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List:       kde
Subject:    RE: Microsoft History (RE: corel's involvement)
From:       dep <dep () snet ! net>
Date:       2000-04-07 12:25:14
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On Fri, 07 Apr 2000, Bruce Sass wrote:

| I have been claiming that MS screwed IBM by selling MS-DOS to the
| clone makers, and there was nothing IBM could do about it.  My
| understanding is that IBM was locked into having MS supply DOS for
| them; calling the arrangement an "exclusive contract" could very
| well be incorrect, but that is minor w.r.t. the argument because
| the point was not whether such a contract existed, but that MS was
| not a good partner and they appear to have used unethical business
| practices from the beginning.

yes and no. ibm wasn't obligated at first to ship dos -- witness the 
two alternatives that were initially offered. microsoft, probably 
ethically, offered dos to ibm for a one-time payment of $80,000, 
which is $30,000 more than microsoft paid for q-dos, on which it was 
based. gates has said in retrospection that this was to get it 
established ("the road ahead," p. 54). indeed, there is strong 
evidence that for years there was a virtual battle underway between 
microsoft and ibm to see who could do more damage to ibm, who made a 
multitude of mistakes -- anybody remember microchannel architecture 
or ps/2 machines with 8088s and 80286 chips? -- while microsoft was 
off cutting deals, perfectly legally, with others. there came a time, 
though, when the preload agreement with microsoft became part of the 
price of doing business. (as late as 1989, it was possible to buy a 
pc with dr-dos on it instead of ms-dos; a couple of companies even 
offered coherent!)

in 1991, microsoft opened fire on ibm via a front-page piece in the 
wall street journal. when the joing operating agreement between ibm 
and microsoft expired in september 1992, it left ibm in the same boat 
as everyone else, which is why OS/2 never supplied win-OS/2 beyond 
3.1.

| Look at it this way Tim... does it matter if IBM had their hands
| tied because of a contract, they couldn't switch OSs for practical
| reasons, or they didn't own the code?  The end result is the same;
| a critical supplier started selling a key component to the
| competition. What I didn't state explicitly, but should be obvious,
| the competition would not have been able to get to market as
| quickly as they did if MS hadn't helped them, and how much of what
| MS learned from working with IBM made it into the competition's
| products.

that's true, but again it was the preload agreements that put 
microsoft in the driver's seat, where it will remain for so long as 
those preload agreements exist. there is simply no incentive for 
oem's to ship anything except windows as long as the oem's are 
required to buy windows for every processor they ship. microsoft now 
offers the novel defense that if there's a paid-for copy of windows 
for every processor, there will be no reason to pirate the thing. i'm 
not making this up.

i mean -- isn't it just a little bit odd that, in the few companies 
that *do* offer linux, it costs more for linux, which is free, than 
it does for windows, which isn't?

-- 
dep
--
take back america and throw a wobble into the spin:
if you're interviewed by an election exit pollster, lie!
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