Windows doesn't have perceived value anymore. OSX leopard ships with every single feature Windows Vista Ultimate has for $129. why does Ultimate cost $300?
Firstly, you must compare the retail Leopard with a Windows upgrade licence, because that is how Leopard is priced. So US$220.
Secondly, there is at least one major feature Vista Ultimate has that OS X lacks - Media Centre. Many people will happily pay the extra $90 for that.
While MS may have made the job harder from Lotus than their own internal developers (hiding part of the API from Lotus, etc.), Lotus also shot themselves in the foot.
Lotus 1-2-3 was (famously) written pretty much completely in assembly. Exactly which part of the "API" do you think Microsoft were hiding ?
In fact, exactly why do you think an OS vendor would be hiding an API *at all* ? It defeats the purpose of selling an OS in the first place.
Stac brought out doublespace- rather than license it, Microsoft stole it, they lost in court, they bought Stac.
Stac's product was called Stacker (I know, because I still have a copy of Stacker 2.0, completely with an ISA compression coprocessor card). Microsoft's product was called Doublespace, later renamed to Drivespace.
The third player in this arena was SuperStor, which was included in DR-DOS 6.0.
The only "scam" Microsoft pulled was getting a look at Stac's source code so they could subsequently design a product that *wouldn't* infringe any of their patents.
Saying that a bit less politely... Stac had a double space product, Microsoft tried to scam them and brought out a very similarly named product, got caught in court, and lost.
There was no naming similarity. Further, by the time MS-DOS 6.0 arrived with DoubleSpace, Stacker was already a well-established and well known piece of software.
This is similar to the "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run". Extremely common during the period but amazingly buried today.
It's not "buried", it was never true outside of the same sort of rabid anti-Microsoft people that congregate on Slashdot today. The very idea is simply too stupid to even pass the laugh test. It would be like Microsoft releasing a version of Vista that (deliberately) didn't run AutoCAD, or Apple releasing a version of OS X that didn't run Photoshop.
Its success caught IBM and other software vendors completely off guard.
It's probably worth noting that it caught Microsoft "off guard" as well (as insiders from the time - eg: Larry Osterman - have since mentioned in interviews and blogs). Microsoft were pouring much more development effort into OS/2 and OS/2 NT (later to become Windows NT). This is also why DOS stagnated badly between 3.3 and 5.0 - because all the effort was going into the two versions of OS/2, which were going to replace everything "real soon now".
Remember, OS2 was jointly developed by both (but more by MS than IBM), and the agreement was for OS2 to replace Windows. MS then took what work they'd done on the project, poured it into a project that would become Windows NT, and essentially stabbed IBM in the back.
There were two completely separate versions of OS/2:
* OS/2 1.x was worked on jointly by IBM and Microsoft. This is the codebase that went on to become OS/2 2.x, Warp, etc. This was the product meant to replace DOS and Windows on low-end, "PCs".
* OS/2 NT was worked on solely by Microsoft. This went on to become Windows NT. It was originally meant to be for high-end "workstations" and workgroup servers and then, eventually, also replace the earlier OS/2 line once hardware was sufficiently powerful.
The "backstabbing" was the surprise (to everyone - Microsoft included) runaway success of Windows 3.0. When that happened, the logical next step was to continue the Windows 3.x line (which went on to become Windows 9x), because that's what everyone was using. IBM didn't want to do that and, hence, IBM and Microsoft had a falling out over it (the infamous "divorce"). IBM took OS/2 1.x and continued its development into 2.x, Warp, then eComstation (while also paying Microsoft licensing fees for the parts of it they owned - most notoriously HPFS). Microsoft to OS/2 NT, renamed it Windows NT and hacked together a 32 bit version of Windows 3.0's Win16 API.
XEROX PARC handed Steves Jobs and Wozniak a virtual monopoly opportunity, and Gates subsequently stole the GUI from them at a time when the courts were not prepared to understand, let alone rectify, the consequences of the outright theft.
Surely you're not referring to that ludicrous "look and feel" lawsuit ?
What's this definition you speak of? Monopoly, from the greek root simply means sole vendor. So by definition you have a monopoly, if you create a market. You possibly meant something different, well, elaborate.
That would be the legal definition of a monopoly. You know, the one that actually matters when you're talking about the law ?
Well, you as a retailer would pretty much have three choices: either you sell MS-DOS (or Windows) with a deep discount, and give MS money even if the customer wanted DR-DOS (or Linux), you sell MS-DOS (or Windows) at it's normal price, and are left by many of your MS-using customers to your competitors who offer the same product for far less, or don't sell MS-DOS (or Windows) at all and lose *all* of your MS-using customers.
