If
you go back to history, you can see Microsoft was not a good guy or a
fair player. Success is not due to building a better or a new mouse trap,
but marketing and management that Microsoft once was a tiger and now a
Micky mouse.
There is a rumor that CP/M owners ignored IBM folks'
visit and played golf instead. At that time CP/M was the only commercial
operating system using disk on PCs. These unemployed, former executives must only afford to play miniature golf, but they have good stories to tell to their grandchildren. Gates licensed one DOS from another
company and sold it to IBM for the then new PC.
Microsoft and
Apple copied the Window ideas from Xerox's PARC. Did they pay loyalties
to Xerox? I guess not. Why does Microsoft ask developing countries to pay
loyalties for their own software?
There were better and matured software on
word processing, spreadsheet, mail...from other vendors. As a new comer,
Microsoft could not compete with them, the marketing genius gave their own versions free
(or almost free) to corporations. When they got rid of the competitors,
they raised prices and used their corporation legal department to crush
down any future competitors. They're the poster boy of product dumping
(China is a long, long way from the master).
The multi tasking
of Windows was a joint venture with IBM with the product called NT.
Microsoft was the wolf that wore the sheep's skin. The IBMers wearing business suites, white shirts and white underwear were destined to be manipulated like a puppet by the villains.
However, Microsoft has been in a coma for the
last decade or more. Hopefully Surface is the first wake-up product.
XBox almost did not accomplish the mission when the management almost
stopped the enhancement.
Now I have some shares of Microsoft. I hope
they start a new era and start to make some money for me. You invest in stocks not because the company is Mr. Nice Guy (with the exception of sin stocks like tobacco and offense companies), but the potential of appreciation at acceptable risk.
-----
Back to the original comment on misunderstanding of UNIX, C...
UNIX is a product from Bell Lab
(now a division of ALU), who has more discoveries other than God. I
used to pay them $500 and they sent me a tape with programs, source
codes and documentation to run my company's PDP 11. C is a native
language for UNIX.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Luke:
ReplyDeleteExcellent post Tony, I'm guessing you're an old guy like myself that grew up on this stuff.
I have a "The Bell System Technical Journal" from 1978 which contains and interesting "A Retrospective" by Dennis Ritchie, circa 1978
I found it very interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, Mr. Ritchie points out that (at the time) UNIX was not realtime, had no interprocess communication, and did not have asynchronous I/O. But even more interesting is that he says "In most ways UNIX is a very conservative system. Only a handful of its ideas are genuinely new.
I improved a newly developed compiler by many times. The old C programmers may understand the getc() and putc(), which at the time is better than sex for the programmers.
ReplyDeleteThe problem of running it in the PDP 11 (which was the king one time and if you do not work on PDP, you're a loser) is putc() generates an hardware interrupt (if you do not understand what an interrupt is, you will not understand the rest of my post and you should go back to your homework). I just buffer all the putc() in a buffer and do a buffer write that generates one interrupt instead of 256 interrupts.
This generation of programmers will never understand these problems we faced in the primitive world of the dawn of the computer age. I'm old as a programmer but only have 5 years full time in investing.
If you do not understand the above, I'm too 'technical'. If you do, you're just another old guy like myself. :)