Microsoft

[Brad De Long]

Re:
>
>Microsoft is a perfect example of the abritrariness of capitalist wealth.
>Microsoft has originated next to nothing. Their first product, Bill &
>Paul's BASIC interpreter, was based on a language developed at Dartmouth in
>the 1960s. The first MS-DOS was based on an earlier operating system, CP/M.
>Windows was stolen from Apple, which stole it from Xerox. Xerox stole the
>mouse & graphic interface from work done for the Pentagon in the 1960s.
>There was a letter in the Financial Times the other day listing all the
>major computer innovations of the last 20 years - Motorola & Intel's
>processors, the graphic interface, Adobe's graphics software, Aldus'
>original PageMaker, relational databases, etc. - and Microsoft had nothing
>to do with any of them. But, through a combination of chance and power,
>they were able to turn other people's work into a great fortune. The
>computer industry is usually portrayed as one of brave entrpreneurs, but
>it's far more cooperative than that, with a long tradition of believing
>that information should be free, and with a long tradition of government
>subsidy too. The computer and the Internet are basically products of
>decades of Pentagon subsidies, but, as is so often the case, the public
>bears the R&D and startup costs, and capitalists claim the profits.
>
>Doug

But Microsoft did do three things: (i) try to sell at a relatively low
price to a mass market in the hope that demand would be very elastic, (ii)
pay very careful attention to backward compatibility--to making sure that
your old DOS programs would work well under windows and that upgrades came
smoothly and relatively rapidly, and (iii) actually write programs (albeit
not very good programs) in a reasonable amount of time.

IBM failed to do (iii)--and cratered.
Xerox, Apple, and Sun failed to do (i)--and are now in deep trouble.
Novell, as I understand it, failed to do (ii)--and is now in deep trouble.

Brad DeLong