But if demand was so high for the "superior" alternatives (as is continually argued), why would losing the business of the (alleged minority) of customers interested in the inferior Microsoft product matter ?
It wouldn't make sense if Microsoft didn't have 90% of the market, but as things stood (and stand), you as a retailer are pretty much dead if you decide to ignore them.
In the timeframe under discussion (when IBM "handed them a monopoly") Microsoft didn't have 90% of the market. They didn't have any% of the market.
So, again, you're arguing that basically every company is a monopoly, since they're the only ones who make their own products ?
You do seem to be playing semantics, so I will clarify what seems to be 'confusing' you.
I'm not arguing semantics, I'm trying to highlight the idiocy of arguing a company is a monopoly because they're the only ones selling their own product. That's not what a monopoly is.
Most people use a generalised version of monopoly, when they are actually talking about a majority.
Which *still* doesn't make sense, because when the IBM PC was first released, it was in no way "a majority".
No I'm suggesting that the crap Microsoft pulled to make Word competitive under DOS and then Windows was an unfair advantage that Word Star and Word Perfect didn't get.
Which, again, is utterly irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand, because a) it was half a decade earlier and b) Word for DOS was never a serious competitor to either of those products.
There was no way Word Perfect could compete when "Word for Windows" was basically built on the next generation of Windows technology before it was released. Sherman act violation.
Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Windows 3.1 in 1992. Word for Windows 6.0 (the version we're talking about) was released in 1994. Are you seriously trying to argue, that for 2-4 years, Microsoft was the only vendor capable of writing software for Windows because of "insider informatioN" ?
This is before we even get to the fact that it wasn't until *1997* that the first semi-decent version of Wordperfect for Windows was released, and the well-known attitudes of Wordperfect Corp. itself towards porting Wordperfect to Windows.
But, no. The nearly unfeasible awfulness of Wordperfect for Windows for ~7 years, the utter lack of interest from the vendor to porting Wordperfect to Windows, the massive effort Microsoft spent finding out why people preferred Wordperfect and building a better word processor based on that - all those were irrelevant. It was all down to the legendary "undocumented APIs" that Word used (to do what, exactly, that other programs could not ?).
All browsers were crap back then. Netscape was better than IE. At that time, Winsock was very buggy.
You were in a minority. Again, as evidenced by the facts.
The point was that the OS Microsoft shipped as the desktop of the future was full of 16bit code and hardly used the capabilities of the CPUs at the time.
Windows 95 was shipped as an interim step towards Windows NT, not "the dektop of the future". It was (assuming you didn't have legacy hardware or software) 32 bit pretty much top to bottom, and made use of all the "capabilities" of "the CPUs at the time".
Windows NT was a bloated pig and not only was it slow but required a massive increase in system resources. It was first stated to be the desktop of the future when OS/2 v2.0 was to ship but when it was finally shipped, they pulled back and claimed Chicago was the future desktop.
In the early 90s, Windows NT was targeted as a replacement for Netware (server-side) and high-end workstations (client-side). It was not, at that time, aimed at regular desktops.
It took almost 4 years for Chicago to ship as Windows 95 and it was pathetic compared to what IBM shipped many years earlier.
Except for the things that mattered - better compatibility, performance, developer interest and a vendor that actually appeared to give a damn.
(I find it rather funny you're championing OS/2, an OS that Microsoft played a major part in developing.)
Only by using false promises, bad press and other marketing tactics were they able to hold the market waiting for Windows 95. So while they had thier hands in 32bit OSs, they sucked at implementation.
No, they were chained by customer requirements. In particular, compatibility and hardware capabilities.
A kernel controlled multi tasking and memory managed system which didn't require 4x time the system resources of the current standard desktop PC.
That would have been Windows 95. Or Windows NT4. Or Windows 2000. Or Windows XP.
Next closest candidate would have been OS/2, which had similar hardware requirements to Windows 95 and more than enough of its own problems (eg: SIQ, few native applications, lack of developer interest).
Next option would have been MacOS X 10.1, which arrived in 2001. Although given the atrocious relative performance and high hardware costs, that's hardly being fair to Windows XP.
But they did it almost 10 years after many others had already provided more robust 32bit OS's.
For example ?
And while we are at it, by strong arming the marketing into their inferior technology, they all destroyed the software developement market for cross platform object oriented application frameworks. The 90s saw the elimination of nearly all object oriented application frameworks based on C++. They were replaced with a non compliant C++ compiler and non object oriented application framework called MFC and COM.
