Did "unethical" behavior help keep Bill Gates rich?

Merlin,

The hardware and software from Intel and Microsoft were open to developers and manufacturers. You didn't need anyone's permission to write or invent for their platform. This forced all of the other brands to open up more. Apple controlled what could or couldn't be in their products. Much of the lower quality from Microsoft was due letting any hardware or software producer create for their platform - I remember what a hell it was matching drivers and getting them to work. Actually, they didn't "let" third parties do this, they made it open so it could go no other way. Apple retained control. The result is that Microsoft/Intel had lower quality and took longer to catch up. But there are software and hardware for MS/Intel that will do ANYTHING. In the end they will surpass Apples quality while retaining market share. Apple has partially caught up on the breadth of functionality. But open is way better - it teaches the market to invent effective methods to make effective standards so that even a mediocre software developer will create product that will interface well.

Think about the standard that lets any 110 volt item plug into an American wall socket. Anyone can invent for that standardized interface. What if you had to get General Electric's acceptance and share your profits with them?

I see Google and T-Mobile taking on Apple and AT&T in the same way. The iPhone is typical Apple - a really high quality expression of cutting edge, but very expensive and somewhat closed (but not nearly as bad as they used to be). Google is much more open with the phone they are doing. I have the iPhone and love it, but I expect that that Google's will surpass the iPhone in a few years.

Post 21

Monday, February 8, 2010 - 8:34pm

It doesn't require being a former Amiga owner to notice just how utterly awful Windoze in fact is, although it helps.

I notice that, finally, Windoze has something vaguely similar to the Amiga's "Assign" command in W7.

This was one of the most useful system functions ever. Even today, when I move stuff around on my XP Professional system at work, I'm constantly having to relink hundreds of graphics in an InDesign document, as just one example. And each of my major pieces of software has a different idea of the history attribute of files. One program wants to invariably go back to the last directory used for everything. Another separates new files from old files, Save As from Save, so that you have to double check every time you save a file, lest you lose track of it altogether and then have to us the XP search, which fails about 50% of the time, requiring a cold reboot. I could go on for hours about silly, inane, utterly mind-bogglingly STOOPID and criminally irresponsible behaviors of every Windoze OS that I've used so far.

On the Amiga, if you had fonts or graphics or whatever scattered around on a CD, a floppy, an external HD, whatever, you could - ON THE FLY WITHOUT REBOOTING - simply "Assign," as in "Assign add df0:fonts fonts:." Then, every program running would see Fonts: as a logical device, indestinguishable from a HD partition or a floppy, and now including the new directory on the df0: floppy. Problem solved.

This was SO handy. It made me sick in 1991, when I started using a Windose 3.1 system to see all the natural shortcuts that weren't there, how you couldn't just grab a block of text from a folder display of filenames - even today! How you couldn't instantly create an alias to automatize simple tasks. How you couldn't create macro programs using REXX. How you couldn't, for example, write simple database programs in the CLI itself. How you couldn't format a floppy without the whole system coming to a virtual standstill. Yuck!

MicroSoft was simply copying their mentor, IBM. IBM was notorious for vaporware and stuff that never quite worked right for the first few decades of their existence. They would simply LIE about new features allegedly coming in their newest minicomputer, and people would fall for it over and over. IBM's actual, for real, sales slogan was "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM."

MicroSloth simply adopted IBM's predatory tactics and convinced the ignorant general public that every computer other than the PC, and every OS other than MS/DOS or Windoze was doomed. Why? Because everyone else was also convinced, and no matter how much better the other platforms and software was, if it was going to die and be orphaned, with little or expensive support, etc.

This was perhaps the first case of negative viral marketing, in which MS barely even bothered to address the issue of actual performance or quality, but rather snowballed the impression that they were unstoppable into reality. Ok, I take that back. MS was never intelligent enough to have innovated anything like that. Jack Tramiel did it first - VIC20 vs. TI99 - and second - C64 vs. Atari 800 and almost third - Atari ST vs. Amiga. In each case he deliberately used scare tactics and false advertising to damage the reputation of far superior products.

My guess is that MicroSoft simply copied from the behavior of IBM, and Tramiel. The result was that it didn't matter that I could do 3D rendered hi-resolution animation on my Amiga in 1989, which cost less than half the price of a PC, or that I could run two dozen programs simultaneously without appreciable slowdown, or that the Amiga was simply a joy to use, powered by thousands of fanatically loyal programmers. So long as the majority of the ignorant market was convinced that the bad guys were going to win, that prejudice was doomed to become reality.

We would be fifteen years past where we are today in computing, meaning equivalent gains in computationally intensive jobs such as protein folding, and ten thousand other problems, meaning 20 years closer to solutions to problems such as cancer, AIDS, or aging in general, had it not been for MicroSoft. I could today set up a 1993 40Mhz Amiga 4000 to look and feel like a 2010 3GHz PC, and carry it off for quite a while. That's just SAD!

Post 22

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - 2:35pm

Steve,

Apple has never really restricted developers from writing for their Mac OS. Instead, they dictated to developers as to the quality of the code (in return for Apple support). It is fairly obvious today that Apple is actively encouraging development for their various platforms, and that they know that the more people developing, the more useful (and more units sold) their products will be. And yet, they do still make an effort to steer developers into making 'higher quality' products by rolling our their own 'developer packs' - special tools to help developers.

When I first got interested in computers and programming in the mid-seventies, there was Apple - with maybe several hundred thousand programs already written - and ... well there was really only Apple*. I tend to credit the rise of Microsoft's OS more to the fact that they hitched a ride with IBM - whose name was universally identified with computers. The venerable Apple II (wish I hadn't given away my old one) had already penetrated the small business market. However the broader market for computers had not yet been created. They were still seen by many as a hobbyist's toy.

That changed with the advent of the TRS-80 (popularly known as the Trash-80) by Radio Shack. Radio Shack (and it was a truly awful machine compared to Apple) was the first to market computers as something the average person (or businessperson) could use and benefit from.

I worked for a major export consortium at the time, which required extensive crunching of numbers and statistical analysis, and could not even get them to think of computers until Radio Shack finally made them (the idea, not their ugly, boxy machine) look attractive. And then, they only became interested when IBM came out with its first "small business machine" (I forget the model number). At a time when Apple had a typewriter-sized computer that worked with full-sized color monitors and boasted a full 64K(!) of memory, and a basic OS that anyone could write code for, IBM offered a 48k desk-and-a-half sized computer, that would only run a built in five inch green-screen monitor, that no one could program unless buying the optional $6000 IBM OS. The Apple II sold back then for somewhere between $1200 to $1600 new. IBM's behemoth sold for $16,000 plus $6000 for the operating system (and bring your own furniture movers). Needless to say, IBM sold very few. A year and a half later they came back with a more realistic product, using the OS Bill Gate's was astute enough to buy the rights to, adapt, and "license" back to IBM.

jt

*I should say that I learned Basic on a Sun Microsystems computer, far better than the Apple II at the time, but still only sold as a kit, and therefore occupying an even more limited market.

(Edited by Jay Abbott on 2/09, 2:38pm)

Post 23

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - 6:18am