- #36
franznietzsche
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sid_galt said:From a user's perspective, for ordinary day to day work I find Windows easier to use than either Mac or Linux. But even if their products won out because they were cheaper, they couldn't have won out if they had built poor products.
You don't seem to understand how a free market actually works. The best marketed product, not the best product is what wins. MS has one of the world's best marketing dpmts.
Computers are not furniture. The majority of consumers do not know what poor quality software is, because they do not understand software. If a chair breaks on them, they know it was poorly made. If their computer can't run for more than a few days at a time without problems, or if they're constantly fighting to hold back malware, they think that's just how computers are, they don't realize that the software is poorly made. A poor product only hurts you if people can tell its a poor product. With computers, the average joe doesn't even know the difference between hardware and software.
Possibly. But even if CP/M was much better, you can't say that DOS was bad and not a quality product. If it served the purpose of the user and cost less than CP/M, then for the user it was a quality product.
Have you ever used DOS? As a CLI, it was abysmal when it was invented. Bash, the standard shell prompt in linux, has not changed much since 1987, when it was released. DOS-Prompt has never ever been as useful or functional (MS is just starting to try to catch up on that with MSH i.e. Monad).
1) Being illegal does not make it automatically wrong.
2) Forced upgrades? What do you mean? MS didn't force anyone to upgrade their software.
3) As to the bullying of OEMs, did MS violate the patents of the OEMs? If it did, then it was wrong.
But if it didn't then that is not bullying. Whatever happened to the OEMs then was not MS's fault.
Do you know what OEMs are? Or did you ignore what I said about reading the Findings of Fact from the DOJ trial? OEMs are companies like Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP, who sell computer systems. MS used punitive pricing to punish any OEMs who offered computers with anything other than Windows on them. They threatened to pull licenses to sell windows on some of them if they sold competing products. That is not only illegal, its wrong. Unless of course you want to say that's not MS's fault?
Monopolizing is illegal for a reason, it destroys the free market. That is bad.
Have you ever tried to open an Office document from a later version of Office in an older one? Forced upgrades. See my above post.