4 ms·
>Silverberg writes Gates didn't engage the government and politicians early on because he believed the company was competing fairly and creating enough value fo
by Nokinside 11y ago
>Silverberg writes Gates didn't engage the government and politicians early on because he believed the company was competing fairly and creating enough value for the customers. But that approach was a "disaster," he writes, as it essentially made the US government and the EU to "declare war on Microsoft."
This is bullcrap. Microsoft was the 800 pound gorilla and played as dirty as they could against smaller competitors using every inch of their monopoly power.
MS had OEM's in their leach and they used blackmail and threats against them to keep them from preinstalling anything but MS sofware in PC's.
Software startups in the PC-era were routinely shafted. If their product was good and MS wanted it, they had to sell to MS or MS would attack them and build competing product that was pre-installed. They also hired engineers from competing firms without requirement to work, copied the product and bled the competitor in the courtroom, hided necessary apis from competing products. MS made so much money they could afford to lose in court if it meant that competing product did not make it.
Government was the only instance big enough to stop dirty game MS played.
- yuhong 11y agoMy favorite is the OS/2 2.0 fiasco, and I think it was Bill Gates that also partly made the initial decision in the first place, right?
- hga 11y agoThe key decision there was made by IBM previously, they'd told their legion of CIOs that the PC-AT was the last personal computer they'd have to buy for a long while. Which required the foundational OS/2 1 to run on the brain dead protected mode of the 286; much of the ensuing mess resulted from this requirement....
- yuhong 11y agoI know, but 32-bit OS/2 was the era most of the unethical stuff that attacked OS/2 was done by MS for example.
- webreac 11y agoI fully agree with you, but this does not contradict the article. If the lobbying effort of Microsoft was more developped, Microsoft would not have been stopped by government. It was an error for Microsoft even if it is in the benefit of whole world.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoI find it bizarre that people would freely admit that a CEO should've made corrupting politicians a priority. How are we going to address corruption in politics when we're so apathetic when it shows up?
- Gravityloss 11y agoAnd he compares to Intel, which was much more successful. Time for more investigative journalism?
- ZenoArrow 11y agoWouldn't mind reading a story about the Intel lobbying. In terms of the next steps (in the US at least), I'd hope there could be greater awareness and support for Wolf PAC and similar initiatives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC
- achow 11y ago> ..Or MS would attack them and build competing product that was pre-installed. This is a myth. A typical corporation was/is so fragmented internally and have so many fires already burning that it is very difficult for them to copy something successfully - this of course applies to high stake products and not small feature sets. Case in point from the era under discussion - Microsoft's FrontPage acquisition. Relevant excerpt from the excellent HBR book review of 'High Stakes, No Prisoners' - the book written by founder of FrontPage and his experience around the acquisition.. FrontPage’s code was so impressive that Vermeer (FrontPage) hardly needed to sell any software before the big competitors came calling. Even a company like Microsoft, willing to commit substantial resources to win market share, may find a well-established proprietary standard difficult to dislodge. Rather than assign a team of programmers to invent a tool to compete with FrontPage, Microsoft found it expedient to pay a huge premium to acquire Vermeer directly. Vermeer essentially beat Microsoft at its own game of lock-in. And without that aggressive software code, Ferguson admits, Vermeer wouldn’t have stood a chance. The start-up lacked even a minimally adequate distribution operation and sold only a few hundred copies of FrontPage before the acquisition. ‘Beating Microsoft at Its Own Game’ https://hbr.org/2000/01/beating-microsoft-at-its-own-game https://hbr.org/2000/01/beating-microsoft-at-its-own-game
- blincoln 11y ago> This is a myth. If it's a myth, how would you describe what Microsoft did to Netscape with Internet Explorer?