4a55db29$1@news.povray.org...
> Really? Interesting... I have yet to see a single netbook that doesn't 
> come with Linux.

Look harder then...
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-308158.html
The Linux netbook for the masses seems mostly DOA. Of course MS could 
completely bork the release of Windows 7 "netbook edition" but even then...

G.

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>>> Do you also think Coca-Cola is wrong for banning pubs and restaurants
>>> from selling Pepsi?
>>
>> Yes. (It's news to me that they can legally do this...)
> 
>     Both Pepsi and Coca Cola do this in the US. They offer a nice rate 
> if the business signs an exclusive contract. It really, really sucks.

They offer a nice rate if the business signs an exclusive contract? Or 
they won't sell to the business at all if they don't sign an exclusive 
contract?

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>> Really? Interesting... I have yet to see a single netbook that doesn't 
>> come with Linux.
> 
> Look harder then...
> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-308158.html
> The Linux netbook for the masses seems mostly DOA. Of course MS could 
> completely bork the release of Windows 7 "netbook edition" but even then...

Well, bareing in mind that I'm not really interested in netbooks myself, 
I haven't been paying too much attention. However, every shop I go into 
that actually sells them, has only Linux on offer.

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> Windows is slightly unusual in that it's a product that goes with another 
> product (but the other product is useless without it - or some other 
> manufacturer's equivilent). The only analogy I can come up with is 
> Goodyear ordering Ford not to sell cars that have tires that aren't 
> Goodyear,

No, the analogy would be that Goodyear says to Ford that it will charge 
double for tyres if it sells any cars without Goodyear tyres.  Yes that 
already happens in other business areas (ok not usually double the price).

> According to the history books, the story goes that IBM wanted an OS, 
> Gate's mum knew somebody at IBM, so Gates stole an OS off one of his mates

Hehe, I think you'll find he *bought* it, from someone who would end up 
working at MS anyway (developing the OS, one would assume):

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm

> It's news to me that Microsoft does have to share their secrets.

The latest EU ruling said they had to share source code and protocol 
specifications for their server networking stuff.  The massive fines they 
were getting on a daily basis were because they had failed to do this 
(originally they just provided the source code to competitors, but 
apparently this was not enough).

> Sure. The only other possibility I see is Apple, and they won't.

Of course, because if Apple sold their OS to work on generic hardware nobody 
would buy Apple hardware :-)

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scott wrote:
> Can you imagine if MS said Windows 7 would only run MS software?

Can you imagine if MS said XBox would only run MS-approved software?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Insanity is a small city on the western
   border of the State of Mind.

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Invisible wrote:
> Not really. Microsoft gains customers by illegally preventing choice. 

You are once again being confused about who Microsoft's customers are.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Insanity is a small city on the western
   border of the State of Mind.

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Invisible wrote:
> Sure. But *respectable* business do this by legal means.

If you're talking about the anti-trust things, one thing to remember is that 
in the US, you can lose an anti-trust lawsuit even if you're *not* doing 
anything anti-competitive. If you just happen to have such a good product 
that nobody buys the competitor's, you can get sued and lose.

The rules on what you are and are not allowed to do are very vague and very 
easy to get caught up in.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Insanity is a small city on the western
   border of the State of Mind.

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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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Invisible wrote:
> According to the history books, the story goes that IBM wanted an OS, 
> Gate's mum knew somebody at IBM, so Gates stole an OS off one of his 
> mates and made it work on the IBM PC. IBM PCs became popular for some 
> reason, and the rest is history.

I think you have a rather twisted telling of that story there. :-)

>> nobody could provide any decent competition back then.
> 
> I doubt that was the reason.

Name two competitors. Were you even in the market at the time it was hashing 
out?

> I wasn't referring only to Windows; M$ make other products as well. 
> (Most notably Office, but also things like VisualStudio, IIS, Exchange, 
> SQL Server, etc.) Other people manage to make similar products which 
> work significantly better, 

Do they? What works better than Exchange?

-- 
   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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Invisible wrote:
> They offer a nice rate if the business signs an exclusive contract? Or 
> they won't sell to the business at all if they don't sign an exclusive 
> contract?

Nothing stops the business from going somewhere else, buying the stuff, and 
reselling it. There are lots of small shops that would build you a computer 
to spec and then buy a copy of Windows and install it for you.

MS just gave better rates to those who would do the install themselves. Part 
of it was you could look at how many computers were sold and just bill for 
OSes based on that. MS didn't have to take the word of the OEM about how 
many machines were sold with Windows and how many machines were sold without.

-- 
   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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