cat Xerox | Apple | Microsoft ?

From: Kai Kaltenbach <kaikal_at_MICROSOFT.com>
Date: Thu May 21 20:23:24 1998

Sure the DOS license was a big initial push, but to say it was solely
responsible for the success of Microsoft is like saying the Model T is
responsible for Ford having the best selling vehicle in America today.

Microsoft was a development products company, not an OS company. When I got
here in 1988, I remember seeing a revenue pie chart at the company meeting.
We were at around 60-70% revenue from development products like C++ &
FORTRAN, with a big slice from apps like Word & Multiplan, and DOS revenue
was a tiny slice. In a decade where everything had to be written directly
to the hardware to get any speed out of the 8088, you can hardly say that
the DOS license had much to do with the success of the dev products.

Our first, all time most successful Windows app, Excel, that nuked the Lotus
1-2-3 monopoly through ease of use and customer demand alone, was _ported
from the Macintosh_. How exactly could we have leveraged our ownership of
Windows to make Excel successful when it wasn't even written for Windows?

If IBM endorsing & bundling an OS makes it a monopoly, why is OS/2 dead?

etc.

Kai



-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Yowza [mailto:yowza_at_yowza.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 21, 1998 5:37 PM
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
Subject: RE: cat Xerox | Apple | Microsoft ?


On Thu, 21 May 1998, Kai Kaltenbach wrote:

> We weren't, and aren't, Orwellian characters,
> just folks trying to write software that people want to buy. Gee, I guess
> it worked! So sue us!

I think one reason Microsoft is being sued is that Microsoft software does
not compete on the merits of the software alone. Windows 3.0 was the
first almost barely usable/tolerable version of Windows. I'm not a Mac
fan, but if you look at something like the Amiga and AmigaOS from 1985, it
was such a clearly better operating system and windowing system PC
environment compared to Microsoft's offering that if Microsoft had to
compete on technical merit alone, they would have been out of business
weeks after the Amiga's introduction.

To suggest that Microsoft's success is due to writing software that people
*want* to buy is disingenuous. Microsoft's success is due solely to the
monopoly IBM gave them in 1982. To their credit, Microsoft is only about
five years behind the curve. If IBM had kept the monopoly to themselves,
we'd all be closer to ten years behind the curve.

-- Doug
Received on Thu May 21 1998 - 20:23:24 BST