merits rather than who can outspend who on marketing, exclude others through restrictive licensing or dealership policies or whatever.
Your example of the stress that ID is subjected to due to monopolistic seems more like evidence that the current market situation is screwed up rather than working correctly. If every company other than Microsoft is forced to be so cautious that they can never make any sort of mistake lest they be crushed, then before long there will be nobody else left, and nobody will be willing to take the risk to ever enter any business that Microsoft might somehow, somewhere decide to think about. And since Microsoft seems to have intentions to expand from computers into television, news media and entertainment, pretty soon there will be nothing on TV or movies but what Microsoft wants...
In 1984, I don't think Microsoft really viewed minis and mainframes as competing with them. They didn't really start thinking about taking on the server world until 1987 or 1988.
If OS/2 wasn't preloadable, then why did Microsoft think they needed evil licensing tactics? DR-DOS/GEM was more comparable to MS-DOS/Windows in terms of hardware requirements and support. But it sure seems like Microsoft has always been afraid to compete in a fair open market.
It would be interesting to be able to roll things back and find out. Without the same sort of forced bundling and "everything from one vendor" mentality with PHB's, if Word and Excel would have shipped on OS/2 PM I think they would have had a more serious climb. On the other hand OS/2 would probably have not floundered as badly had it had a few more applications, which one would suspect had something to do with Microsoft burying ready to ship versions of Word and Excel for OS/2 as you suggest they did.
And Atari shipped with MS BASIC - I have the cart right here.
I don't believe that it was 'standard equipment'. I think it was an extra cost option, at least at the time I looked at them (in the days of the 400 and 800 as the only models). Maybe later with the 130XE they shipped with the Microsoft BASIC cartridge standard or something. By that time it was already obvious that Atari would lose to Commodore, let alone Apple or anyone else. And if you couldn't avoid paying the Microsoft tax with Atari, it only makes my point about them being a defacto monopoly that much earlier...
"So certainly since at least 1984 or so Microsoft has basically had a monopoly position in OSes."
Not quite buckeroo. In the late 1980's platforms from Apple and Commodore(and even Atari to some extent) were very viable, and continued to be up until around 1990.
Apple, Atari and Commodore, all put together even as early as 1987 could barely have scratched into the 2 digit market share range. And certainly of those the only one that was making any share in business sales was Apple. Even then, Apple was never very successful outside of the desktop publishing and graphics niches. Atari and Commodore were never serious competitors to Microsoft. Heck, Commodore even sold MS-DOS based x86 boxes. Hardly much of a competitor.
At which point DR-DOS and OS/2 were very viable competitors with Microsoft and had large chunks of marketshare.
Oh please. Neither of those ever sold any significant numbers. Microsoft already had over an 80% market share by then. I'm not saying that they weren't viable products, but that is different than being viable competitors. OS/2 and DR-DOS were never viable competitors at least in part because neither of them could ever crack the preload market. Microsoft was able to keep them locked out through restrictive contract terms amongst other issues.
Having viable products in competion with yours doesn't necessarily prevent you from having a monopoly. If you have a seriously dominant market share, then you can have a monopoly even without being officially granted a government sanctioned monopoly or without necessarily being the only product available. It seems like a popular thing for Microsoft apologists to claim Microsoft isn't (or wasn't) a monopoly by wanting to make the definition of what a monopoly is so restrictive that there practically isn't such a thing.
It wasn't until 1995-1996 that Microsoft became a real monopoly, when everything else just disappeared into the nowheresphere.
Please. Both Atari and Commodore were out of business by the 1994 timeframe, and neither were more than gasping for air for the last several years of their lives. Apple is essentially the only non-x86 holdout in micros. Microsoft certainly extended their monopoly during that time period, but it was far from the turning point.
You're also grasping for straws on the BASIC thing.
How so? Microsoft was making a royalty on virtually every microcomputer sold in the 8 bit days. About the only exceptions were Atari and TI, who had their own proprietary BASIC. Just like with most packaged PC's these days, it was virtually impossible to avoid paying the Microsoft tax even back then. Sounds like a de-facto monopoly to me.
