7 May
2000
7 May
'00
6:15 p.m.
Almost on the mark, but see my remarks below.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Wayne M. Smith <wmsmith(a)earthlink.net>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 07, 2000 12:12 AM
Subject: Re: I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'
All the talk about the browser market is a red herring. Internet Explorer
was never a product separate from Windows.
Wrong.,. It was in the 95 PLUS pack an add on product I spent extra
for. IE2 really sucked. It was basically a badly reworked Mosaic.
The v3 product was pretty good... however.
It was a part of the OS utility package called PLUS!
Yup. Which was SEPERATE from Win95 and not available for download until
Netscape was taking off and Bill Gates had the internet epiphany..,
Internet Explorer always was a part of the Windows 9x
package. Netscape,
OTOH, was a commercial product intended for sale, but initially offered
gratis to individual users.
Nope, it was only 3.x of IE that was a download.
HOWEVER . . . they did have to purchase the
WINSOCK from a third party, i.e. Trumpet, in most cases. This was never the
case with Internet explorer.
Nope Winsock and Networking was a direct part of Win95, WinNT etc.
It was an addon to Win3.1. Most of us used Trumpet until the IE3
package added all the goodies.
Only after Internet Explorer became as popular
as it did under '95 did Microsoft release the "made for WIndows 3.1x"
version, also at no charge, but complete with its own WINSOCK and the 32-bit
runtime libraries it needed for operation under the 16-bit OS.
Yup The Win9x version was about 6 months to a year ahead of the Win9x
version.
In the meantime, IBM had acquired LOTUS, primarily in order to take over the
Lotus Notes program. With the spread of Netscape, people found that
Netscape would replace Lotus Notes quite easily, hence IBM quickly acquired
them, only to distance themselves from it later, in order to APPEAR to be an
outsider to the conflict which I'm quite certain they actually scripted, and
which is now being played out in the courts.
Well, they rather quickly realised Notes Servers needed web
accessibility so Domino became a hot upgrade to Notes Server and Client.
Unfortunately, there does appear to be evidence that MS overreached its
rightful position in the industry, giving their applications developers an
advantage by giving them information they didn't publish as part of the
standard API. That was an anticompetitive act, and should be reversed in
some way.
Yup.
Many people think that lobotomizing MS would help the industry. I am not
among them, however, because, at least for now, MS is the only organization
capable of mustering the talent and resources to generate application
software that pretty much functions as it should within the framework of
this extremely complex OS.
Believe me, I think the appllications could be done by hundreds of
companies -- if the MS apps folks were divorced of early access to the
API's the lead MS got over everyone else would dissapear.
Even if someone else could do it, which I seriously
doubt, it's unlikely
anyone can come up with an OS capable of competing against Windows, if the
same tests are to be applied that have been used to determine MS' practices
monopolistic or anticompetitive. If the complete source code for Windows is
to be mandated by the courts to be made available to anyone who wishes to
write applications for Windows, MS is correct in demanding that the code be
released only to companies who, including all their employees as
individuals, be barred for a period of, say, ten years, from participating
in the production of any operating system which might be used as a
competitor to Microsoft's OS products, including the drivers, utilities, or
ancillary programs, e.g. a browser.
Actually, if there was a GUI like the IBM Workplace Shell from OS/2
available on FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, etc there could be some
competitive apps. Right now I'm watching Koffice and the KDE stuff and
really enjoying WordPerfect Office 2000 on Linux.
If they're to "fix" this thing in a
permanent way, then they will have to
legislate a solution which would require that no person involved in the
development of any major software product be permitted to communicate with
anyone else, not his/her spouse, offspring, superiors or subordinates,
except in permanently recorded written form for a period not less than five
years beyond the end of the economic life of that product. I doubt that
will happen.
Nope. Make the OS vendor, the Tooks vendor and the Desktop apps vendor
diferent companies and let the fun begin.
I bet there would be an MS Office for Unix in about 6 months.
I also think they would see Borland tools back in the windows area
if they had the same API info as the Visual-whatever folks.
IBM's stuff might even expand their toolsets even further.
Bill
--
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