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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Did he help make computers affordable internationally?

I have a hard time seeing an argument for this. There was a large selection of alternative OS's in the 80's, and one of them would've gotten a dominant position without DOS/Windows, possibly, though not necessarily, giving us a dominant player that would've been far less aggressive about using illegal methods to undermine their competition.

Gates legacy is becoming more positive, but brushing the negative sides under a chair is revisionism.

EDIT: Charming, being downvoted instead of getting a counter-argument. I thought I was on Hacker News, not on Reddit.

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I didn't downvote you, but I'llgive a counter argument.

If you go back to the 80s it was a very different world. Gates foresaw that by licensing the OS and allowing it to run on any IBM PC compatible computer it would commodify HW. Prices on PC HW just started dropping -- margins all but disappeared.

The model virtually everyone else did -- and note the Apple model was the dominant model in this day -- was you did the full stack. Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sun, SGI, DEC, etc all built the HW and the OS -- with healthy margins built it. But they couldn't compete pricewise with MS + commodity HW.

The other thing Gates did was to realize that disruption works from the bottom up. Microsoft became the master w/ disruptive SW. They would come into an existing market with a powerful, but expensive marketleader and offer a weaker, but far less expensive competitor. I think kids nowadays never knew the old days of computing where the fear was that Microsoft would do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price.

What Gates didn't have a plan against was the natural disrpution to MS's disruption -- free software.

People now say, "Microsoft SW is so expensive!", but few recall that early versions of WordPerfect could cost $5,000 per seat.

Microsoft brought prices down for much of software into the $49-$299 range from the $5,000-$10,000 range. Without the licensed OS model that runs on commodity HW, I'm not sure we would have seen such drastic downward pressure on SW pricing.

The point is there were other players with OS's similar to DOS ready to license it. E.g. remember the controversy over how Digital Research supposedly lost out on the contract with IBM? The market for CP/M like OS's (of which DOS is/was one) was not confined to Microsoft. To believe that in that environment if you were to take Microsoft out of the equation nobody else would step in (quickly) seems ludicrous to me.

You want to talk about revisionism and all you do is speculate about what would have happened without microsoft doing this or that.

> Gates foresaw that by licensing the OS and allowing it to run on any IBM PC compatible computer it would commodify HW.

That was happening before gates -- MS-DOS 1.0, renamed from QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) was a clone of CP/M, an O/S that had already been available for essentially every hardware capable 8080 or Z80 based system at the time. MS-DOS was just a clone for 8088/8086 based systems.

The fact that 8088/8086 became the dominant PC architecture (rather than e.g. 68K) has a lot to do with IBM's lack of innovation (they just needed to counter apple's rise, so they built something which was very close to an intel reference design -- making clones easy and mostly legal).

To a lesser extent, this was also happening with Unix.

DOS was a clone of CP/M in the same way as Linux is a clone of Unix ... it preserved some compatibility, but the internals were rewritten from scratch. And that's not a clone in my view.

I also played with a Z80 computer - those things were useless. What made the PC shine was the constant innovation coming from Intel - they didn't stop at 8086.

> I also played with a Z80 computer - those things were useless.

Context is everything. CP/M was already useful in 1973. MSDOS made an appearance in 1981. Which word processor could you run on the PC in 1979? (Yes, that's a trick question ...)

> What made the PC shine was the constant innovation coming from Intel - they didn't stop at 8086.

No. The only thing that made the PC shine is the cheap IBM clones of the time. Motorola's 68K (in 1978) was years ahead of the 8086 (introduced in 1978) -- and it also cost 20 times as much. The same vintage 1978 68K was still years ahead of Intel's 80286. And then Intel almost killed themselves with the 432, which was not backwards compatible and had miserable performance.

Intel returned to usefulness with the 386, that was comparable to the 68030 (same time, and price comparable as well) The 486 was to the 68040. But at that point, the world was unfortunately owned by the PC and x86 architecture.

If you ever programmed for the 68K, and then looked at the mess that is the x86 32-bit architecture, the only possible response is WTF!?!?

"I think kids nowadays never knew the old days of computing where the fear was that Microsoft would do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price."

We now have Google entering your market and offering a better product for free.

And discontinuing it a year later.

Oh no we don't. Claims that Google Docs are better than MS Office are total BS. The free price comes at the expense of your privacy which in invaded by personalized ads. Not to mention much of the world still runs offline whereas Google assumes de facto connectivity in most things they do.

Of course where search, mail,browser and android are concerned, Google has done an excellent job, but for productivity software MS is still the king.

I was referring to the fear, not the actual products. If Google entering your market doesn't scare you, you are either a fool or lucky to be in a defensible position.

The free price comes at the expense of your privacy which in invaded by personalized ads.

And in exchange get a system where when your non-tech-savvy friend breaks their computer their data is still safe waiting for them?

Or when they want to send you a document they just press the share button?

Google Docs and MS Office are very different products, but saying Docs is inherently worse ignores the benefits provided by a web based system that Office just can't provide.

