[Gllug] Re: Gates to get Knighthood!!!

[John Winters]

> I really didn't want to get into a war over this one BUT....
>
> Before Bill gates came along and started offering (sorry licensing - and
> that's very important if you know his history) Dos to IBM (and just for
> that
> hat I used to work for IBM and wasn't keen on the company at all.), IBM
> did
> not have anything sensible to run on their hardware.

Err, no.  The original IBM-PC came with a choice of 3 operating system. 
Microsoft just did the best job of ensuring their option was pre-loaded.

>  Dos -> Windows etc
> really sold that hardware, and probably made people want to clone it. Thus
> cheap commodity PCs became easily available.

Again, not true.  People were into cloning PCs long, long before Windows
arrived on the scene.  The actual killer application which created a
market for clones and dictated how close a clone they had to be was Lotus
1-2-3.  Not a Microsoft product at all.

> Yes maybe someone else would have got there BUT they didn't

But without Bill Gates getting there, someone else undoubtedly would have.
 Whether they'd have been quite as into iffy business practices as he is
is open to debate, but the fact remains we would still have had commodity
PCs and users would probably have had a lot less pain if we'd had a
technology company (instead of a marketing company) making the most money.

John

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