On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:49:27 -0700, "David Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
> > I guess I don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying that >Microsoft demanded you pay them per machine you sold under the table in the >absence of a written contract that said that? Or are you simply saying that >they changed the terms of your agreement when it came up for renewal? They were demanding I sell a copy of windows with every machine I constructed, whether the customer wanted or not, even if the customer had us install some other OS. The threat was that I did not comply, they would put me out of business by arranging that my wholesalers would stop selling any MS product to me, with veiled threat of even worse strangulation. What I don't think you understand this threat would was just as effective in putting he out of business as threatening to sending in goons every week to smash my shop to pieces. I could at least have a chance of legal recourse with the vandals. It will be very hard to prosecute MS for their crimes because they commit them much the way the Mafia does. No one has any paper. Everyone was terrified of MS and would never dream of going public. I have talked about this publicly many times because it always looked as if I were going to die in a few years anyway. To put this in perspective, IBM's salespeople made much nastier threats in their heyday. Dick Toewes, head of Inland Natural Gas, was in charge of a tender for a new mainframe to do billing. I was working on the Univac bid at the time. He said that the IBM salesman said to him, "We know you have an eight year old little girl. We know she walks along X street every day on her way to school. It would be a terrible thing if somebody hurt her." I wrote a tender for about $1 million in computer equipment for BC Hydro gas. There were many bidders hoping to get a foothold in a solidly IBM shop. IBM sent a weird chap to see me, dressed as a gangster, talking in a gangster accent, with a strange tic like Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo in midnight cowboy. He made no specific threats, but his act was straight out of Hollywood,"you knows what I means" warning me about the "consequences" of picking anything but IBM, how I might get the reputation as unreliable..." There were the standard tactics on $1 million contracts. Imagine the dirty tricks for the big ones. Mind you, back then $1 million was serious money, especially when you considered the no-bid followons over the years. -- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
