Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Originally posted by: sirjonk
Doesn't anyone realize he achieved success and Microsoft's success at any cost, no matter how many start-ups he crushed, no matter how many little companies he left dead and bloodied along the way, just as long as he could become the richest man in the world, no matter how many lives he ruined, or dot-coms he left dead and bloodied along the way, just as long as he became the world's richest man, no matter how many Netscape's he buried, or how many other free browsers he left dead and bloodied along the way?
Stockholders don't pay Microsoft to play nice, they pay Microsoft to make money. Microsoft made that money and the resulting company continues to do so. Whether or not all of his business practices were perceived as being socially perfect does not matter. If a second major operating system were to be presented that were superior to MS, then I wouldn't doubt it would succeed.
However, when you look at any other system that has been presented they have been inferior for various reasons or barely superior. If they were so superior they would have enticed enough companies to dump them anyway.
This is akin to the Intel vs AMD situation. AMD never had a great product until the K7 series, everything else was lower-tier trash. Even then they didn't have a hugely great product until INTC screwed up with the P4 and compounded that mistake. People whine that INTC offered too many incentives, dropped prices, struck deals...etc so that AMD couldn't compete.
Frankly, I don't care. If AMD's product was so great then it would be more widely accepted, but the mere fact is that it has never been that great.
Others say that MS has such a crappy product that has only been supported through sheer monopoly. I find this laughable. What other OS provides a very easy to use system for almost *every* computer configuration available on the PC? Most of the problems are due to computers not adhering to the standard, or just the fault of having to account for every problem in every configuration.
How do you account for infinity? You can't. Apple does it by limiting users and hardware down into a narrow spec. However, the larger they become the more degraded the system becomes as a whole as they have to increase their system geometrically.
Frankly, I would rather have 1 MS running such a daunting task rather than 5 apples. The massive scale of such undertakings naturally appeal to one large company.