Anthony Fremont wrote:
...
Actually, if Gates wasn't so good at being greedy, we'd all be using
something that actually worked. OS/2 was crap too. Too bad Xerox
didn't have sense enough to stay in the game, they had the best product
for the office in 1980. ...

Xerox had superb computer products in the 1970s. Yes -
they even had the precursor to Apple's MAC workings and
marketable in the 1970s. I worked with some 1970s products
that were even multiple workstations connected to a small box
- the disk server. When did you start using PCs with
servers? The problem, again, must be broken down to citing
top management. Hack Crowley, a Xerox vice president noted
the problem:
Xerox was spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on
research, development, and engineering. Yet there was no one,
literally, in top management who had ever run a product
development program, who could say to the engineers that such
and such should cost less or should be doable faster, and who
would know from their personal experience, that they were right.
If Xerox had one single management weakness, it was that none of
the power players from Peter [the president] on down, and that
includes me, had a technical background or the technical support
to permit them to challenge hard the judgements of the
engineering group.

Why was Microsoft constantly riding the bull? IBM
management were so business school trained - to
anti-innovative - at to even have only IBM XTs with CGA
monitors - 1984 technology - on early 1990 desks. How, pray
tell, how could MS ever promote innovation when IBM was that
anti-innovative. By definition, IBM was that anti-American.
This is why IBM kept pushing OS/2 - and even wrote it in
assembly language. How to made an OS and simply complex as
OS/2 unreliable? Do it all in assembly language. But then
IBM had no way of knowing how anti-innovative its top
management was. These people did not even come from where the
work gets done. They got promoted using business school
concepts - which routinely result in disasters even as serious
as 3 Mile Island, the Challenger, and just recently the
NorthEast blackout.

This is what Ballmer (of Microsoft) meant when he talks
about riding the bull. If it was innovative, then late 1980s
and early 1990s IBM would fight it all the way until it was
dead. OS/2 is a trophy of business school management in IBM.
Xerox also lost the computer and copier business for same
business school reasons. "A good manager can manage any
business". Only in myths and communism.