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Amaros -> RE: Bill Gates did nothing for PCs (10/19/2006 6:23:28 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: cloudboy
quote:
People think Bill Gates is a smart guy, when it was
mostly his lack of ethics that made him what he is.
This is otherwise known as business acumen.
Its definitely an interesting history, though, the whole triumph of the nerds story.
More than anything, Gates took advantage of IBMs lack of preparedness to market a PC.
IBM could have insisted on buying the software, too.
One little known fact is that Bill Gates wrote a 3-page memo to APPLE suggesting that they lease out their operating system, but the Apple "genuises" ignored his suggestion --- a costly error that almost led Apple over the cliff into obscurity.
Back to your thesis, tho, Gates was just acting like the good Capitalist he proved to be. A good Captalist doesn't want to compete in the marketplace, he wants to control the market.
IBM was blindsided due to their insistance on quality - they collaborated with Gates to develop OS/2, Gates talked them into releasing a beta version as Windows, and the rest is history.
IBM's customers were, and still are, banks, etc., who cannot afford to invest is shit that's sown half the time - they could not back windows, it would have destroyed their reputation for support and stability.
Window, or rather DOS, was a boon to the third party software development industry, a common OS that was hacker freindly, pretty much anybody with the slightest amount of programming ability could write software for it - I wrote a number of apps myself on Turbo Pascal, some of which I still use.
Once the Windows GUI finally got to the point that actually worked - what's this, ten years later? the underlying OS was so complicated that you had to be MS certified, and recieve the inside gouge to get anything to work more thna half assed, and if MS found out you were porting to other OS's, they cut you out of the loop.
I still have apps on the drawing board, it was just too much effort to get them to get along with the Windows GUI - C++ is a snap compared to MS object libraries, which is like the biggest bag of junk you've ever seen, just a big headache - you had to pay MS so they'd tell you how to sort through all that crap, and that's when they had your ass.
In this way, Gates made sure that competing OS's wouldn't get supporting apps, and retained control of the installed user base - they also killed the third party software development that made them a household name in the process.
Good business? Maybe, he got rich, everybody else got screwed, good for Gates, bad for everybody else, and bad for the industry in general, no matter how you slice it.
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