GUI

James Knott james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Fri Nov 28 11:48:26 UTC 2003


William Park wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 09:35:51PM -0500, James Knott wrote:
> 
>>There were features in OS/2, back in 1992, that have still not
>>appeared in Windows.
>>
>>In order to appreciate all the benefits of OS/2, you have to use it a
>>fair bit.  And even though I've used it for almost 14 years and even
>>provided 3rd level support at IBM on it, there's still a lot of it,
>>which I haven't used.
> 
> 
> If it's so good, then why couldn't IBM sell it?  Could it be that what
> you're describing (ie. rearranging things on desktop) has nothing to do
> with real productivity in workplace, ie. by secretarial letters, mom/pop
> small business accounting, students essays, executive presentation, etc.?
> 

You might want to read up on how Microsoft used extortion etc., to force 
market share.  You can find lots of info in books such as Netscape Time, 
The Microsoft Files, World War 3.0 and of course the trial transcript. 
One example of this, was when Windows 95 came out, and IBM wanted to 
sell it on it's systems, along with OS/2, MS refused to let them have 
W95, until they stopped supporting OS/2.  Then there was the bundling, 
where MS would make computer suppliers pay for a Windows licence on 
every system sold, even if shipped with a competing OS etc.  Do a bit of 
research and you'll see that's MS dominance had nothing to do with 
product quality and everything to do with "dirty tricks".

How productive would a secretary be, if she has to stop typing a letter, 
when she's formatting a diskette?  That's one example of MS 
productivity.  Also, many of the "innovations" in Windows, were 
"borrowed" from elsewhere.  The desktop is one example.  You may also 
recall the Stacker case, where MS stole their disk compression 
technology.   There are other examples, some of which are mentioned in 
the above sources. And of course lets not forget the deliberate 
"incompatibilies" is Windows, which prevented it from working with 
DR-DOS.  All that incompatibility was, was a check to see if it was 
running on DR-DOS and then crap out with an error message.  Bypass that 
check and it ran fine.




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