Ease of portability. If you read the concept behind NT, they developed the HAL in order to move it easily to new hardware. This allow them to support Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC (while they did) with a very similar code base. Should there be another hardware platform that they wish to support, their major task will be to rewrite the HAL. And I don't just mean new processors. Try porting Windows ME to PPC architecture.
Which has basically done nothing to improve the popularity of NT/W2K/XP, since the non x86 versions were complete marketing flops. It doesn't look like any other architecture is ever likely to become popular with a Microsoft OS. Even the Itanium is looking like it is going to have a slow and rough time. AMD's much more conservative 64 bit x86 extension has a serious and credible chance to beat the Itanium, especially if it is cheaper and does a better job of running legacy 32 bit x86 code.
Slashdot Mirror
DDR prices back up in the stratosphere compared to say, a month or two ago
When did DDR prices go up? I just looked at the price list of one of the local parts stores (www.laboratorycomputers.com), and a 128M DDR is $38 vs. $31 for a 128M PC133. That is only a $7 difference. The difference is percentage wise the same on 256M modules, which are $69 and $55 respectively. The difference is percentage wise less on 512M modules, which are $138 and $122 respectively for a difference of only $16.
Probably the biggest difference in price if you go with DDR is in motherboards which are about $35 or $40 more for boards with DDR support.
I don't know how a Celeron 1.2GHz can be discounted that much, as it is just over 1/2 the street price locally (Austin, TX) while the AMX XP 1.5GHz price you quote is not that much lower than the local street price. The pricing at a local place (www.laboratorycomputers.com) looks like this:
Celeron 1.2GHz $115
AMD XP 1.5GHz $133
For comparison:
Duron 1.2GHz $99
TBird 1.2GHz $112
If Intel is trying to compete with AMD, it sure looks like a no-brainer choice to go with AMD. The only question is which AMD is the best value.
On the other hand:
P3 Tualitan 1.2GHz $273
So if you have to have "Intel Inside" and you want a "1.2GHz computer", then the Celeron looks like a good deal in comparison to the P3.
fingerprint
Texas already requires you to provide both thumbprints in order to get a license. I don't know what they do for people with one or more prosthetic hands...
I respect gnome guys but still dont know why not go with java that was tons of support from big companies.
Perhaps because IBM and others are already working on Java for Linux, as well as official Java SDK support from Sun for Linux. I look at what the Gnome guys are doing more from the bet hedging aspect than anything else. The open source community can probably afford to work on two things at once more than a company could. That being said, I am still looking at the whole thing with a certain degree of suspicion.
Seriously, nothing against SuSE or RedHat (Slackware is unapologetically old fashioned, so I don't know why you'd use it as an example for desktop ease of use), but Mandrake beats both of them when it comes to ease of installation and configuration for desktop GUI users. Mandrake includes most of the things a desktop user would want, comes more preconfigured and pre-set up and includes more little GUI utilities to configure things than most other distros do.
It also doesn't sound like you've tried StarOffice 6.0, it is a big improvement over 5.2.
Seriously, if you want a hand-holding Linux distro for Windows orriented newbies, I think Mandrake is the way to go right now.
The best doesn't always succeed
Absolutely true, but it is more complex than that. There are always differences of opinion as to what is "best" and what criteria are used to make that decision.
Consider BetaMax versus VHS
Everyone always brings that up... But Beta wasn't better than VHS in every way. Beta did have slightly better picture quality than VHS, but VHS had a larger tape capacity and slower tape speed modes that let people record more on the same tape. A lot of people were willing to sacrifice a little picture quality (especially given the fact that most TVs weren't that great back then, so you might not notice that much difference) in order to be able to fit a whole movie or a whole week's worth of their favorite soap opera on a tape.
But I personally believe the real reason Beta lost to VHS was licensing. The licensing for VHS was much cheaper and more open, so lots of companies built them and made tapes for them, so they came down in price faster. I only remember Sony and Hitachi making Beta decks, and a lot fewer choices on tapes too.
Now, Linux is more like VHS when it comes to the money -- even more so, it is essentially license fee free, whereas Microsoft is all about collecting ever more and larger license fees. So I am not sure the Beta vs. VHS comparison works. Linux is both cheaper AND better.