Have you considered they might have died because they simply weren't in demand ? "Cross platform" would have to be one of the biggest boondoggles in computing history.
Then you miss a VERY important step, ignoring which, will cloud your view of what REALLY happened in the office market of the late 80s and early 90s.
Are you suggesting the distinct lack of interest in Word for DOS is the reason Word destroyed Wordperfect in the '90s ?
If you are, I think you're going to need to expand on that a bit.
Yes because Netscape charged for their browser and Microsoft gave theirs away for free. This was an almost perfect example of a violation of the sherman act.
Navigator was freely available for download, from ISPs, on magazine covers, in cerial packets, etc, etc. To suggest that any more than a tiny minority of users ever paid for it, or that most users considered it anything but free, is disingenuous in the extreme.
To say nothing of it simply being an example of software that used to an addon becoming an inclusion. Happened with GUIs, task switchers, network stacks, text editors, media players, etc. If that's a violation of the law, then the law is wrong.
Having been in the industry since CP/M, it is a hard job to keep history from being re-written by people who don't know the whole series of events.
Then perhaps you can enlighten us as to why pretty much everyone in the industry considered Navigator 4.0 to be a broken piece of crap, but it was actually a diamond in the rough. Or how Word 6.0 didn't displace Wordperfect by being the Word Processer most people preferred to use. Because, having lived through it happening, I find it difficult to think of two better examples of software becoming dominant due to its merits.
No, only the companies profiting from products virtually no one else produces or sells. The companies that have a significant majority of the market. It is usually only a problem when a company uses its market share to prevent/limit other players in the market. When there are two or more products competing for close to equal parts of the market, they are not monopolies.
So how do you think that applies to the first IBM PC ?
Yes, they are. They're insisting Microsoft were "handed a monopoly" by IBM, yet this - quite literally - was impossible (without, as I said, using logic that requires basically every company in the world be a monopoly, to say nothing of an utter lack of legal support).
If you want to be disingenuous in your responses, have fun, but don't delude yourself into thinking anyone is either fooled or entertained. As soon as you want to participate in the adult conversation by responding to what people say rather than your deliberate mischaracterizations, you'll probably get more responses, and may even learn something about either the history of the computer market or basic social skills.
Then perhaps, in all your wisdom - and since no-one else has managed it - you might be able to explain which market Microsoft was supposedly a monopoly of when the first PC was released in 1981, which court made that judgement, and how the rather phenomenal achievement of going from not even being in a market, to dominating, could have happened overnight. Then, when present with an argument that isn't just blatantly biased whining, I might be able to muster up a different response.
We are talking about history not current events. Word for DOS.
No, we're talking about:
I can't think of one, that's right, not one product of theirs that won on its own merit. Office and IE are the two most obvious examples.
We are in no way, shape, or form, talking about Word for DOS. Two aspects of the discussion ("winning" and "office") preclude it from being relevant.
You and I remember history different. I remember IE being worse than Netscape.
Which does not change the facts. IE4 took ca. 50% of the browser market off Navigator before "integration" could have possible been a significant factor. That means a *lot* of people thought it was better and deliberately sought it out. Software reviews from the time also greatly favoured IE.
Indeed, it's a struggle to take anyone who remembers Navigator 4.0 as anything other than an unstable, bloated piece of crap, seriously.
Because if I buy application to run on an IBM PC compatible platform [...]
Your assumption is broken. In the timeframe under discussion, there was no "IBM PC compatible platform" (in context, the term makes no more sense than "the Apple Macintosh platform"). There was the IBM PC and there were various other "personal computers" like the Apple ][. The market was "personal computers", and Microsoft did not, by any measure, have a monopoly in it.
This product was superior. The proof lies in the fact that MS rushed a DOS 5.0 product to market after years of not upgrading what was widely held to be a stinking POS, MS-DOS 4.0.
The main reason DOS stagnated after 3.3, and why 5.0 had to be rushed to market, was because Microsoft was busily working on OS/2 and NT. There was never supposed to be a DOS 5.0 (or even 4.0) because it was meant to be replaced by OS/2. But customer demand - much like it did in the late 90s with Windows 98 - was for DOS, not OS/2.
They did. That's why the contracts "dried up" instead of "never existed in the first place." MS made it so that the computer manufacturer had to pay for MS-DOS even if the end customer wanted DR-DOS.
Only for vendors who also wanted to sell MS-DOS with the deep discounts offered by per-processor licensing.
This is the same circular logic that is used to justify why so few PCs are sold with Linux, and it makes no more sense here than it does there.
