From: phaedrus@halcyon.com (Mark Phaedrus)
Subject: Re: Mac OS on PC
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 06:35:27 GMT

In article <cjs2z6m@rpi.edu> deweeset@ptolemy3.rdrc.rpi.edu (Thomas E. DeWeese) writes:

>                                                           There are two 
>"rumors" I have heard which, if true (which really is for a court of law
>to decide), mean that MS is no longer compeating in a free market enviorment.
>the two things I have heard are:

>1).  There were several parts to Windows 3 that were left out so that they
>could later introduce upgrades (in a free market system they should have
>to put out the best product they can in order to compete).

     Even if this is true (and I wouldn't be surprised if it is), it has
nothing to do with anti-competitive practices and is not illegal.  A company
is perfectly free to cripple its own product to whatever degree it chooses.
If I want to put out a word processor that can't edit files more than 4K long,
it's perfectly legal for me to do so... and perfectly legal for you not to
buy it.  The fact that I plan a later upgrade that handles much larger files,
or even the fact that I already have such an upgrade programmed, is not
relevant.  It may well be in my best long-term interest to provide that
functionality in the first place, but there's no law that says I have to.
     What Microsoft is definitely doing, and what IMHO _does_ constitute
anti-competitive practices, is almost exactly the opposite.  By unfairly
obtaining undocumented information from the operating-system division, the
applications division of Microsoft is able to add features to their products
that other application manufacturers cannot add without a much higher
investment of development time and expense.

>2).  All of MS's Windows apps are designed so that they will NOT run on any
>other OS other than MS Windows.  This is a move that will strongly affect
>sails of other OS's.  But in a free market they should be interested in
>having there programs sell as widely as possible (this may be related to
>confict of interests).  BTW what I mean by they will not run on any other OS
>is not that they won't run under Mac OS,  but that systems that attempt to
>simulate Windows will not be able to run MS applications.  A good example
>is OS/2.  Virtually every non-MS application runs, but virtual no MS apps
>run.

     Again, this is not illegal.  There's no law, and IMHO no ethic, that
states that I have to bring my applications out on every possible platform.
Case in point: When Apple came out with their ProDOS operating system, they
intentionally made it refuse to run on cloned Apples.  This wasn't just a
matter of using incompatible code; they deliberately checked the ROMs and
refused to let their software run.  There's nothing whatsoever illegal about
this; the package specifically said it ran only on Apple's computers.  If a
company chooses to come out with a series of products that you can only use
if you already have some other product of theirs, that's perfectly fine.  And
again, you're perfectly free not to buy any of them.

     Mind you, I'm not saying that Microsoft shouldn't be broken up; I think
there's valid reasons for doing so.  But not these particular reasons. :)
-- 
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