I do agree that spending a lot of time trying to kill Microsoft isn't necessarily productive. I personally just want to see a world where there are a number of viable competitive choices in every market. Building the best alternatives you can, and when possible giving them away for free is probably a good place to start, but I think Linux also needs to answer needs Microsoft isn't able to or interested in filling.
That being said, a certain amount of 'us-versus-them' is inevitable and checking your products against the competition isn't always bad, it is just a matter of making sure you put that to productive use rather than wheel spinning.
The question that comes to mind regarding those rationing vouchers is why they don't make a point of destroying the ones they have, and destroying any that show up from circulation. If the supply dried up eventually these things should have a collector value greater than a buck, then the likelyhood of them showing up in change machines would be small and change machine operators who did run across one would have a pleasant surprise instead of being cheated.
Given this theory, I am quite amazed that they haven't put a bar code on paper bank notes to make it easier to scan them using readily available hardware.
It seems to work O.K. with Konqueror.
Snide? If I wanted to be snide, I would have been meaner than that... :-) I never said it wouldn't be hard to find a good Linux admin for what school districts want to pay -- just that I don't believe it to be any harder than finding a good MS admin for what they want to pay. Good admins aren't cheap regardless of platform. Idiots are cheap regardless of platform. I just don't see any advantage on Microsoft's side when it comes to the real costs of getting your sysadmin needs fulfilled, and I will stick by that.
How many people need the "wealth of features" of Microsoft Office? I can't ever get anyone to tell me what it has that StarOffice doesn't. For that matter, from what I see 90% of Windows and MS-Office users use only about 10% of those features. Not always the same 10%, but there are a lot of those features that just about nobody uses. How many of them would be happy with something that was smaller, cheaper and faster? I've been using StarOffice for quite a while, and I have to say, it has always done what I wanted. If anything the complaint I had about the 5.x versions was that it was too much like MS-Office in that it was big, used a lot of resources and was slow. 6.0 has made a lot of improvements on that in that it seems much faster, especially on startup. StarOffice hasn't failed to open up the MS Office format documents people send me (unlike some of my co-workers who were using MS Office 95 and couldn't open some documents created in newer versions of MS Office -- they've since switched to StarOffice), so I just don't see the point in paying money for Microsoft Office.
As for MS-Office being the standard file formats, that is true for now, but unless you've got some kind of crystal ball, it is dangerous to make a prediction on that not changing in the future. If you went back 10 years, and told people that Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 wouldn't be the standard file formats in a couple of years, people would have looked at you with the same kind of disbelief that you do now regarding MS-Office. If you went back 10 years further it was WordStar and VisiCalc. Things change, and few people will accurately predict the way things will be in the future, especially not those without a view of the past.
Do I have a problem paying for software? No, if it is worth it. Am I going to pay for something I can get free? Probably not. And I certainly don't want to pay money for software that isn't worth it. And frankly, that is what I think about most of Microsoft's products, especially since it seems like their prices have gone up over the years.
Do I expect highly skilled software developers to give their work away? No, at least not unless they want to. But do they? Yes, and I thank them for that.
Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force
Actually I don't believe that is true. I think that most high school graduates go on to attend some form of college. I don't think that a very large percentage of kids learn enough in just high school to get a good enough job that they would be using a computer much. If you only have a high school diploma you are probably going to be stuck flipping burgers, hammering nails on a construction site or bagging groceries rather than working in an office.
And as for children learning one software package and it having no applicability to the "real world" unless it is the exact package that they will encounter later -- I don't buy it. There isn't that much difference between one GUI word processor and another or one GUI spreadsheet and another. Or for that matter one desktop environment and another. Just about all of them have some kind of pop up application "start" menu, and icons on the desktop you can click. Just about all applications have a menu bar, tool bar, etc. If you know one, you can figure out anything else in a short period of time.
As for your assertation that Linux makes a crappy end-user desktop, I think it is largely a myth based on people being told that and not really taking the time to look for themselves. While your typing teacher may not be able to figure out a command line or power user tools like TeX and vi, she probably wouldn't have much more trouble figuring out how to use KFM/Konqueror and StarOffice than Windows Exployer/IE and Microsoft Office.
