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BS. If you can write an OS, you can write an ethernet card driver.
Microsoft's alleged crimes have very little to do with why it has a lock on
the OS market. The main reason for this lock is that some OS has to be
standard. MicroSoft was in the right places at the right times with the
right moves early on in the game and got overwhelming market share to the
point where developing for any other OS became uneconomical. The cost in
terms of dollars and functionality for a company to try to get its work
done using multiple, mutually incompatible Operating Systems has always
been prohibitively high. That's why IBM mainframes and their clones were
overwhelming in terms of market share in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. When
the PC came along and the computing paradigm changed, the same imperatives
dictated that all but one OS would be relegated to the
margins. Microsoft's "crime" was to manage to be the company that sold
that one OS. There was nothing stopping Apple or SUN being that
company, but Bill Gates had the vision to do it right. The cost of
upgrading to newer technology on Microsoft's path was all along the line a
tiny fraction of the cost of moving between generations of Apple or SUN
products. While Apple and SUN used the infamous "forklift upgrade"
technique, Bill maintained his market share over the generations of PC
evolution by maintaining an often painful amount of backward compatibility
between each newer generation of MicroSoft's OS products and the ones that
came before. Now, the only way (short of government intervention) that
Microsoft is going to be blasted out of its current position is if
something comes along (and MicroSoft doesn't notice it in time) which
completely changes the computing paradigm again in as radical a manner as
did the shift from mainframe computing to PC based desktop
computing. The rise of the internet and network computing in general
would be a good candidate, but I think Bill's noticed it. :)
Maybe its time for a new book: "How I learned to stop worrying and
learned to love Bill Gates" :)
-uf
At 07:28 PM 9/20/99 -0700, David Fenstemaker wrote:
>The point is simply this:
>
>Microsoft's "marketing" practices unfairly
>eliminate competition. If it continues,
>companies that provide stable OS's won't
>exist. Already its getting hard to develop
>on them because things like ethernet cards
>now are "Microsoft Windows compatible",
>Translation: "incompatible with anything
>else by design".
>
>You better believe there is lots of exposure
>in embedded devices, especially in the medical
>field. Most don't run NT. That's why there
>is a disclaimer with Embedded NT, that its is
>not intended for critical applications, let
>alone regular NT.
>
>David
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