[Gllug] Re: Gates to get Knighthood!!! (Andrew Halliwell)

[Jack Bertram]

* Bruce Richardson <itsbruce at uklinux.net> [050303 16:42]:
> On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 03:59:34PM +0000, Jack wrote:
> > * Christian Smith <csmith at micromuse.com> [050303 15:36]:
> > > For a start, we may not have been stuck with a single tasking, polling
> > > synchronous IO operating system mess that was MS-DOS until 1995! DOS held
> > > the industry back to 1983 PC standards for over ten years. In that time,
> > > for example, SUN had moved from 68K and VME bus, through i386 with ISA,
> > > and SPARC on VME, SBUS and finally PCI, and gone from a 32-bit platform to
> > > 64-bit platform, with barely a hiccup by comparison. Similar story from
> > > HP, DEC, IBM and all the other vendors who's operating systems actually
> > > isolated the programs from the hardware, and all without 8.3 filename
> > > restrictions!
> > 
> > While I agree that DOS was limited in crucial respects, I think there
> > are a number of interesting points here:
> > 
> > * None of these other systems were able to compete against DOS, despite
> > their technology superiority.
> 
> Erm, that's effectively gibberish.  First of all, Smithy was comparing
> architectures (Sun hardware versus Intel).  Secondly, for the time frame
> that DOS was the main OS on Intel PCs, the quoted architectures and
> Intel weren't in the same market, so competition is not an issue.

Well, Christian was responding to my comment that there wasn't any
evidence to suggest that we'd have something better without DOS.  He
pointed out that there were better things, and I agreed but said it was
irrelevant because they weren't competing against DOS.

> > This is despite the presence of competing
> > operating systems (OS/2, CP/M) on the same architecture, and at least in
> > the period we're talking about (pre-1992, say) it's difficult to accuse
> > Microsoft of having a monopoly position.  After all, there were DOS
> > clones available in those days too!  So I'm not convinced that
> > Microsoft's "parasitism" was responsible for holding back the industry,
> > nor that if Microsoft hadn't existed the industry would have progressed
> > faster.
> 
> Then I urge you to reconsider.  The thing is, almost nobody in the early
> PC industry cared about DOS.  DOS was a piece of crap that barely
> started a machine up.  Anthing useful was done by individual programs.
> So nobody really cared that MS had an exclusive contract with IBM,
> because they didn't care about DOS.  They wanted to run Visicalc.

I agree.  But why did the vendors write software to run on DOS rather
than the alternatives?  For a number of reasons, but the most important
were (a) they didn't have sophisticated operating system needs and (b) DOS
was cheap and ubiquitous.  So Microsoft were selling an operating system
that was fit for purpose - while competitors were, arguably,
overengineering their OSes.

> > needs (or uncovers latent needs, if you believe in these).  Given that
> > noone bought these other technologies, arguing that they are superior is
> > like arguing that Betamax was superior.  True from a technical sense,
> > but too expensive to have any real-world impact, and hence not superior
> > in the marketplace - which is the acid test.
> 
> You are assuming a perfect market, with perfectly informed customers,
> honest vendors and cool, rational thought all round.  The reality was a
> very new industry where very little was obvious to most people and where
> at least one vendor was doing its best to FUD and starve (economically)
> the competition into oblivion.
> 
> For example, GEM running on C-DOS offered a very usable GUI with
> co-operative multitasking and an easy development language (Locomotive
> Basic) on 8086 machines, long before MS was capable of offering anything
> comparable.

I remember running GEM and Windows 1.0.  The contrast was staggering.

>   The fact that that combination failed wasn't exclusively
> because of MS' monopolistic tactics but it had a hell of a lot to do
> with it.

Well, I'd argue that at this point in time, it was MS's competitive
tactics, not monopolistic tactics.  And I'm not assuming a perfect
market, far from it. If it were a perfect market, then they would not
have been able to turn their competitive advantage into a monopoly.

> > You could argue, then, that the ability of Microsoft to contribute to
> > the creation of a dynamic market which addressed customers' needs was
> > one of the things which has forced the progress of technology, rather
> > than a limiting factor on it.
> 
> But this is an argument made more often in ignorance than awareness.

I think it's difficult to prove or disprove (at least when looking
at the time period before Windows).  I do think (and I'm not accusing
you of this) that the "evil Microsoft" argument is often made more
becaues it's fashionable than because it's right.  Just because
Microsoft has broken the law and is a monopoly doesn't mean that
everything it has done throughout all its history has not been worth
doing.  I've been arguing for a balanced viewpoint which acknowledges
Microsoft's contribution to computing history as well as its negative
effect on it.

cheers,
jack
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