[Gllug] Re: knighthood

[Christopher Currie]

Astonished that no-one in this discussion of competition has made the point 
that DOS, and later Windows, was *bundled with the computer*.

 Gates learned about bundling long before MS-DOS - with his bundled MBasic 
interpreters on turnkey proprietary systems like the TRS-80 from the late 
70s. Almost every company went for his Basic, which rapidly became the 
standard on the VHS principle. It was sold in flexibly sized versions for 4K, 
8K, 12K etc. ROMs, and was on the whole a good product. Good marketing there, 
i agree, Jack.

(there was also a competitive version for CP/M; that MBasic was, in my view, a 
genuinely better product than CBasic. If DR had bundled CBasic 'free' with  
CP/M, they might have kept Gates out of that market.  After M$ got a near 
monopoly on BASIC, it started to release knowingly defective upgrades; by 
then they didn't have to worry about the competition, knowing that 
programmers would have to adapt their work to M$'s defects).

The later products- OS's etc-were not better than their competitors, but it is 
very difficult to compete with something bundled with the computer -- there 
will be always a segment of the consumer market which can't be bothered to 
try anything else, and a segment of the OEM market which goes for what seems 
predominant, so the positive feedback effects of that will guarantee you a 
success even with a merely adequate product (and with its security weaknesses 
Windows is now not even an adequate product; but given enough FUD it doesn't 
need to be). 

The original dominance of the IBM PC was due to FUD - lots of journalists 
persuading companies that IBM had 'made the microcomputer respectable'. The 
original spec was functionally inferior to a lot of the competition: 8-bit 
micros had as much functionality with lower price, and other 16-bit micros 
had full 8086's (not the cut-down 8088). But because 'you couldn't go wrong 
buying IBM', companies began buying it in large numbers. It was more 
affordable in the US than in Europe, and better marketed there at first.

What's more, it seriously damaged the UK software industry, since it wasn't 
officially released over here until 18 months after its US launch. By then, 
US software writers for it had a huge lead.

The effect of the introduction of the IBM PC was not to reduce PC prices - as 
one poster claimed - but to peg them for a while at a higher level. People 
got used to the idea that each technical improvement brought more bangs for 
the buck but not fewer bucks for the bang, and prices declined from the new 
high level much more slowly than before. One has to compare that with the 
massive fall in cost of a minimal computer system between say 1971 and 1981.

In the early 80s there was a full range of low-priced micros from 100-pound 
Sinclair ZX models, through Atoms (200) etc., and BBC micros (300-450), 
PETappleTandy systems at 600 to 1,500+ depending on configuration, to CP/M 
and CP/M-86 systems around 1,500 to 2,500. The IBM PC was above that for a 
2-drive system. The clone machines had bought standard prices for a fairly 
basic working system, by then with 10 or 20 meg hard disk, down to around 
1,000 by the late 80s (though Amstrad PCs were less and Amstrad 
wordprocessors less still), and they remained at that level till quite 
recently, though of course the 'standard' kept improving.

MS-DOS did not keep operating systems at early 80s standards for several 
years; it actually reduced them -- some 8-bit operating systems in the late 
70s and early 80s had much better levels of security, password protection, 
disk space utilisation, batch script management, multiple users etc.  Unix, 
of course, was a different market. But CP/M had also been pretty cr*ppy and 
CP/M 86 was an easy target after MSDOS 2.0 came out.

Some products for GEM were better than their later equivalents for Windows 3 
(Ventura 2 is an example; I typeset large books with it on an 8088 in 1991-2; 
the Windows 3 version was much bulkier, slower to use even on a 386, & had a 
narrower text view).

*end of historical rant*

Christopher

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