I'm not sure how familiar you are with the state of things in 1993, but Microsoft's dominance in introducing a new OS was not exactly a slam dunk. They faced competition from IBM and OS/2 and UNIX on the client side and Novell, IBM, and UNIX on the server/networking side. And the browser wars were just starting and the office productivity race was far from over.
At that point Win16 is what MS had sewn up. To alienate the user and developer base by forcing them to abandon that installed base of existing programs and code was not something that they were assured they could do enforce "unilateral action". Especially when NT required new(er) hardware, new device drivers, had compatibility issues as it was, was deemed slower, etc... -sc -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 11:43 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: My OS is better than your OS (was: Mac Anti-Malware) [quoting restored for context] On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Jon Harris<[email protected]> wrote: >>> ... market realities (aka user desires) do tend to rule. >> >> Given everything Microsoft has done to get their way that has led to >> the market screaming bloody murder, not to mention bringing quite a >> few anti-trust lawsuits, I'm not at all willing to give them a free >> pass on that. > > It was not end users screaming bloody murder it was companies that lost > money as a result of their practices. Well, several of the anti-trust lawsuits allege that Microsoft's practices effectively locked out competition, hurting the market and limiting consumer choice. You're entitled to disagree, of course. Myself, I've seen far too much evidence that Microsoft uses their market dominance to twist things in their favor. > I don't think the users really cared two hoots and from my OJE they > for the most part still don't care about security. I'm not saying that the market screamed bloody about security. Not at the time, anyway, and indeed, not even that much today for the most part. My point was that I'm not willing to let Microsoft off the hook because of the idea that they "had to" deliver insecure OSes because the market demanded it, or at least, demanded other things for. Microsoft regularly uses their market dominance to enable unilateral action; they could have done so then, too. Indeed, Microsoft's response to the many complaints about UAC in Vista was originally that "security is more important; get over it", and that still holds to an extent. So they're doing that *now*. They just didn't do it back then. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