> Oh no we don't. Claims that Google Docs are better than MS Office are total BS.

For many it is, for others it's insufficient. But: "do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price."

The only reason we have MS Office at work is Exchange and Outlook, and that's because we dogfood a component of the service we're providing to our customers. Everything else is taken care by OOo/LO and we have a Google Apps around (used mostly for XMPP) but that one would be put to full use the moment we drop Exchange.

Agreed with offline though.

haha

> one of them would've gotten a dominant position without DOS/Windows, possibly, though not necessarily, giving us a dominant player that would've been far less aggressive about using illegal methods to undermine their competition.

It's worth noting that Apple wanted to control both the hardware and the operating system, just as they do now. I'm glad we don't live in a world with a dominant player controlling both of those.

I think by supporting an enourmous range of hardware they did a titanian task. Apple never had to tackle that problem.

The turning point was when Microsoft licensed DOS to Compaq. This suddenly send hardware prices tumbling and made computers cheap enough to penetrate the corners of the world. This even made Linux possible in the early 90s by leverage cheap hardware. All(or most) of the other solutions were software/hardware tie-ups like Apple and Commodore. Even Apple started taking advantage of this by switching to x86 processors. Also, to MS' credit, they never got tempted to get into the PC hardware market(unlike Google with Android/Motorola) that would've skewed things.

If you think Apple's prices are high now, think what would happen if there no other PC OEMs.

There were several DOS alternatives available. Hadn't Microsoft been there, someone else would have filled that niche quickly. It is simply highly unlikely that removing Microsoft from that equation would have made all that much difference given just how competitive that part of the OS market was.

That's great and all...but they did, not somebody else.

Surely somebody else would have eventually written an open source Unix clone. (Probably not GNU, but somebody.) But Linus gets praised for it, and rightly so.

The did because they got in there first, not because nobody else where willing to license theirs, so this is bogus argument. The whole point is that original claim I addressed about Microsoft making computers affordable is based on the assumption that Microsoft somehow provided something unique at the time. They did not.

There's little basis for thinking that if you were to travel back in time and take Microsoft out of the equation, IBM would not have been able to quickly sign a deal with someone else, and that someone else - or a third party would not have been able to help kickstart the clone industry the same way Microsoft did by being willing to provide a license.

Nonsense. Whether someone else could have exerted a similar downward pressure on the cost of computers does not change that Microsoft did. "Could have" is worth very little.

As mentioned above, there were other OSs and DOS implementations. Nothing unique about MS except their agressiveness.

...and that they succeeded.

>that someone else - or a third party would not have been able to help kickstart the clone industry the same way Microsoft did by being willing to provide a license.

That someone else would have to resist the temptation of making mega billions by tying their software to hardware that they sell at a premium.

I think this is a lot of what people are missing. Microsoft did things differently, and because of that, were successful. Whether or not you agree with their business tactics, their contribution was undeniable.

I don't think anyone here is questioning Microsoft's success. The question is more whether the tactics used by Microsoft to achieve that success (and the consequences of that success for people who weren't Microsoft employees) were admirable or despicable.

I don't think it's binary. They had more than one tactic. Their initial tactics were admirable. Long term, their tactics tended towards despicable. But then again, most large corporations fall down that hole.

Wasn't the turning point when the IBM PC spec was reverse engineered which allowed for clones?

The IBM PC spec was included with the IBM PC (or sold for $100 or so). Schematics, BIOS source code, everything. IBM was meticulously documenting everything, and that was actually common and expected at the time (e.g. I had the same info about my ZX Spectrum; I remember the same info was available for the Apple][ and C-64 at the time).

A defining moment was when the "clean room" approach to implementing a BIOS was certified non infringing by courts. Clones were available (as in, 5 years or so) before that moment, but the BIOSes had a cloud of copyright uncertainty.

How about when Microsoft made it so Windows wouldn't run on DR-DOS?

Though it may not have made too much difference in the long run, given the need to get away from the DOS based architecture.

Digital Research licensed CP/M to everyone; CP/M machines were more varied in hardware than PCs of the time, but CP/M software _was_ portable.

This was already in progress, and Digital Research was already working on CPM86, just too slow and not business savvy. Had microsoft not snatched the IBM deal, PC prices would have probably looked the same, perhaps one or two years delayed.

I have personally witnessed Microsoft bullying in 1990 in a project I was involved with. BeOS (and other alternative PC operating systems) died mostly because of Microsoft bullying. That's a big part of Gates' legacy, and probably will be for a long time to come.

BeOS died because Jobs torpedoed their negotiations with Apple with his return from NeXT. Prior to that, the odds were good that BeOS would become the next OS for Macs.

Apple was the last-chance for BeOS. They were actually gaining ground with PC channels, until Microsoft declared that anyone selling a non-pure-windows system (including dual boots that default to windows) will lose their discount on the Windows OEM license.

Guess how many PCs were sold with BeOS after that happened? At that point, it was Apple or bust. And then it was bust.

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