My apologies. Rereading my point, I didn't differentiate between the building of MS's monopoly and the maintaining of MS's monopoly. I agree that the way MS acts now (by limiting interoperability) is clearly detrimental to anyone else who wants to enter the market.
However, I stand by my statement that Gates had a lot to do with how well PC/MS -DOS operated on a variety of hardware. There are a number of anecdotes in "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" (a less-than-flattering book by a former employee) about how Gates bamboozled both the hardware and software vendors.
Even given our disagreement over that, we can both agree that he was extremely lucky in being in the right place at the right time.
As much as you may bash the MS monopoly now, you're forgetting that the MS monopoly was built on improving interoperability, not limiting it. It was a masterful display of bullshitting on Bill's part to get hardware and software vendors to come together so that MS's stuff ran on damn-near everything and damn-near everything ran on MS's stuff.
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(hushed announcer's voice) We've secretly switched John's websurfing app to Firefox. Let's see if he notices....
My apologies. Rereading my point, I didn't differentiate between the building of MS's monopoly and the maintaining of MS's monopoly. I agree that the way MS acts now (by limiting interoperability) is clearly detrimental to anyone else who wants to enter the market. However, I stand by my statement that Gates had a lot to do with how well PC/MS -DOS operated on a variety of hardware. There are a number of anecdotes in "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" (a less-than-flattering book by a former employee) about how Gates bamboozled both the hardware and software vendors. Even given our disagreement over that, we can both agree that he was extremely lucky in being in the right place at the right time.
As much as you may bash the MS monopoly now, you're forgetting that the MS monopoly was built on improving interoperability, not limiting it. It was a masterful display of bullshitting on Bill's part to get hardware and software vendors to come together so that MS's stuff ran on damn-near everything and damn-near everything ran on MS's stuff.