| | What I've read so far seems close to the mark, although I would hope that Rand would have been up to speed enough on how and why MicroSloth got to where it is to recognize that Gates is no Hank Rearden. Would Rearden have gone to City councils and suggested that they buy only Rearden metal for public works projects, in return for nice Rearden metal railings for their homes? The OC Board of Education passed a resolution in the '80's, when the Amiga was outselling the Mac and offered a far better educational platform for half the price, that required all the public schools in the OC to buy solely IBM (MsDos/Windows) or Apple compatible (including the then antiquated Apple II series). Even the fact that the Amiga could run both Mac and PC software under both software and hardware emulators was considered irrelevant.
The systems' cost alone that this mandated was twice that of the Amiga per computer and the cost in terms of actual usability and thus educational impact was several times that.
Or, there was the little episode of Reagan's embargo on memory chips, which he accused the Japanese of "dumping" on the American market. Coincidentally, the machines that could actually use and had a need for the expanded memory were the new generation Macs, the Amiga and the Atari ST. The IBM PC and compatibles were on the verge of being wiped out by these vastly superior systems, but the embargo more than doubled the cost of the chips, giving the MicroSoft market the breathing space to survive with their primitive, kludgy machines.
And then there was the lone customs official who declared that the Amiga 2000 was a cheap PC clone, and thus blocked the machines at the dock for about half a year on his sole authority. This was hardly an honest mistake, as anyone could immediately see upon firing up any Amiga that the OS was FAR more advanced, and completely distinct, from anything that Microsoft or IBM had come up with.
But this was a severe blow to Commodore, one of many that had nothing to do with the quality of the machine or its software base or the millions of happy users. At every stage of the rise and fall of the Amiga, there were genuine villians and crooks, including the financiers behind the company, who used every dirty political and insider trading trick to milk the product and ultimately destroy the company. In this unhappy tale, it is easy to see which side Gates and Microsoft partake of.
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