[Gllug] IA32? IA64? x86...

[John Winters]

On Thu, 2002-10-03 at 13:21, Adam Bower wrote:
> Alain Williams wrote:
> > Marketing, marketing, also
> > 	VHS vs Betamax
> > 	M$ Windows vs *nix
> > 	...
> 
> I was under the impression that neither of those was to do with 
> marketing, I thought the main reason VHS started to win over Betamax was 
> because Betamax was more expensive than VHS and also the proliferation 
> of pr0n movies on VHS. The reason for M$ market dominance isn't really 
> marketing either, it was that Unix systems in the 1980's cost many many 
> times more to purchase than a x86 compatible and that you could run 
> visicalc etc. on the x86 machines.

This I'd have to disagree with.  The relative cheapness of a 1980s PC
compared to a Unix system is an explanation of why people went for PCs,
but not of why they went for a Microsoft OS rather than the alternatives
available.  No, Microsoft achieved market domination purely by
marketing.  They arranged that what people got by default was MS-DOS
(and then Windows) and people just bought it because they didn't know
they had a choice.  They weren't even really aware they were buying it.

Back in the 80's Bill Gates visited Acorn and said, "Why don't you put
MS-DOS on your machines?"  The way the Acorn guys tell it they nearly
fell off their chairs laughing.  MS-DOS was just so crude by comparison
to Acorn's own offering.  What the Acorn people didn't understand is
that what matters is not the quality of your product but how well you
market it.  They never mastered marketing and the rest is history.

Microsoft is not primarily a software company - it's a marketing company
and the rest is incidental.  When they are faced with a problem (e.g.
the perceived (and actual) instability of NT4) they first attempt to
address it by marketing.  Only when all else has failed will they try a
software solution.  Thus they were perfectly happy with Windows 3.x
until they saw they were in danger of losing market share to a better
product (OS/2).  Suddenly they found they could do better and along came
W95.  ("Better" is a relative term.)  Similarly, they tried for as long
as they could to persuade the market that NT4 was stable enough for
serious use but eventually they were forced to do something about it and
along came 2000.  However much (or little) one may like it, there's no
doubt that 2000 is a big improvement on NT4 in terms of stability.

John

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