On 5/15/2011 9:28 AM, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
On 5/14/2011 5:32 PM, Jack Stein wrote:

It doesn't take genius to take a market bestowed
on you by IBM, use that market to force retailers to carry only your
product, or die. Judge Sporkin is/was clean as it gets, unbribable and
unafraid of the Billions and Billions of ill-gotten gains of Microsoft.

Personally, I have used BSD Unix for many years, but Microsoft has been
*good* for the industry notwithstanding I am unenthusiastic about their
products ...

Personally, I used UNIX system 7 for years, OS/2 for years, and
Dos/Win for years. DosWin is a PERFECT example of how anti-competitive
practices can result in the worlds worst product dominating a market.
Judge Sporkin was made keenly aware of this when the DOJ brought
charges against MS. Unfortunately, imo, the DOJ was more interested in
bilking MS of $ than fixing/addressing the problem. This was made
clear when the DOJ appealed their own court VICTORY.

Your understanding of 'forced' is, um, bogus. No one forces you to use
Windows, or for that matter a computer *at all*. It's absurd to complain that you cannot
buy what you want at the store.

Not absurd at all. If I go to any large retail store, and can buy only
the worlds worst os because of illegal, anti-trust marketing practices,
and most all home software products are professionally developed ONLY
for the worlds worst OS because of past illegal, immoral, anti-trust
marketing practices, then I, and particularly the average user, is
'forced' to run the worlds worst OS on their home PC.

Hardware vendors voluntarily entered into a deal
with Microsoft to get preferential pricing.

Bear in mind, that NO hardware
vendor had to agree to Microsoft's terms. They could simply have sold bare metal
and let the consumer decide what to put on it. They didn't because they (rightly)
understood that consumers wanted a turnkey system.

Wrong. Any vendor that decided to increase their market by installing
say, OS/2, and allowing the consumer a choice of OS's was met with
threats of losing the ability to sell DOS/WIN. The OS cost them a few
dollars, but if they sold say, OS/2 installed, they either would not get
to sell DOS/WIN at all or would no longer get the "discount" price and
would pay hundreds for the OS. This would spell the death knell to any
retailer dependent on the home PC market. The result of these anti
competitive tactic's was the retailer and the consumer (and the software
developers) had NO CHOICE, they would be using the worlds worst OS. Why
do YOU think most of the home market is using the worlds worst OS?
Everyone is just too ****ing dumb to buy something better, right?

For about a decade now, there have been a dozen or so Linux
distributions, 3 or 4
major BSD variants, FreeDOS, WINE, and host of other lesser choices
available
for *free*... And the consumers still have consistently chosen Microsoft
over all the above.

Last time I was at best buy, I could not buy a PC with LINUX installed
on it. Last time I watched my wife and children on the PC, looked like
they would have no clue how to remove windows and install a shareware
version of UNIX that would not run any of their software.

This is not the behavior of a predatory monopoloy.

Yes, it is. Without illegal marketing practices, people would have
chosen to buy an OS that worked installed on their home PC, and
developers would have developed software for that market. MS would have
had to come out with a solid, smooth working, multitasking OS or go out
of business. The consumer would have been the winner.

It is the evidence of a satisfied customer base, nothing else.

Nope, it is evidence of the results of stifled competition. People do
not choose to use the worst product available when given a choice. When
choice is stifled, the consumer ALWAYS loses.

Microsoft makes "good
enough" technology. It's good enough for most people, most of the time.

Nothing is good enough if there is other stuff available that is better.
Windows sucks the big one, most everyone hates it but don't know why.
Mostly they blame it on their own "computer illiteracy" or on
non-existent viral attacks. It's the OS stupid!

It's
not "great" because consumers wouldn't pay for great ... or at least
they haven't been willing to thus far.

Consumers could have had great had they been able to purchase OS/2
installed on their PC's. They could have had great in spite of MS
illegal anti-trust marketing had IBM not pulled the product the moment
it became clear OS/2 was about to explode on the market as it reached
critical mass of 1 million copies sold a month, despite the difficulty
of finding it for sale, and having to remove the worlds worst OS and
installing something that actually worked yourself. Had IBM provided it
to the retailers, and MS not threatened retailers, Win would either have
gone out of business, or developed something better than OS/2. Neither
happened.

You're grumbling because the Chevy dealer won't put Ford sales
literature in the showroom...

Wrong, I'm grumbling because most all retail outlets sold ONLY MS
operating systems. They did this because of illegal marketing practices
of MS.

I'm grumbling because I'm using the worlds worst OS on my PC because of
these past illegal marketing practices. I'm grumbling because most of
the software professionally developed is developed only for the worlds
worst OS. I'm grumbling because most of the hardware developed works
only with the worlds worst operating system. All because of the things
that horrified a great federal anti trust judge, Stanley Sporkin.

--
Jack
You Can't Fix Stupid, but You Can Vote it Out!
http://jbstein.com