I read a history of MS once and IIRC they were kind of forced
intoexpanding their business. It's been many years since I read it but I
think IBM (perhaps) was looking for an OS and after being turned away
initially by MS they eventually came back and at that point, MS found a
small company nearby who had created DOS - they bought DOS for something
like $80K and it became MS-DOS which they then sold all over the world
- and the PC was born (in a very condensed version) ;-)
I may be wrong -- but I think that's what happened -
LarryT
On 7/21/2013 4:27 PM, Peter Frederick wrote:
With no "consumer dependency" they will HAVE no market.
The normal result of a monopoly, eventually people learn to get around
it, and the organization dies -- no new ideas.
Intel monopolized the PC chip market for something like 40 years, with
a few exceptions, and is no no longer able to innovate anything -- all
their corporate energy was used defending their "turf". I'm amused
that they think they can "high end" the market and survive. How are
they gonna pay dividends to stock options to all those stockholders if
they sell six supercomputers a year? Now that other designs have
supplanted the x86 architecture (which really DOES date to the 1970s)
they have nothing to compete with.
RIP Intel.
Microsoft has always produce crappy products, I don't know why anyone
would think their hardware would be any better than their software.
They have made their money by appropriating other peoples work for at
least 30 years, and it's way to late to "innovate" there, too.
MS is, and has always been, a derivative company, they derive their
products from other peoples ideas and software (when they don't steal
it outright). So long as Ballmer is in charge, this won't change no
matter what re-organizations they try, they need to toss the entire
company culture out and start again.
Improvements in computers these days are very small compared to a few
years ago. We now have a 5 year life cycle for desktops and laptops
-- there is now real change in operation. We got stuck with the "new"
Office this time around, which bites -- all sorts of annoying changes
that do nothing but irritate me, there was NOTHING wrong with the menu
system, it's not improved by making it harder to see, less organized,
and piling all sorts of different functions onto one gigantic
toolbar. I want to see my document, not all the crap some teenaged
programmer wants to show off. This means there are not productivity
improvements from replacing computers at work -- the only thing that
works better now on my brand new one is startup, which is a function
of some marginal changes in the OS, not anything else. I use it for
email, word processing, and searching for products and parts on the
Internet, hardly heavy duty use. My instrument computers acquire data
at 15k Hz as a general rule, and the data process is trivial (although
glacially slow due to the shit software, again dating from the 70's,
just in software instead of slow hardware). Some of them use IEEE 488
bus connections, you see I don't need speed!
MS drove all the other competitors out of business (think
WordPerfect), and now they don't have anyone to steal code from, so
they are history. Long overdue if you ask me, all that progaming
talent could have been used to make life better, not make me suffer
with crap software.
Everybody thinks they are going to become a multitrillionare by
writing trivial software or designing a computer chip. This stuff is
all commodity, we should not have been paying anywhere near as much
for it as we have been. One of the sources of our current economic
problems.
Peter
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