From: linstee@dutecaj.et.tudelft.nl (Erik van Linstee)
Subject: Re: FCC will proclaim Microsoft is run by Communists! : )
Organization: Delft University of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1992 20:38:01 GMT

bai@msiadmin.cit.cornell.edu (Dov Bai-MSI Visitor) writes:

>From a previous post by Jeff Sicherman:

>>  Oh, I think there will still be plenty of opportunities for Billy boy if
>>he works at it. However, it may put a crimp in his megalomania. And I fail
>>to see why we have to tailor the marketplace for the most extreme desires
>>of entreprenuers if that results in being to corruption of the market and
>>the detriment of consumers.

>You asked what may happen as a result of FTC actions and I gave
>you my answer. Read some books about successful entrepeneurs if you
>don't believe me.

>When I am buying software I could not care less about BG's personality
>traits. I would worry about them if I wanted to be his girlfriend -:). I
>am not interested in discussing any of his personality traits that
>are unrelated to software writing.

>The marketplace is a place where people are trading _voluntarily_. If
>some government beaurocrats dictate to a software house how it should
>write software it is no longer a market place, but a govermentpalace.

>>  The rules are there and long established and well documented. (Bill
>>could learn a few things about documented rules himself.) All he has
>>to do is follow them.

>Show me where it is written on the books that the same software house
>cannt write both system and applications, or that a company who
>writes system API must give them all to their competitors. It is
>purely an _ad hoc_ invention of the FTC, based on the success of
>a single a company.

>>  Apparently you have developed a new philosophy of applications
>>programming that I have not seen in my 20+ years of it. The best
>>applications programming involves adhereing to the well defined
>>interface supplied by the O/S and not mucking about with and/or in
>>undocumented areas or the internals.

>Wuh ? In the MS-DOS market you cannt avoid knowing a lot about
>the internals of the system and the hardware. Ever heard about
>writing interrupt handlers ?

This is very silly. It is not at all necesarry to write an interrupt
handler for a regular piece of software. In fact, why would anyone
want to go invent the wheel over and over again? There are
libraries you can use to do almost anything these days. No need
to know about the system at all, except for trivial things, like
does it provide graphics or not, does it have a clock or not and
such. Still these things can be solved at the high level language
level.

Erik

>Besides, you say that if something has been so for 20+ years than
>it cannt be better otherwise. Did it ever occur to you that some
>people are innovators and are doing things differently from their
>predecessors ? That is where the danger of FTC rulings are.

>>Jeff Sicherman
>>up the net without a .sig

>Dov
-- 
Erik van Linstee   |   Delft University of Technology   |   I'll be back ... 
----
   We are god, 'cause only we can create the idea of his existence
   in our holy brains...  (Yello)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy