"Jeroen Wenting" <jwenting at hornet dot demon dot nl> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > >> > >> Q: Microsoft's Operating System is used over 90% of PCs. If that's > >>not monopoly, i don't know what is. > > > > They got where they are by CHEATING. That is why they are evil, not > > because they have a large market share. > > no, they got their by clever marketing and generally having a product that > was easier to use for the average user than anything the competition made > and a lot more powerful than other products created for their main target > market. > > Microsoft isn't evil, they're not a monopoly either. > If they were a monopoly they'd have 100% of the market and there'd be no > other software manufacturers at all. > Prices would be far far higher than they are today, like they were back in > the days before Microsoft started competing with the likes of Ashton Tate > and WordPerfect corporation by offering similar products at 20% the price > (which is the real reason they got to be top dog, they delivered a working > product for a fraction of the price their competition did, and the > competition couldn't drop their prices that much and remain profitable). > > Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more powerful > than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used only dumb > mainframe terminals.
> IBM's prediction that there would be 5 computers (not counting game > computers like the Comodores and Spectrums) by 2000 would likely have come > true. > I'd be VERY surprised if IBM predicted that there would be only 5 COMPUTERS in *2000* - perhaps you mean 5 *manufacturers* of computers? - unless the prediction was made a VERY long time ago. I think you are giving a badly-mangled version of something I saw when I worked at IBM. About 10 years ago, when I was working at IBM, there was an employee newsletter circulated commemorating the death of Thomas J. Watson Jr., a former CEO of IBM. They cited an old interview with him in which he had predicted that the world wide market for computers would be 3 in the next year; in other words, he expected IBM to sell three of their computers in that year. However, he was not making this prediction in or for the year 2000; the interview had taken place just after World War II - 1946 perhaps - and was for the next year. I wasn't born then but, from what I recall about computer history, selling 3 Eniacs (or whatever model they were making that year) isn't too far out of line with what actually happened. Of course, we are talking about a time when computers were absolutely immense, ran on vacuum tubes (the transistor hadn't been invented yet) and filled very large rooms - and yet probably had less computing power than the average microwave oven you can buy today. Only very large companies or national governments would want or need a computer in those days. Everyone else was still using typewriters - which was IBM's bread and butter in those days - for their business needs. Rhino -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
