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Replying To:
Your column underestimates Microsoft's abusiveness (none / 0) (#7)
by Futurepower tm on Tue Jul 01, 2008 at 11:48:16 AM PDT

Ed,

That's the worst column you have ever written, in my opinion. You have vastly, vastly underestimated how much Microsoft's abusive practices were the cause of it's "success".

There are so many abuses that it is impossible to mention them all here. There is "embrace, extend, extinguish". That just happened to the database language xBase, because Microsoft discontinued FoxPro.

There was the apparent lying to IBM about Microsoft's support for OS/2.

Another example: Back before Windows 95 was released, I got very irritated at Microsoft. There were only two ways to buy DOS. You could be a big computer maker, or you could buy an illegal, pirated copy from one of the six distributors in this area. Apparently that was an attempt to give the big computer makers a monopoly. I called the Microsoft legal department, and gave my complaints to someone who was apparently new there. She took the complaint, and that apparently forced Microsoft to take one of the pirates to court. I was a witness. But, to my knowledge, Microsoft never did allow smaller system builders to buy legal copies of DOS. Last time I checked, Microsoft had made it impossible to talk to anyone in the legal department.

Another example: At one time the top three word processors were: 1) Microsoft Word, for lots of money, 2) Microsoft Word, pirated, for $50, and 3) whatever was in 3rd place. My experience of Microsoft, and my opinion, is that Microsoft encouraging or allowing piracy of its products was a big factor in causing Microsoft products to become so "popular". It certainly wasn't excellence. It was, in my opinion, adversarial behavior.



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