As someone who uses a KDE desktop on a daily basis, I just can't agree with you about free software not having its place on the desktop. Even some of my Windows using coworkers are using StarOffice instead of Microsoft Office because there is no reason to spend a lot of money on something they don't use all that much.
If there is a shortage of sysadmin resources then Linux is probably an even better answer compared to Microsoft. One central sysadmin can usually maintain a lot more Linux boxes remotely than Windows boxes, at least that has been my experience where I've worked. The only problem I can see is that schools are not as networked as they should be, which means that sysadmins may have to make more personal appearances than is typically necessary in a business environment. But the fact that Linux is generally more secure(able) than Windows or Macs (Macs are fairly network secure because they provide almost no inbound services - but as a broad generality they aren't as secure from the console as Linux is because they aren't designed for multiple users), and more reliable should also make it a win in reduction of need for sysadmin resources as a whole.
As for it supposedly being more difficult to hire a good admin that knows Linux, it just doesn't seem to hold true. There are just as many good admins out there who know Linux as there are that know MS. Chances are it will be difficult to hire a good admin for what school districts pay, but it shouldn't be any more difficult for Linux than for MS. Look around at salary surveys -- experienced admins don't get paid that much differently based on platform.
I think you need to examine your light again because you are buying into too many of the MS marketing promises that don't hold up. They want you to believe that any idiot who buys a bunch of "Exam Cram" books and gets a little certificate (after paying them a nice chunk of change) is qualified to administer your network. But it is a false economy to hire an idiot to administer your network because -- you then have an idiot administering your network.
Eh? I just cut-n-pasted from Nedit to "Advanced Editor" and KWord... It worked with no problem at all. What is even "sort of" impossible about that?
You probably live in too cold a climate and/or don't have a garage. I would suggest moving far enough south that frost on your windows during the day isn't a problem. In the morning you car will be in your warm garage, so no problem then either...
:-)
Believe me, I know your pain, I just moved 900 miles south of where I used to live. I am getting spoiled awfully quickly with upper 70 degree temps in December... I don't think you could get me back up north for anything now.
At certain periods, hardware vendors had to use middlemen in order to get around restrictions against preloading non-Microsoft OSes. Not only did the customer generally end up paying that middleman a bunch to do a preload for them, they also paid for Microsoft OS licenses for the boxes that they probably never used. Before that there was a period where vendors could preload what they wanted, but they still had to pay for MS-DOS licenses for every CPU they shipped, whether it was preloaded with MS-DOS or not. Microsoft agreed not to do "per processor" licensing as part of an earlier consent decree. But what they started doing instead (exclusionary contracts) was actually far nastier.
Share the roads of your city with Asian drivers
Uhh. I live in Austin, TX. We've got lots of asian drivers. I don't think they are any worse than the hispanic drivers, black drivers or rednecks driving their red F150's. Everyone around here drives like fscking maniacs. Either way too fast or way too slow and changing lanes without looking seems like standard proceedure regardless of racial background.
Wow. That is a whole lot of rationalization. I don't think that fear of being crushed by an all powerful bully raises the level of software engineering most of the time. I think in fact it does the opposite. It stifles innovation because a lot of people will just say 'why bother'. In a truly competitive market, where no player has more than, say 30 or 40% market share, there is a lot more room for smaller players to carve out a niche. I think that the level of software (and otherwise) engineering is raised a lot more when there are two or three comparable, credible alternatives to choose from and they have to compete based on merits rather than who can outspend who on marketing, exclude others through restrictive licensing or dealership policies or whatever.
Your example of the stress that ID is subjected to due to monopolistic seems more like evidence that the current market situation is screwed up rather than working correctly. If every company other than Microsoft is forced to be so cautious that they can never make any sort of mistake lest they be crushed, then before long there will be nobody else left, and nobody will be willing to take the risk to ever enter any business that Microsoft might somehow, somewhere decide to think about. And since Microsoft seems to have intentions to expand from computers into television, news media and entertainment, pretty soon there will be nothing on TV or movies but what Microsoft wants...
Microsoft was working with IBM on OS/2 in 1987-1988 time frame. It was 1988 when Microsoft hired David Cutler from Digial to work on "OS/2 NT".
