I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Sat May 6 23:02:42 2000

It was thus said that the Great Wayne M. Smith once stated:
>
> > MS has the market share it has by targeting
> competition and ruthless use of
> > its monopoly powers
>
> That is backwards. The law, and common sense, requires
> that you already have to have significant market share
> to have monopoly power. Monopoly power is the ability
> to control prices and exclude competition by virtue of
> monopoly power. To me, the question is, how did MS
> achieve that power in the first place. There is no
> doubt that once they had the power they abused it --
> that is what the DOJ's case is all about. But it seems
> to me that they must have done something "right" to get
> the power in the first place, such as Windows 3.1 or
> some such. When you don't have monopoly power,
> targeting competition is not only not illiegal, it's
> what the free market encourages because that's what
> USUALLY benefits consumers in the long run.

  First and foremost, William Henry Gates, III is a masterful tactician at
business, whether you agree with his tatics or not. At 19 (in 1975) he was
able to see that the money wasn't going to be in hardware but software. And
he was able to negotiate his way out of a rather bad contract with MITS in
order to license BASIC to other computer manufacturers. In fact, most of
the early products from Microsoft were languages and it was for this reason
that IBM approached Microsoft---for BASIC and other languages for their new
machine.

  When IBM returned and asked Microsoft for an operating system, William
Henry Gates, III saw an opportunity to license (at first) an operating
system from Seattle Computer Products (I think that's the name) with a
non-exclusive, non-royalty license.

  What gave Microsoft their power were three things---I-B-M. When IBM
entered the PC market, it not only legitimized microcomputers, it
practically spelled the doom for the smaller PC companies because at that
time, nobody was fired for buying IBM.

  Microsoft however, not only entered a non-exclusive license with Seatle
Computer Products, but a non-exclusing license with IBM and thus they helped
with the emerging PClone market (and I think it was Compaq's clean-room
implementation of the IBM PC BIOS that clinched the market).

  Also, of the three operating systems available for the IBM PC in August of
1981, MS-DOS was the cheapest of the three, even beating out Digital
Research's CP/M-86.

  William Henry Gates, III was able to leverage any advantage he had, and he
did.

  -spc (And the rest, they say, is history)
Received on Sat May 06 2000 - 23:02:42 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:33:08 BST