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

[Jack Bertram]

* 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.  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.

* While innovation is good, it's generally "pull" innovation and not
"push" innovation that succeeds - i.e., innovation that meets customer
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 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.

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

jack
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