Hacker News Reader

Comment by cooldeal | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com