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Re: I think you missed the point about MS... Posted by Justin VanAbrahams [Email]  (#32) [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Justin VanAbrahams) on Wed, 26 Jun 2002 14:54:38
In Reply to: I think you missed the point about MS..., ~ben, Wed, 26 Jun 2002 10:52:25 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
You're joking right? Don't you remember Borland Office? Corel Office? WordPerfect Office? Hell, what about Wordstar? Lotus? StarOffice has been available for x86 for years. These products SUCKED. Believe me, I installed them all on demand from customers. The legal field (a bulk of my clientele) was stuck on WordPerfect throughout its problems - it sucked since the first Windows version and never got better. But they clung to it, because all the legal-field-specific macros were done in WP. Anyway, there WAS competition - it just wasn't competitive. WordPerfect may have been better than Word, and 1-2-3 may have been better than Excel, but no one packaged all the *decent* apps into one cohesive suite. MS made, overall, a cheaper, easier-to-use product that was acceptable in terms of reliability and performance.
You can argue they infiltrated the market using anti-competitive tactics, but that's utter crap. IBM sold a competing version of DOS, so did Digital Research and later Novell and Caldera. They could have just as easily struck deals with manufacturers to get their OSs bundled with new PCs, but MS did it first and had the "best" deal. You can argue that MS continued its activities with Windows, but what prevented IBM from doing that with OS/2? Oh wait, they tried with Dell and their own PS/2 line, but no one gave a crap. They *wanted* Windows. The old anti-MS argument of, "You *had* to preload the MS apps because that's what the marketplace demanded" is further illustration of my point. Consumers WANTED the MS products. They weren't heaped on them or offloaded on them. For whatever reason, Joe Public WANTED Windows 3.1, he WANTED MS:Office 4.0. He had other choices, but he didn't excercise them. I worked at a software store during the time when Windows 3.1 came out, and let me tell you we *loved* when MS released a new product. People came in by the droves to buy whatever MS had that week. There were no guns, no troops. People came in and dropped $500 because they wanted to. No one *ever* asked to see WordPerfect Office (which we stocked). Perhaps MS secretly developed brainwashing, but from my side of the counter it sure looked like everyone was acting of their own free will.
I dunno. Perhaps I have a skewed view of the situation. I worked in a retail software store for three years, I've been an independent consultant for the better part of the '90s, and since '97 I've been doing full-time IT professionally. I've seen the options, I've seen the choices. None of them really impress me, and certainly none of them strike me as something I'd install on my mom's computer. I'm not saying I'm right, only relating what I see, from where I stand.
-Justin
posted by 64.166.4...
, Tue, 25 Jun 2002 19:06:36
, Tue, 25 Jun 2002 21:37:09, Wed, 26 Jun 2002 03:55:59, Wed, 26 Jun 2002 14:54:38 <-- Viewing This Message, Wed, 26 Jun 2002 02:05:23, Tue, 25 Jun 2002 19:20:12
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