One thing I don't know is how much of the market you have to control to be a monopoly.
Becoming a monopoly does not happen at a particularly market share - indeed, market share is not really a factor.
In fact, one of the rather large problems with antitrust law is that a company has no way of knowing whether or not it is a monopoly until a court has ruled it as one.
But remember, being a monopoly doesn't have to be an issue, its only a problem if you use that power to eliminate competitors or to build a monopoly in another market.
No, you have to worry if you "abuse" your monopoly. Given that many perfectly normal business practices become "abusive" once you are a monopoly, it is - for all intents and purposes - impossible be a monopoly and not "abuse" it.
The simple fact is there has never been any point where you have not been able to easily buy a functionally equivalent alternative (where the "functions" are broad concepts like "spreadsheets" rather than specific applications) to a Windows PC. Which is I why I don't consider Microsoft to have _ever_ had a monopoly.
Someone much wiser than me once said (and I don't know who, perhaps someone could fill that part in) "it's impossible to turn ten dollars into twenty dollars, but it's inevitable to turn ten million dollars into twenty million dollars".
Although dozens of people who have won hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in lotteries, but are bankrupt only a few years later, would suggest that comment is less than 100% accurate.
The only advantage Windows 3.x and 95 had over their contemporary competitors -- Mac OS and OS/2 -- was that it could run MS-DOS applications better than anything else out there.
For an Operating System, running the applications people want to use is pretty much the single most important feature.
You also forgot the price aspect. A PC running Windows was a lot less than a PC running OS/2 or MacOS (the former due to higher hardware requirements and software cost, the latter due to Apple).
Think about it. the 386 and 486 were 80s era CPUs but where 32bit. Microsoft released Windows 95 in late 1995 as a crappy 16/32bit OS which still relied on DOS under it for much of it code. 1995!
Firstly, Windows 95 - assuming no legacy drivers and software - relied on DOS for little more than a bootloader (much like Windows 3.1 and 3.11 before it).
Secondly, Microsoft were developing and releasing 32 bit OSes well before Windows 95, including OS/2, Xenix and Windows NT.
Microsoft to this day differentiates between a client OS and a server OS and that is ridiculous.
It is a very common distinction, made by numerous OS vendors both past and present.
What year/millennium was it that the powerhouse that is Microsoft had a proper operating system for the masses?
Without knowing what you mean by "proper OS" and "for the masses", a question impossible to answer. However, by any consistent definition of them, they were pretty much the first to do so.
I recall 2. I had the choice of shelling out $175 for DR's CPM/86 or accepting PC-DOS which came with the machine for free. The other one you referred to I'm sure wasn't free. Now if that doesn't constitute a monopoly for MS, it's because you're playing with the meaning of words.
No, it's because I'm not silly enough to use logic that dictates basically every single company in the world is a "monopoly", and any company choosing to sell their product cheaper is "abusing their monopoly".
You almost by definition have a monopoly over a market you create. If you are the only person making widgetA then you have a monopoly on that market, even if you were the first one to come up with the idea to make widgetA.
So, you're basically arguing that pretty much every company in the world is a monopoly ?
There is nothing wrong with being a monopoly. What is wrong is using that power to lock other people out of the same market (or related markets... like the market for widgetB that works with widgetA).
Please explain why you think "IBM PC" is a valid definition of a market, but something like "RedHat Linux" or "Apple iPod" is not.
Win32s was used in so few apps that I don't really consider it serious.
Win32s != Win32. Windows 95 was the latter (although it also supported the former).
Windows 95 was quite a bit less stable than Win3.1 in my experience.
Then you were - depending on your perspective - either very luck or very unlucky.
The message queue was a problem in OS/2, but I can only assume that you never used WPS if you think Win95's GUI was comparable.
I used WPS quite a lot. I considered Windows 95's GUI comparable because I - like most people - never used any of the WPS's more advanced functionality for anything more than "playing".
The amount of configurability in the folders, the fact that everything on the desktop was an object (heck, I could set files to open by a specific program without even having to rely on a specific extension). I used WPS for about a year before Win95 came out, and I thought Win95 was absolute crap, ripping off the folders on the desktop idea, but none of the configuration options.
I'm not going to argue the WPS wasn't technically impressive (although there were some utterly braindead ideas, like the standard keyboard shortcuts), I'm just going to make the point that most of that cool stuff was never really leveraged out in the real world, and because of this - *practically speaking* - Windows 95's UI was comparable.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows doesn't have perceived value anymore. OSX leopard ships with every single feature Windows Vista Ultimate has for $129. why does Ultimate cost $300?
