On Sat, 14 May 2011 20:25:48 -0400, Jack Stein
wrote:
Clipped

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.


Go to any large retail store and all you can buy is the "consumer"
models of whatever brand the stores carry. Best Buy etc. only carry
what they can sell by the truck-load - which is, by definition, the
cheapest crap they can get because the general buying public won't pay
the price for the "best". Try buying a laptop computer, for instance,
from any of the major big-box stores with Windows 7 Professional. The
manufacturers produce systems designed for and sold with the
professional version of the OS, but you cannot buy it at Best Buy or
Future Shop, in most cases.


Also, many of the low end products sold by Future Shop/Best Buy and
other retailers is not available to me as a reseller/VAR. It is a
mass-market only product, contented to meet a price-point.
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.
They were threatened with losing the ability to sell DOS/WIN as an
OEM, with preferential pricing. Nothing stopped them from selling
their machines with no pre-installed OS, and selling a "retail"
package of MS DOS/WIN with the computer at full retail price.

And to get right down to the basics - if a COMPANY wanted to sell
computers with DOS/WIN OEM and without, all they needed to do was form
a wholly owned subsidiary company to sell the non MS OS machines under
a different brand.. One company had an OEM agreement, the other did
not. Product from the one "division" could ONLY be sold with MS OEM
OS, the product of the other "division" could NOT be sold with MS OEM
OS.

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?

Or too CHEAP.

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.

They also could not buy a machine with Windows XP Professional or
Windows 7 Professional, or as of late, not even Windows 7 32 bit,
pre-installed.

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.


And by jove, they HAVE. They get an OS that works reasonably well for
PEANUTS with their computer, and they have the option of having
WHATEVER OS THEY WANT installed on their machine for a price. They can
then have WHATEVER SOFTWARE THEY WANT produced to run on that OS, for
a price.

Or they can buy off-the-shelf software for that so-so OS, that also
works reasonably well, for a couple hours wages. ANd that software can
come from "anti-christ inc" or any number of other established
software houses who sell their products in sufficient quantity to be
able to sell at a competetive price.

The option would be that everybody bought a computer with NO OS
installed, and bought whatever OS they either wanted or were directed
to by their reseller, at full retail price, and then bought or had
programmed whatever application they wanted/needed, at significant
cost, with no expectation that data generated on their computer might
be compatible with or readable on someone else's computer.

Back to the seventies, the days of Basic 4, Business Basic, OS/9, the
various incompatible versions of CPM, Exec, Gecos, George, MFT, PCP,
BKY, Chios, and all the non-compatible Unix and Xenix flavours, EMAS,
VMS, Ultrix, etc. and "custom software" written at great expense for
every different OS and application - very few of which ran
successfully even on ONE platform for less than the cost of a driveway
full of Cadilacs.

So yes, I'll say it again: By Jove, the consumer HAS come out the
winner. At least to a point.
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.

OK smarty-pants. Develop a new OS - or buy the rights to OS/2 and
upgrade it to the point where it is not only a viable alternative to,
but also a superior product to anything offered by "anti-christ inc"
and market it at a price that will generate enough sales to put some
bread on your table. Set up a support team capable of providing all
required support to all users (Oh, I forgot - your product will be so
perfect no support will EVER be required) - and the whole world will
be your oyster.
If your product is truly superior, it will outsell "anti-christ inc"
regardless of their anti-competitive behaviour, and you will make
enough profit to fight off all the predatory court cases against you
for having your product "look and feel" like some-one elses - or
infringing an invalid patent issued to some backstreet lawyer for some
common generic "technology".

In about 10 years you'll have the rest of the world complaining about
YOUR anti-competetive behaviour, and YOU will find yourself in front
of a trade tribunal or whatever, defending YOUR rights - and you will
be known as "anti-christ inc #2"

Good luck.

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!

"Non existant" viral attacks????? "non existant" Mal ware?????
OK, so MS products are not perfect. Their registry is fragile, and
occaisionally requires attention - but the vast majority of
performance issues in the PC world ARE related, in one way or another,
to MalWare and other outside influences, including virus issues.

Cleaning or restoring the registry can often get back much oif the
lost performance - but getting rid of all the MalWare generally gets
back the rest.

If as many people had a hard-on against, say , RedHat Linux as have
against Microsoft, they would come up with ways to compromise RedHat
just as badly as they have Microsoft products - and the damage could
end up every bit as serious to Linux as it has proven to be against
Microsoft.


If you set up a Microsoft Windows XP system as a standalone system,
and install half a dozen applications and use them for a few years -
with NO outside connection, and no updates or system changes, that
machine will work well, with virtually no issues.

My system, (xp 2002 Professional) connected to the internet 24/7/52
has not needed a software re-install in almost 10 years and is ,
today, running just about as well as a 3.13gz Celeron computer with
1GB of RAM could be expected to run.
I run and test all kinds of programs and hardware - so the registry
gets cleaned up occaisionally, and the hard-drive gets defragmented
regularly - and when the system seams to be slowing down a bit, a
amal-ware cleaner is used to drive out the "bugs" that have gotten
into the system.

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.

Customers WERE able to buy OS/2 on their computers. Microsoft made it
available to their OEM partners back in the '80s, and it was a real
hard sell.

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.

IF OS/2 was so superior, IBM would have remained the predominent brand
and supplier of personal computers in the world, because to get OS/2,
all you would have had to do is by a PS/2 computer from IBM. The
market would have responded by a landslide demand for OS/2 on
competitor's machines - which would have resulted either in IBM
providing the software to other manufacturers to package with their
systems, and a tsunami-like wave of sotware development for the OS/2
platform, OR - - - - - Anti-trust investigation and findings against
IBM.
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.

And TODAY they CAN supply Linux, BSD, and even eComStation (OS/2) or
whatever OS they want to supply - and still they are not..........
BECAUSE??????
Because people want applications to run on their systems. And the
majority of common apps do not run on most of these OS platforms.
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.

And you talk about "the world's worst OS". You need to make that,
perhaps, the world's worst SURVIVING OS - becuse thankfully many like
CPM have long since left the marketplace.