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Comment by CamperBob | Hacker News Reader

Did proprietary software need to happen to spur innovation?

To the extent that the Wintel monopoly resulted in lower hardware costs, it's hard to see any intellectually honest Linux or BSD user arguing otherwise.

You would not be able to buy 3+ GFLOPS systems with gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of mass storage for less than $1000 without the kind of mass standardization that, history suggests, can emerge only from monopolistic behavior.

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I find it hard to argue that, without Bill Gates, we wouldn't have ended up with a monopoly of some type in hardware/OS. Certainly Microsoft won the race, but it's not like every other player on the scene at the time wasn't trying to do the same thing.

Every single PC maker/OS developer knew that winning the bulk of the market was the key to success. Thus, they were all following similar strategies. I just think it's unlikely, if there was no Gates, that we wouldn't have all ended up on the same platform anyway, and some other company would have had a monopoly.

Possibly. But the question was, was a proprietary OS needed at all? I wasn't defending Microsoft or Intel specifically, just pointing out that the PC revolution damned sure was not going to happen if left up to Apple, Commodore, IBM, and the Unix geeks.

Oh, really? You're actually making the opposite argument: divided technical leadership is what drove most progress in personal computing. Unless you yearn for the days of the IBM mainframe...

The Economics of the Microsoft Case, by perhaps the best technology economist there is, Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.24.7...

Divided technical leadership was, indeed, important, up until the point where the hardware platforms converged. At that point it became a stumbling block to progress in application software.

The problem was that the hardware platforms were converging in terms of functionality, but not at the all-important register and ISA level. Consequently the OSes were not converging at all. Let's assume I don't have time to read a 27-page .PDF -- do the authors address the economic impact of the lack of a common platform for application development?

It's possible that somebody would have duct-taped some sort of graphical shell to CP/M and gained some traction, but at best, they'd have ended up doing exactly what Microsoft did by duct-taping a graphical shell to MS-DOS. People who walk into computer stores want to be told what to buy.

In the end it won't matter, if you believe that HTML is the next platform. In that case we'll all end up running dumb terminals anyway, and it won't matter what chips and what OSes are handling the UI. But that was never something that was going to happen in the 25 critical years between 1985 and 2010, when the commodification of high-performance PC hardware took place. We will not see another "window" of opportunity like that, and we absolutely would not have seen that one happen without Wintel, or something very much like it.

You think we would have worse computer hardware now (for the price) if Microsoft had been less successful? Why do you think that? I don't believe that without MS/Intel we'd have only a bunch of Apple-model hardware manufacturers.

Tough to say. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't have ended up with a market fragmented between Apple, Commodore, Atari, IBM, TI, Sinclair, Radio Shack, and twenty other companies all selling essentially similar hardware with mutually quirky chipsets and incompatible OSes.

That's certainly an accurate portrayal of the state of things in the era before MS-DOS. What would be some arguments to the contrary?

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