Firstly, you must compare the retail Leopard with a Windows upgrade licence, because that is how Leopard is priced. So US$220.
Secondly, there is at least one major feature Vista Ultimate has that OS X lacks - Media Centre. Many people will happily pay the extra $90 for that.
While MS may have made the job harder from Lotus than their own internal developers (hiding part of the API from Lotus, etc.), Lotus also shot themselves in the foot.
Lotus 1-2-3 was (famously) written pretty much completely in assembly. Exactly which part of the "API" do you think Microsoft were hiding ?
In fact, exactly why do you think an OS vendor would be hiding an API *at all* ? It defeats the purpose of selling an OS in the first place.
Stac brought out doublespace- rather than license it, Microsoft stole it, they lost in court, they bought Stac.
Stac's product was called Stacker (I know, because I still have a copy of Stacker 2.0, completely with an ISA compression coprocessor card). Microsoft's product was called Doublespace, later renamed to Drivespace.
The third player in this arena was SuperStor, which was included in DR-DOS 6.0.
The only "scam" Microsoft pulled was getting a look at Stac's source code so they could subsequently design a product that *wouldn't* infringe any of their patents.
Saying that a bit less politely... Stac had a double space product, Microsoft tried to scam them and brought out a very similarly named product, got caught in court, and lost.
There was no naming similarity. Further, by the time MS-DOS 6.0 arrived with DoubleSpace, Stacker was already a well-established and well known piece of software.
This is similar to the "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run". Extremely common during the period but amazingly buried today.
It's not "buried", it was never true outside of the same sort of rabid anti-Microsoft people that congregate on Slashdot today. The very idea is simply too stupid to even pass the laugh test. It would be like Microsoft releasing a version of Vista that (deliberately) didn't run AutoCAD, or Apple releasing a version of OS X that didn't run Photoshop.
Its success caught IBM and other software vendors completely off guard.
It's probably worth noting that it caught Microsoft "off guard" as well (as insiders from the time - eg: Larry Osterman - have since mentioned in interviews and blogs). Microsoft were pouring much more development effort into OS/2 and OS/2 NT (later to become Windows NT). This is also why DOS stagnated badly between 3.3 and 5.0 - because all the effort was going into the two versions of OS/2, which were going to replace everything "real soon now".
Remember, OS2 was jointly developed by both (but more by MS than IBM), and the agreement was for OS2 to replace Windows. MS then took what work they'd done on the project, poured it into a project that would become Windows NT, and essentially stabbed IBM in the back.
There were two completely separate versions of OS/2:
* OS/2 1.x was worked on jointly by IBM and Microsoft. This is the codebase that went on to become OS/2 2.x, Warp, etc. This was the product meant to replace DOS and Windows on low-end, "PCs".
* OS/2 NT was worked on solely by Microsoft. This went on to become Windows NT. It was originally meant to be for high-end "workstations" and workgroup servers and then, eventually, also replace the earlier OS/2 line once hardware was sufficiently powerful.
The "backstabbing" was the surprise (to everyone - Microsoft included) runaway success of Windows 3.0. When that happened, the logical next step was to continue the Windows 3.x line (which went on to become Windows 9x), because that's what everyone was using. IBM didn't want to do that and, hence, IBM and Microsoft had a falling out over it (the infamous "divorce"). IBM took OS/2 1.x and continued its development into 2.x, Warp, then eComstation (while also paying Microsoft licensing fees for the parts of it they owned - most notoriously HPFS). Microsoft to OS/2 NT, renamed it Windows NT and hacked together a 32 bit version of Windows 3.0's Win16 API.
XEROX PARC handed Steves Jobs and Wozniak a virtual monopoly opportunity, and Gates subsequently stole the GUI from them at a time when the courts were not prepared to understand, let alone rectify, the consequences of the outright theft.
Surely you're not referring to that ludicrous "look and feel" lawsuit ?
What's this definition you speak of? Monopoly, from the greek root simply means sole vendor. So by definition you have a monopoly, if you create a market. You possibly meant something different, well, elaborate.
That would be the legal definition of a monopoly. You know, the one that actually matters when you're talking about the law ?
Well, you as a retailer would pretty much have three choices: either you sell MS-DOS (or Windows) with a deep discount, and give MS money even if the customer wanted DR-DOS (or Linux), you sell MS-DOS (or Windows) at it's normal price, and are left by many of your MS-using customers to your competitors who offer the same product for far less, or don't sell MS-DOS (or Windows) at all and lose *all* of your MS-using customers.
