Chambers wrote:
> IIRC, IBM wanted an OS and a BASIC interpreter.  They went to MS for 
> MS-BASIC, and said, "By the way, do you have an OS?"  MS purchased QDOS 
> from some other guy, then licensed it to IBM.
> 
> The other guy started b*tching because he only got the one flat fee 
> instead of all those licensing fees, but hey, he's the one who signed 
> the deal.

The way I heard it was that Gates got some code off a mate and then 
decided to sell it for money, pretending it was his own. And the other 
guy was naturally a little upset that somebody was selling his product 
without his permission.

The facts of the story you present are significantly different.

>> Sure, nobody forces web developers to use IE-specific extensions. Yet 
>> 90% of all websites work properly only if you use IE.
> 
> Have you surfed the Web recently?  I haven't used IE in years.  I've 
> been using Firefox and, more recently, Chrome, and I can't remember the 
> last time I had a page display incorrectly.
> 
> Granted, there are pages that check the useragent string, and then give 
> you a *message* saying they might not work properly... but then they 
> proceed to work properly.

At work, I use two web-based applications which actually don't work 
without IE. (And work correctly only with certain versions of it, for 
that matter.) In general, most sites out there do now work with Firefox, 
although it definitely depends on which kind of sites you visit. I'm not 
sure if more sites work with Firefox because the web is becomming more 
standards-compliant, or because Firefox is getting better at emulating 
the brokeness of IE...

>>> Nobody's forcing you to use it.
>>
>> I'm sure this one has been argued to death. While *technically* this 
>> is true, the reality is that M$ has carefully engineered a situation 
>> where little viable alternative actually exists. (Let's face it, if 
>> somebody else was producing decent software, M$ would go under fairly 
>> quickly.)
> 
> So, first you complain that MS sucks, then you admit that everyone else 
> sucks worse.

No, I said M$ has carefully arranged it so that you don't have much 
choice. They deliberately stop people from making better products. Or if 
better products get made, they make it as hard as possible for regular 
users to be able to use them.

I wouldn't mind if M$ was top dog because they actually made the best 
products, but that's simply not true. They're top dog because they use 
trickery to keep the competition out.

> Maybe you just don't want to admit that making software is hard, and MS 
> is doing they best they can given current market conditions and user 
> requirements?

Yes, making software is hard. Making software is *so* hard, in fact, 
that a bunch of people who don't even have access to the spec for the M$ 
Word file format managed to write a word processor that reads M$ Word 
files more reliably than M$ Word itself, and can repair files that M$ 
Word cannot. Clearly M$, the richest software producer on the face of 
God's Earth, is doing the very best they can.

(The best they can to screw you out of money for an inferior product, 
that is...)

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