I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'

From: Bill Dawson <whdawson_at_mlynk.com>
Date: Sun May 7 01:54:32 2000

<large snip>

--> If you simply look at what Apple did with their extremely (for all the
wrong
-> reasons) popular Mac, you'll see that they did all the bad stuff now
being
-> attributed to MS. When you're in business to make money, you go after
your
-> competitors any way you can. Apple did that with their "big-brother"
-> commercials on TV. Their product, though "cute," was no more capable
than
-> an equivalently equipped PC, and cost over three times as much. They
-> prevented everyone else from competing with them in the hardware and
-> software arenas, and ultimately the price and availability of Mac
products
-> ran them out of the marketplace.

If you look at the legal aspects of the Apple vs. Franklin lawsuit, back in
the Apple II days, you can see that had Franklin properly argued, they would
have won. It *was* impossible to separate the software from the firmware at
the time Franklin copied Apple's ROMs. Even though Apple had the approved
set of firmware entry points for third party software development, they
looked the other way as all parties used every and any useable subroutine
they could find in the firmware. Franklin had no choice to do anything
*but* exactly duplicate the Apple firmware to ensure software written for
the Apple II would run on their machine. Even Apple had a rough time of it
trying to maintain compatibility with their own firmware due to software
developers departing from the approved ROM subroutines. Look at what MS did
to DR.DOS users in the beta testing of Windows. All it took was slight
incompatibilities to send the Windows software developers over to the MS DOS
camp. How long did DR last after that?

And I don't agree that what Apple did with the Mac was for all the wrong
reasons. They knew how well the strategy worked with the II series, so why
not continue it in the Mac line? People bought Macs because they worked and
worked well. The software functioned with minimum of grief and did what it
was purchased to do. Third party ad-ons worked as well. Can you say that
about PeeCees? Sure, you can buy a PeeCee and the attendant software
cheaper, but what value do you place on the many, many hours troubleshooting
incompatibilities, reboots, restores, etc., etc.

And while I'm on the soapbox, I'll state the obvious. Bill Gates is a
shrewd thief and an accomplished liar. About the only original product MS
ever had was BASIC. IBM screwed Digital Research with the pricing of CP/M
for the PC. Gates was no small part of this. This opened the door to new
software that was not a direct port from CP/M, but directly designed with
the MS DOS user base in mind. I've been using PC's since the beginning, but
I also still prefer a good "closed" OS like PICK for "networked" situations.
Remember, DOS was designed for _Personal Computers_, where the first, read
that *early*, users were knowledgeable about files, extensions,
incompatibilities, an so forth. With PC networking, the base OS didn't
change to reflect the fact that users ignorant of the "innards" were now
using this OS in an application driven environment, but with access to
things forbidden in a strong OS. This has gotten us to where we are now.
We have individuals with MS products like Outlook (which I am using right
now), who can infect the www networked systems, thereby in-house networked
systems, and other individual user's computers worldwide. Not good.

Enough rambling for now. Thanks, Dick, for compelling me to put down in
words these thoughts.
Received on Sun May 07 2000 - 01:54:32 BST