Sam Varghese
Thursday, 03 April 2008 06:33
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The way Cringely tells it, back in the 1980s, soon after the first IBM PCs had appeared with MS-DOS (the renamed and slightly reworked Q-DOS which in turn was based on the late Gary Kildall's CP/M) as its operating system, there were a large number of players who wanted to compete with IBM - HP, Zenith, Kidde to name a few.
They were all encouraged to take on IBM - and the urging came from Microsoft which had a suite of applications like Multiword (later Word) and the spreadsheet Multiplan (later Excel) which could be ported quickly to various types of hardware. Once these would-be IBM competitors were convinced to buy a version of MS-DOS for their hardware, they would be later told that the applications which ran on IBM's port of MS-DOS would probably not run on their customised versions.
Desperation would then set in - and Microsoft would then reveal, that by the way, it had a few portable applications lying around which could be quickly adapted to work on these hardware platforms. More sales, more money for Gates and Allen. And, writes Cringely, this was just the first of many times the company coordinated its operating system and applications strategy, which it will never admit doing. It happened for every new platform and version of MS-DOS.
One more glance back. The BASIC that Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote borrowed heavily from the 1964 invention of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz - in short, somebody else's IP was used without any compensation. And yet, when people started passing around copies of the over-priced, bug-ridden language, trying to come up with bug fixes, they were all accused of software piracy. This basically set the tone for Microsoft's business practices, defined its attitude towards customers and gave an indication of the quality of products which would emerge from its portals.
