scott wrote:
>> I'm not sure how many of these are actually *illegal*, but they don't 
>> command respect.
> 
> AFAIK only #1 is illegal in most cases. 

It's also not what they did. They simply offered a better price on the OS if 
the company included the OS with every machine they sold. If the company 
didn't want to do that, they could buy the OS on a per-unit basis, which 
many small companies indeed did.

It's like accusing them of illegal actions because they offer site licenses. 
Obviously a little more complex, but hard to say actually immoral. It's not 
like there was a lot of choice at the time, even.

> was just because at the time they had the "best" product,

Name an OS that ran on the original IBM-PC that wasn't PC-DOS. Can you name 
one that wasn't just an attempted clone of PC-DOS?

Name an OS that ran on a x86 competitive with Windows 3.x? OS/2? Sure. Name 
another. Was OS/2 better than Win3 in any way that a business user would care?

> Linux was probably too complicated 

Windows wasn't out before MS had a monopoly on desktop OSes. The fact that 
MS actually had a monopoly is what made hardware ubiquitous enough to let 
Linux grow into something useful. You'd never have written a free popular OS 
in the days when you had Apple ][, Atari ST, Amiga, Atari 800, TRS-80 I, II, 
and III, etc etc etc out the wazoo. Only after MS already was popular enough 
that people were building hardware to run Windows rather than vice versa was 
there enough of a hardware base that something like Linux 0.01 could get any 
traction.

>> ...but mostly I hate them because they charge extortionate prices for 
>> a product which isn't actually very good. :-P
> 
> TBH, when you compare the complexity of Windows with other software, the 
> price seems perfectly acceptable to me, in fact it seems quite a bargain.

I think if you were to actually go head-to-head between what Linux offers 
and what Windows offers, you'd find Windows offers a lot more. The 
difference is, to get the system where you just put the install CD in the 
administrator's drive and it goes and installs it on everyone's laptop next 
time they dial in without disturbing them, you need to pay a lot of money 
and learn how to use it. But the functionality is there.

>> Last time I checked, Google doesn't have a desktop OS...
> 
> But they seem one of the most likely candidates at the moment to have 
> any significant impact on Windows sales...

They're still not going to have a desktop OS or a netbook OS. It's Linux, 
running Chrome.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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