But if demand was so high for the "superior" alternatives (as is continually argued), why would losing the business of the (alleged minority) of customers interested in the inferior Microsoft product matter ?
It wouldn't make sense if Microsoft didn't have 90% of the market, but as things stood (and stand), you as a retailer are pretty much dead if you decide to ignore them.
In the timeframe under discussion (when IBM "handed them a monopoly") Microsoft didn't have 90% of the market. They didn't have any% of the market.
They were the only ones selling it?
So, again, you're arguing that basically every company is a monopoly, since they're the only ones who make their own products ?
You do seem to be playing semantics, so I will clarify what seems to be 'confusing' you.
I'm not arguing semantics, I'm trying to highlight the idiocy of arguing a company is a monopoly because they're the only ones selling their own product. That's not what a monopoly is.
Most people use a generalised version of monopoly, when they are actually talking about a majority.
Which *still* doesn't make sense, because when the IBM PC was first released, it was in no way "a majority".
No I'm suggesting that the crap Microsoft pulled to make Word competitive under DOS and then Windows was an unfair advantage that Word Star and Word Perfect didn't get.
Which, again, is utterly irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand, because a) it was half a decade earlier and b) Word for DOS was never a serious competitor to either of those products.
There was no way Word Perfect could compete when "Word for Windows" was basically built on the next generation of Windows technology before it was released. Sherman act violation.
Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Windows 3.1 in 1992. Word for Windows 6.0 (the version we're talking about) was released in 1994. Are you seriously trying to argue, that for 2-4 years, Microsoft was the only vendor capable of writing software for Windows because of "insider informatioN" ?
This is before we even get to the fact that it wasn't until *1997* that the first semi-decent version of Wordperfect for Windows was released, and the well-known attitudes of Wordperfect Corp. itself towards porting Wordperfect to Windows.
But, no. The nearly unfeasible awfulness of Wordperfect for Windows for ~7 years, the utter lack of interest from the vendor to porting Wordperfect to Windows, the massive effort Microsoft spent finding out why people preferred Wordperfect and building a better word processor based on that - all those were irrelevant. It was all down to the legendary "undocumented APIs" that Word used (to do what, exactly, that other programs could not ?).
All browsers were crap back then. Netscape was better than IE. At that time, Winsock was very buggy.
You were in a minority. Again, as evidenced by the facts.
The point was that the OS Microsoft shipped as the desktop of the future was full of 16bit code and hardly used the capabilities of the CPUs at the time.
Windows 95 was shipped as an interim step towards Windows NT, not "the dektop of the future". It was (assuming you didn't have legacy hardware or software) 32 bit pretty much top to bottom, and made use of all the "capabilities" of "the CPUs at the time".
Windows NT was a bloated pig and not only was it slow but required a massive increase in system resources. It was first stated to be the desktop of the future when OS/2 v2.0 was to ship but when it was finally shipped, they pulled back and claimed Chicago was the future desktop.
In the early 90s, Windows NT was targeted as a replacement for Netware (server-side) and high-end workstations (client-side). It was not, at that time, aimed at regular desktops.
It took almost 4 years for Chicago to ship as Windows 95 and it was pathetic compared to what IBM shipped many years earlier.
Except for the things that mattered - better compatibility, performance, developer interest and a vendor that actually appeared to give a damn.
(I find it rather funny you're championing OS/2, an OS that Microsoft played a major part in developing.)
Only by using false promises, bad press and other marketing tactics were they able to hold the market waiting for Windows 95. So while they had thier hands in 32bit OSs, they sucked at implementation.
No, they were chained by customer requirements. In particular, compatibility and hardware capabilities.
A kernel controlled multi tasking and memory managed system which didn't require 4x time the system resources of the current standard desktop PC.
That would have been Windows 95. Or Windows NT4. Or Windows 2000. Or Windows XP.
Next closest candidate would have been OS/2, which had similar hardware requirements to Windows 95 and more than enough of its own problems (eg: SIQ, few native applications, lack of developer interest).
Next option would have been MacOS X 10.1, which arrived in 2001. Although given the atrocious relative performance and high hardware costs, that's hardly being fair to Windows XP.
But they did it almost 10 years after many others had already provided more robust 32bit OS's.
For example ?
And while we are at it, by strong arming the marketing into their inferior technology, they all destroyed the software developement market for cross platform object oriented application frameworks. The 90s saw the elimination of nearly all object oriented application frameworks based on C++. They were replaced with a non compliant C++ compiler and non object oriented application framework called MFC and COM.
Have you considered they might have died because they simply weren't in demand ? "Cross platform" would have to be one of the biggest boondoggles in computing history.