In 1984, I don't think Microsoft really viewed minis and mainframes as competing with them. They didn't really start thinking about taking on the server world until 1987 or 1988.
If OS/2 wasn't preloadable, then why did Microsoft think they needed evil licensing tactics? DR-DOS/GEM was more comparable to MS-DOS/Windows in terms of hardware requirements and support. But it sure seems like Microsoft has always been afraid to compete in a fair open market.
It would be interesting to be able to roll things back and find out. Without the same sort of forced bundling and "everything from one vendor" mentality with PHB's, if Word and Excel would have shipped on OS/2 PM I think they would have had a more serious climb. On the other hand OS/2 would probably have not floundered as badly had it had a few more applications, which one would suspect had something to do with Microsoft burying ready to ship versions of Word and Excel for OS/2 as you suggest they did.
And Atari shipped with MS BASIC - I have the cart right here.
I don't believe that it was 'standard equipment'. I think it was an extra cost option, at least at the time I looked at them (in the days of the 400 and 800 as the only models). Maybe later with the 130XE they shipped with the Microsoft BASIC cartridge standard or something. By that time it was already obvious that Atari would lose to Commodore, let alone Apple or anyone else. And if you couldn't avoid paying the Microsoft tax with Atari, it only makes my point about them being a defacto monopoly that much earlier...
"So certainly since at least 1984 or so Microsoft has basically had a monopoly position in OSes."
Not quite buckeroo. In the late 1980's platforms from Apple and Commodore(and even Atari to some extent) were very viable, and continued to be up until around 1990.
Apple, Atari and Commodore, all put together even as early as 1987 could barely have scratched into the 2 digit market share range. And certainly of those the only one that was making any share in business sales was Apple. Even then, Apple was never very successful outside of the desktop publishing and graphics niches. Atari and Commodore were never serious competitors to Microsoft. Heck, Commodore even sold MS-DOS based x86 boxes. Hardly much of a competitor.
At which point DR-DOS and OS/2 were very viable competitors with Microsoft and had large chunks of marketshare.
Oh please. Neither of those ever sold any significant numbers. Microsoft already had over an 80% market share by then. I'm not saying that they weren't viable products, but that is different than being viable competitors. OS/2 and DR-DOS were never viable competitors at least in part because neither of them could ever crack the preload market. Microsoft was able to keep them locked out through restrictive contract terms amongst other issues.
Having viable products in competion with yours doesn't necessarily prevent you from having a monopoly. If you have a seriously dominant market share, then you can have a monopoly even without being officially granted a government sanctioned monopoly or without necessarily being the only product available. It seems like a popular thing for Microsoft apologists to claim Microsoft isn't (or wasn't) a monopoly by wanting to make the definition of what a monopoly is so restrictive that there practically isn't such a thing.
It wasn't until 1995-1996 that Microsoft became a real monopoly, when everything else just disappeared into the nowheresphere.
Please. Both Atari and Commodore were out of business by the 1994 timeframe, and neither were more than gasping for air for the last several years of their lives. Apple is essentially the only non-x86 holdout in micros. Microsoft certainly extended their monopoly during that time period, but it was far from the turning point.
You're also grasping for straws on the BASIC thing.
How so? Microsoft was making a royalty on virtually every microcomputer sold in the 8 bit days. About the only exceptions were Atari and TI, who had their own proprietary BASIC. Just like with most packaged PC's these days, it was virtually impossible to avoid paying the Microsoft tax even back then. Sounds like a de-facto monopoly to me.
Ease of portability. If you read the concept behind NT, they developed the HAL in order to move it easily to new hardware. This allow them to support Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC (while they did) with a very similar code base. Should there be another hardware platform that they wish to support, their major task will be to rewrite the HAL. And I don't just mean new processors. Try porting Windows ME to PPC architecture.
Which has basically done nothing to improve the popularity of NT/W2K/XP, since the non x86 versions were complete marketing flops. It doesn't look like any other architecture is ever likely to become popular with a Microsoft OS. Even the Itanium is looking like it is going to have a slow and rough time. AMD's much more conservative 64 bit x86 extension has a serious and credible chance to beat the Itanium, especially if it is cheaper and does a better job of running legacy 32 bit x86 code.