On Wed, 6 Sep 2006, Diane Poremsky wrote:
Copycat is as logical reason as Mrs. Gates - I will leave it
to others to comment on Microsoft's track record on original
ideas. :)
Such as the "original" product itself? <VBG>
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<http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/business/bill-gates/>
"Micro Soft (later renamed MicroSoft)'s money was to be made
selling software, and while this might seem logical, at the
time it was not the norm. Computers, especially for the
hobbyist market, were so expensive and so time-consuming to
build out of kits, that a natural social set of users and
owners would trade any software they constructed freely,
looking at the software as icing on a cake and hardly anyone's
bread and butter. Bill's company had written a port of the
BASIC programming language (previously seen on other machines,
and which Bill neither designed nor paid royalties for the use
of) and this software, retailing at over $600 in 1975, was
freely traded among the different computer owners, since, well,
six hundred dollars is a lot of f*****g money. This drove the
young Gates ballistic, and in that year he fired off what
became known as "The Letter", or "An Open Letter to Hobbyists",
in which he decried this outward theft of his (ported,
design-lifted) product.
The letter drips with ironies, as Gates asks a group of people
to stop taking his software and using it for free, when in fact
his entire distribution model had depended on these very
groups, and his product wasn't his exclusively in the first
place. Needless to say, these sort of demands became much
easier once Gates' company essentially corralled the entire
market under its wing."
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BTW there is a great mug shot of billg on the web site above.
Yup, that's right... an actual mug shot, from when he was
busted in New Mexico, supposedly for running a stop light. :D
This dude probably looked like he was 14 right up until he was
44. <LOL>
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