Then you miss a VERY important step, ignoring which, will cloud your view of what REALLY happened in the office market of the late 80s and early 90s.
Are you suggesting the distinct lack of interest in Word for DOS is the reason Word destroyed Wordperfect in the '90s ?
If you are, I think you're going to need to expand on that a bit.
Yes because Netscape charged for their browser and Microsoft gave theirs away for free. This was an almost perfect example of a violation of the sherman act.
Navigator was freely available for download, from ISPs, on magazine covers, in cerial packets, etc, etc. To suggest that any more than a tiny minority of users ever paid for it, or that most users considered it anything but free, is disingenuous in the extreme.
To say nothing of it simply being an example of software that used to an addon becoming an inclusion. Happened with GUIs, task switchers, network stacks, text editors, media players, etc. If that's a violation of the law, then the law is wrong.
Having been in the industry since CP/M, it is a hard job to keep history from being re-written by people who don't know the whole series of events.
Then perhaps you can enlighten us as to why pretty much everyone in the industry considered Navigator 4.0 to be a broken piece of crap, but it was actually a diamond in the rough. Or how Word 6.0 didn't displace Wordperfect by being the Word Processer most people preferred to use. Because, having lived through it happening, I find it difficult to think of two better examples of software becoming dominant due to its merits.
No, only the companies profiting from products virtually no one else produces or sells. The companies that have a significant majority of the market. It is usually only a problem when a company uses its market share to prevent/limit other players in the market. When there are two or more products competing for close to equal parts of the market, they are not monopolies.
So how do you think that applies to the first IBM PC ?
Nobody else is making those claims, either.
Yes, they are. They're insisting Microsoft were "handed a monopoly" by IBM, yet this - quite literally - was impossible (without, as I said, using logic that requires basically every company in the world be a monopoly, to say nothing of an utter lack of legal support).
If you want to be disingenuous in your responses, have fun, but don't delude yourself into thinking anyone is either fooled or entertained. As soon as you want to participate in the adult conversation by responding to what people say rather than your deliberate mischaracterizations, you'll probably get more responses, and may even learn something about either the history of the computer market or basic social skills.
Then perhaps, in all your wisdom - and since no-one else has managed it - you might be able to explain which market Microsoft was supposedly a monopoly of when the first PC was released in 1981, which court made that judgement, and how the rather phenomenal achievement of going from not even being in a market, to dominating, could have happened overnight. Then, when present with an argument that isn't just blatantly biased whining, I might be able to muster up a different response.
We are talking about history not current events. Word for DOS.
No, we're talking about:
I can't think of one, that's right, not one product of theirs that won on its own merit. Office and IE are the two most obvious examples.We are in no way, shape, or form, talking about Word for DOS. Two aspects of the discussion ("winning" and "office") preclude it from being relevant.
You and I remember history different. I remember IE being worse than Netscape.
Which does not change the facts. IE4 took ca. 50% of the browser market off Navigator before "integration" could have possible been a significant factor. That means a *lot* of people thought it was better and deliberately sought it out. Software reviews from the time also greatly favoured IE.
Indeed, it's a struggle to take anyone who remembers Navigator 4.0 as anything other than an unstable, bloated piece of crap, seriously.
Because if I buy application to run on an IBM PC compatible platform [...]
Your assumption is broken. In the timeframe under discussion, there was no "IBM PC compatible platform" (in context, the term makes no more sense than "the Apple Macintosh platform"). There was the IBM PC and there were various other "personal computers" like the Apple ][. The market was "personal computers", and Microsoft did not, by any measure, have a monopoly in it.
This product was superior. The proof lies in the fact that MS rushed a DOS 5.0 product to market after years of not upgrading what was widely held to be a stinking POS, MS-DOS 4.0.
The main reason DOS stagnated after 3.3, and why 5.0 had to be rushed to market, was because Microsoft was busily working on OS/2 and NT. There was never supposed to be a DOS 5.0 (or even 4.0) because it was meant to be replaced by OS/2. But customer demand - much like it did in the late 90s with Windows 98 - was for DOS, not OS/2.
They did. That's why the contracts "dried up" instead of "never existed in the first place." MS made it so that the computer manufacturer had to pay for MS-DOS even if the end customer wanted DR-DOS.
Only for vendors who also wanted to sell MS-DOS with the deep discounts offered by per-processor licensing.
This is the same circular logic that is used to justify why so few PCs are sold with Linux, and it makes no more sense here than it does there.
One thing I don't know is how much of the market you have to control to be a monopoly.
