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

[Bruce Richardson]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 03:59:34PM +0000, Jack wrote:
> * Christian Smith <csmith at micromuse.com> [050303 15:36]:
> > On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Jack Bertram wrote:
> > 
> > >
> > >> Without such an insatiable parasite hooked onto it it might also have
> > >> been quite a lot better.
> > >
> > >Whatever.  Do you have any justification for this?
> > 
> > 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.


> 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.

When the clone manufacturers appeared, they almost all licensed DOS
because they wanted to show how compatible their machines were.  Again,
the only people this really upset were the people marketing DOS
alternatives (C-DOS etc) and even then, there were some of those that
were clearly superior but ran up against early MS aggression.

So MS established a monopoly position with a crap product when most
people were not looking.  This suddenly became very important when
people tried to raise the PC platform to the next level, because MS were
able to use their position to destroy competitors like GEM and DR-DOS.

> 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.  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.

> 
> 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.

> 
> Post-1992ish, when Windows and Office became increasingly entangled and
> monopolistic, the story changes, as monopolistic markets are less
> competitive.

Windows was where the monopoly became much more entrenched, because many
of Microsoft's competitors ignored it and were wiped out.  It didn't
start there, though.

-- 
Bruce

I see a mouse.  Where?  There, on the stair.  And its clumsy wooden
footwear makes it easy to trap and kill.  -- Harry Hill
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