Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 08:42:54 -0400 From: "Gray, David" <David_W_Gray@tvratings.com> To: "'FreeBSD Chat List'" <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: How did the MSFT monopoly start? Message-ID: <01D4D419B1A4D111A30400805FE65B13070AC3D5@nmrusdunsx1.nielsenmedia.com>
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I was working in a large (then) electronics co. in the early 80's... There were two pivotal events in the Microsoft saga. One was DOS 3. The other was Windows 3. Let me elaborate... The company I was working for built products for the IBM plug-compatible mainframe market (as a sideline, actually.) One of our products was a 327X compatible display system. It had a completely proprietary communication scheme, so it was really only compatible at the channel attachment level. In the early 80's came the IBM pc. It took the market by storm (never underestimate the power of the cachet of those three letters). It was decided the latest version of our display was going to be PC compatible (sort of.) The problem was that the design people started with *too* clean of a slate. They built the thing with DR-DOS in mind. It worked rather well, but everybody wanted MSDOS, so they could run FOO. So, we licensed DOS from Microsoft, and rolled our own. Oh, did I mention we weren't *too* compatible? That was deliberate - this company had an announced strategy of locking customers in. And we even sold a few of these little things, with our very own DOS 2.2. Then came 3.0. Microsoft announced that there would be no licensing of customised versions. Period. The same disk that booted the IBM PC had better boot your box. Well, our little semi-compatible didn't. There was a considerable amount of re-engineering done (in things like the hardware interrupt structure.) It never worked well. And since none of the 'good stuff' ran on DR-DOS, that product was pretty much limited to its secondary roll - an IBM semi-compatible terminal. And was killed, far too long afterwards for the good of the company. The second event was Windows 3. Up till that time, Windows was a curiosity. I actually saw Windows 2 bundled with a scanner, but thats the only place I'd seen it. Windows 3 coincided with the general availablity of the '386. This was the combination needed to make Windows practical (for some values of practical.) [Oh, and it had the prettiest Solitaire game you ever did see. I firmly believe that game sold more windows 3.0 packages than all the salesman in Microsoft.] Important to remember, is that Microsoft is the only one in a position to come out with this at this time. Win 3 ran on top of DOS, using interfaces that Microsoft never published. Anyone trying to compete, had to deal with this huge hurdle (and things haven't changed much, have they?). Windows 3 upped the ante in the level of complexity a program needed to interface with it. And since it was, at the time, the only way to really *use* the capabilities of the newer processors, everyone wrote thier software to those complex APIs. And a vicious cycle was started. Microsoft has never let things like 'ethics' get in the way of making money, and they had the only game in town, at the beginning. Unlike IBM, they saw the danger in being too open (IBM figured it out, but by the time they tried pushing the Micro-Channel machines out the door, the market had grown past them.) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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