Becoming a monopoly does not happen at a particularly market share - indeed, market share is not really a factor.
In fact, one of the rather large problems with antitrust law is that a company has no way of knowing whether or not it is a monopoly until a court has ruled it as one.
But remember, being a monopoly doesn't have to be an issue, its only a problem if you use that power to eliminate competitors or to build a monopoly in another market.
No, you have to worry if you "abuse" your monopoly. Given that many perfectly normal business practices become "abusive" once you are a monopoly, it is - for all intents and purposes - impossible be a monopoly and not "abuse" it.
The simple fact is there has never been any point where you have not been able to easily buy a functionally equivalent alternative (where the "functions" are broad concepts like "spreadsheets" rather than specific applications) to a Windows PC. Which is I why I don't consider Microsoft to have _ever_ had a monopoly.
They had to consciously break backwards compatibility, Windows's main reason for dominance, to fix fundamental architecture problems.
There is nothing "fundamentally" different in Vista's architecture vs earlier versions of Windows NT.
Someone much wiser than me once said (and I don't know who, perhaps someone could fill that part in) "it's impossible to turn ten dollars into twenty dollars, but it's inevitable to turn ten million dollars into twenty million dollars".
Although dozens of people who have won hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in lotteries, but are bankrupt only a few years later, would suggest that comment is less than 100% accurate.
The only advantage Windows 3.x and 95 had over their contemporary competitors -- Mac OS and OS/2 -- was that it could run MS-DOS applications better than anything else out there.
For an Operating System, running the applications people want to use is pretty much the single most important feature.
You also forgot the price aspect. A PC running Windows was a lot less than a PC running OS/2 or MacOS (the former due to higher hardware requirements and software cost, the latter due to Apple).
Think about it. the 386 and 486 were 80s era CPUs but where 32bit. Microsoft released Windows 95 in late 1995 as a crappy 16/32bit OS which still relied on DOS under it for much of it code. 1995!
Firstly, Windows 95 - assuming no legacy drivers and software - relied on DOS for little more than a bootloader (much like Windows 3.1 and 3.11 before it).
Secondly, Microsoft were developing and releasing 32 bit OSes well before Windows 95, including OS/2, Xenix and Windows NT.
Microsoft to this day differentiates between a client OS and a server OS and that is ridiculous.
It is a very common distinction, made by numerous OS vendors both past and present.
What year/millennium was it that the powerhouse that is Microsoft had a proper operating system for the masses?
Without knowing what you mean by "proper OS" and "for the masses", a question impossible to answer. However, by any consistent definition of them, they were pretty much the first to do so.
I recall 2. I had the choice of shelling out $175 for DR's CPM/86 or accepting PC-DOS which came with the machine for free. The other one you referred to I'm sure wasn't free. Now if that doesn't constitute a monopoly for MS, it's because you're playing with the meaning of words.
No, it's because I'm not silly enough to use logic that dictates basically every single company in the world is a "monopoly", and any company choosing to sell their product cheaper is "abusing their monopoly".
You almost by definition have a monopoly over a market you create. If you are the only person making widgetA then you have a monopoly on that market, even if you were the first one to come up with the idea to make widgetA.
So, you're basically arguing that pretty much every company in the world is a monopoly ?
There is nothing wrong with being a monopoly. What is wrong is using that power to lock other people out of the same market (or related markets... like the market for widgetB that works with widgetA).
Please explain why you think "IBM PC" is a valid definition of a market, but something like "RedHat Linux" or "Apple iPod" is not.
Win32s was used in so few apps that I don't really consider it serious.
Win32s != Win32. Windows 95 was the latter (although it also supported the former).
Windows 95 was quite a bit less stable than Win3.1 in my experience.
Then you were - depending on your perspective - either very luck or very unlucky.
The message queue was a problem in OS/2, but I can only assume that you never used WPS if you think Win95's GUI was comparable.
I used WPS quite a lot. I considered Windows 95's GUI comparable because I - like most people - never used any of the WPS's more advanced functionality for anything more than "playing".
The amount of configurability in the folders, the fact that everything on the desktop was an object (heck, I could set files to open by a specific program without even having to rely on a specific extension). I used WPS for about a year before Win95 came out, and I thought Win95 was absolute crap, ripping off the folders on the desktop idea, but none of the configuration options.
I'm not going to argue the WPS wasn't technically impressive (although there were some utterly braindead ideas, like the standard keyboard shortcuts), I'm just going to make the point that most of that cool stuff was never really leveraged out in the real world, and because of this - *practically speaking* - Windows 95's UI was comparable.