>From: "Ian Field" <field_ian@hotmail.com>
>Subject: Re: what if microsoft disobeyed the breakup?
>Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 21:48:59 -0700
>
>Billy Brown wrote:
>
><snip>
>
>|
>| Claims that the "wrong" product has won out in a free market are
>commonplace
>| among supporters of the products that lost, but they almost invariably
>turn
>| out to be incorrect.
>|
>
>This leads into "history is written by the victorious". 30 years from now,
>I wonder what the general perspective on MS and its competitors will be....
>
>For my part, as an advanced application designer, I *know* that my world is
>a better place thanks to the folks at Redmond. I do understand concerns
>related to anti-competitive, innovation-destroying practices, but the DOJ
>has definitely jumped the gun in this case. The market would, on
>percieving
>a lack of new innovation, find/create it elsewhere. We were in the midst
>of
>a computing revolution, and are bound to take a technological step
>backwards
>due to this bungle. The economic impact could also be enormous...
>
Funny, most of the professional developers I have known over the years
consider MS/DOS - Windows to be an unbelievable kludge. And what about the
market itself? It was specifically Bill Gates who pushed us into the
software marketing model that still prevails - where the software developer
gets a few pennies on the dollar, while most of the money goes to marketing,
and the end-buyer really has little clue as to product suitability or
reliability. Read Steven Levy's "Hackers." We could have had a model more
like the LINUX - open-source, peer-reviewed system, where lousy software is
caught before it ever made it to the shelf, and the money mostly goes
directly to the creators, and solid products cost a fraction of the Windows
equivalent.
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