I seen it before. I saw the reaction of classmates when I abandoned the Apple II platform which we had been introduced to at RIT for the PC. (Rochester NY Institute of Tech., more hardware oriented and into hands on hotsolder hacking than MIT)
I looked at the 'open source' of the open architecture of the PC, and at the reaction of Apple to Franklin when it cloned them, and saw that the single source proprietary model which Apple was trying to protect would be driven to the peripheral by the competitive price pressure of the open architecture IBM PC. Maybe IBM did not understand, but I did, as soon as I popped the hood, see that if they could go to Tandon, Western Digital, Seagate, Intel, and half a dozen more well known manufacturers... so could I, and put to gather my own pc. Which is just what Compaq did. The only thing that IBM actually made was the case and the keyboard. But then, they'd been making keyboards in their Selectrics for decades, and really had that down tight. I still use, and look for, IBM keyboards. And, I remember the 'steep learning curve' trying to change from the Apple os to DOS 2.17... and, frankly, it is worse changing from DOS to Linux, but then, Linux does so much more, has so much more hardware to deal with, so many options, functionality. And I see exactly the same attitude among the Windoz users today I saw in my classmates back then. Nobody wanted to bite the bullet, and since there are still Mac users around, I spoze there'll be windoz too for quite a while. But within three years, classmates who had expressed resistance to the PC had their own clones. And while the Linux learning curve is steep, it is so far more for those trying to install and setup rather than ordinary users, many of whom would not notice the diff. But what business honchos have noticed, is that IBM now sells servers with Linux/Apache loaded. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." That fact, that the corporate icon, the main computer in the building is running on Linux, will have all the bigwigs wanting Linux on their own desktops so they can get some of the cache of power represented in servers. And that fact will do far more damage to Microsoft than any decisions made by the courts. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
