(snip) > Microsoft did not "earn" market share through producing decent software that people used and recommended to others. Microsoft bought the market, bought PC magazine reviews with advertsing money, etc etc etc. If the software had been competitive and honestly better than what was available, then that would have been fair. But M$ software has never been "better"; it has only been advertised better and shoved down the throats of computer users better.
> l.d. MS also made very restrictive deals with software and hardware companies. Even IBM buckled under. Shortly after I got started with desktop computers in 1990, I noticed that PC magazine reviews tended to be biased toward the good points in commercial software packages, and I learned not to trust the reviews at all. I remember a favorable review of (Ashton-Tate) Multimate 4 but found that word processor not in the same league with WordPerfect, not even close, some glaring deficiencies. After Borland bought out Ashton-Tate, mainly for dBASE, Multimate became lame-duck, and apparently no other software company was interested. Reason for all the favorable software reviews in PC magazines may be a matter of not wanting to bite the hand that feeds them (advertising revenues), but then the reviews become meaningless.
