[Lancaster] [Fwd: Re: Twitter]

[andy baxter]

Martyn Welch wrote:
> Yes and these boxes weren't usually in peoples homes, they were 
> corporate/academic machines. It wasn't until the internet got into 
> peoples homes that it really took off to the point it has today.
>
> My point is that this transition between "academic/military tool" to 
> "mass market medium" was greatly aided by Microsoft's massive 
> installation base in peoples homes. Had the home OS market been highly 
> fragmented (as with the Unices of the time) it would have been a lot 
> harder for companies such as Demon to distribute TCP/IP stacks on floppy 
> (from a pure capacity standpoint if not from the engineering cost of 
> providing TCP/IP stacks for may rather than essentially 1 OS).
>
>   
How about putting it the other way around? Suppose that instead of the 
internet being developed by the military and academics (i.e. publicly 
funded institutions with an interest in sharing information between each 
other), what we had now had been developed by a company like Microsoft - 
either them or another company with the same kind of business practices, 
culture and commercial agendas. E.g. say that (at the point where this 
story departed from real history), Microsoft had had the imagination or 
resources to team up with one or more big telecommunications companies 
in the US and develop something similar to TCP/IP which ended up 
sidelining what we now know as the technical basis of the internet. 
Would it have been better, worse, just different, or some combination of 
the above?

I could just have an easy go at MS by saying that it would likely have 
been buggy, slow and patent-ridden, but I'm also wondering if we would 
have seen things like DRM and some kind of per packet payment mechanism 
built in from the start. And then this might have changed the way that 
online culture developed from that technical base.

I.e. the point isn't really about Microsoft as the one and only Great 
Satan of the computer industry, more about how the culture and political 
situation of an organisation affects the way that it imagines and 
creates the future of technology through what it does.

andy