quote:
Originally posted by Underlord
well m$ bought dos over from ibm...
and sold it and made a shit load...
i think without microsoft other companies would have made other products...
instead of m$ buying up the competition...
and there would be alot more competition that way
Actually MS bought a bastardized version of CP/M, re-wrote it into a DOS system, sold it to IBM as IBM DOS, re-wrote the same thing as MS-DOS only to turn around and sell this to people who infringed on IBM's copyrights by people creating similar systems. Smart move.
Microsoft at one time bought SCO Unix. They wrote XENIX about the same time... Later MS sold SCO. Smart move at the time, the world didn't want *nix on desktops.
Microsoft wrote OS/2 1.0 for IBM... based on LAN MAN. IBM later breached the contract and wrote OS/2 2.0 in house. MS turned around and wrote Windows NT 3.1 at that time to coincide with Windows 3.1 for Workgroups to have a server with to connect other than Lan Man.
MS may buy up competition, but typically if you watch the trends, MS buys up program development firms for products that compliment already existing MS products... see VISIO now in Office 2004.
My only gripe is taking an in-house tool, MSBuddy, turning around and making MSN Messenger/Exchange IM Client, publishing the protocol OPEN SOURCE, and turning around and taking this once free product and making it pay just to retain their ad-revenue base, or whatever seems to be a bit arrogant as a company to anyone in the 3rd party community.
A good counter, if they really wanted to quash 3rd party tools/apps/messneger clients, they'd have done so LONG ago... when they could have patented the protocol instead of open source it. MS is all about fostering competition, just to stay out of court... court costs money
I know MS is out to make a buck. For a good example, MAC is constantly getting financial aid from MS to keep it afloat (and help kick start new innovation by Apple), so yes, we'll still see Mac MSN clients.
But If MS really wants to close the 3rd party development, they should at the very least offer an RPM of a Linux MSN client. Pick someone like RedHat or Mandrake and partner out a MSN client that's approved on their network so the rest of the computer users aren't left out.
I am NOT a MS fan... I'm not currently an MS employee... I'm not a relative of Bill Gates nor any of his fan club's a member.
I agree that MS has the rights to do whatever they want with their servers, but if they truely wanted to make this be a pay only service, at least offer a way for 3rd parties to be a .NET messenger provider service, add-on or client.
Gee... they do some of that, but not enough to promote it to the open source community (read MS makes another buck).
