I can't leave this one alone either.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: allisonp <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2000 9:27 PM
Subject: Re: I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'
> >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 --
>
I've seen/heard of little evidence of that. Though there have been lots of
references to such actions. They've been ruthless, yes, but not criminal,
though some judge lacking in the grey matter to see the obvious, has been
horswoggled into believing what a bunch of MS-haters tell him.
>
> It started with the licensing of DOS at the vendor level to the
> extent that if the hardware could run dos it had to be licensed.
> Some of us may remember the early machines the the
> "jumper" to disable dos. { the is } was to inhibit the CP/M
^^^^^^^^
> follow ons, Netware and the unix varients.
>
I'm not sure I know what you mean here. I had a '186-based machine that
ran DOS and CP/M-86. I didn't like either well enough to give up CP/M-80,
BTW.
>
> This first lockin of the vendors was exploited for the windows
> software that followed. It would also get the DOJ to issue
> an aggreement back some years for MS to stop this
> monopolistic activity.
>
Are you sure you'renot taking this one step too far, Allison?
>
> Thats how the got the power. The money came from the
> applications and MS was known for them and never cheap.
>
No, they weren't cheap, but they were among the cheapest of the bunch.
Other vendors' office automation software typically cost more than
Microsoft's. I wasn't unhappy to see Lotus' offering and WordPerfect's go,
though I liked the WP v5.1 for DOS and the surrounding office software
suite. They never got going under Windows, (v3.0, 1990) however.
>
> Allison
>
Received on Sun May 07 2000 - 00:43:41 BST