On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, SlashDevNull wrote:
> Micros~1 does NOT have the best marketing in the world, despite what
> everyone thinks. And Apple does not have the worst marketing. And I hate
> always hearing how Micros~1 products suck, but because of their
> marketing....
Yup.
> Windows 95 is the only OS that people have bought to upgrade their
> machines. Every other MS OS including Win2k and XP have very few purchased
> upgrades. Because MS had DOS, they had a constant revenue stream. This
> stream allowed them to fail with Windows 1,2 & 3. Until they finally got it
> a little right with Windows 3.1. Then they came out with windows 95/98/Me
> (basically the same OS). They could afford to fail constantly because of
> the income from DOS.
And MSFT worked very hard to kill their DOS competitor DR DOS by trying to
make Windows incompatible with it. (Even Win9x sits on top of DOS.)
And in the DOS days, when hard drives weren't so cheap or voluminous, they
attempted to license Stacker, then turned around and said, nah, it turns
out, our guys have been working on this already, coincidence, sure, but we
won't be needing your compression. This was after they saw the source
code to Stacker. Stacker sued them, and apparently MSFT sued back because
stacker used some unpublished DOS calls they somehow found out about.
Where is stacker now?
> Office. I remember when a database cost $600 (Ashton-Tate dBase). I
And of the xbase crowd (dbase, foxbase, clipper) one of the better ones
was FoxPro - foxbase's update. Guess who ate them? MSFT. Gee, I don't
see FoxPro in Ms Orifice, I see Access.
Ditto for Visio - they bought it, to keep from having to write their own.
> Exchange. Exchange sucks. And it failed miserably went it was first
> introduced. Care to guess how it is the #1 email software now? MS is
> giving it away. When I worked in Richmond, VA Micros~1 almost GAVE the
> large company I worked for Exchange. Why? Because we were running cc:Mail
> and were going to switch to Notes.
This is the same tactic they used to kill off Novell. When ABC was in
need of upgrading to Netware 4.x, they gave them NT 3.5 for free plus tech
support. Novell Netware was the best Network OS out there for LAN's.
Guess who won that market.
> Xbox - supposed to lose money for at least the next 2 years.
> MSNBC - Laying of people right now.
> WebTV - Lost so much money I think they have already canceled it or rolled
> it into another business unit.
> MSN - Still losing money.
And hotmail, which ran very nicely under unix, but crashed when they try
to move it to NT, and required twice the hardware to implement.
> So when a manger makes a business decision, they KNOW MS is not going out
> of business, unlike Lotus (merged), Ashton-Tate (merged), Corel (almost
> dead), Borland (barely succeeding as a development company after almost
> going out of business challenging MS), WordPerfect (merged), and many, many
> more that are barely hanging on.
Borland was given a choice - either get rid of ObjetWindows, or we won't
license you MFC. Gee, Borland C++ or Visual C++... which would you use
to code for MSFT?
:)
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