7 May
2000
7 May
'00
6:45 p.m.
I can't leave this one alone either.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: allisonp <allisonp(a)world.std.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2000 9:27 PM
Subject: Re: I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'
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.
Actually, you can purchase Office2000 and WordPerfect 2000 and Lotus
Smartsuite Millenium -- the latter two under $120... Office is
considerably more retail -- unless you corporate license under discount.
Actually grey market versions of the later are under $25 each.
I know, I bought both to compare them with the Office used at work and
forced on me. I liked them (used SmartSuite96 at IBM for a while) and
WordPerfect is now purchased and running on my wife's Linux box.
I'm actually a WordStar 6 kind of guy, if I'm not using FrameMaker though.
Bill
--
bpechter(a)monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
| Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
| BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?
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 --
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