From: rwh@moose.cccs.umn.edu (RICHARD HOFFBECK)
Subject: Re: Is Microsoft the next Standard Oil?
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Reply-To: rwh@moose.cccs.umn.edu
Organization: Colon Cancer Control Study, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 16:16:00 GMT

In article <1992Dec29.225839.15668@noose.ecn.purdue.edu>, helz@ecn.purdue.edu (Randall A Helzerman) writes:
>  
> By "Dumping" I assume you mean selling something below what it costs to
> produce it.  However Microsoft hasn't been doing that--even when you factor
> in the cost of developing Windows--selling a million copies of it a month
> at $8 a copy still isn't selling it below cost.

I had a professor in graduate school who use to cite a study showing that for a
product to enter a market with an established standard, it had to be at least
20% more efficient than the market leader.  To remain in the market long term,
it had to be 40% more efficient.  And to become the new market leader it had to
be more than 75% more productive than the current standard.  For example, the
Dvorak keyboard is more efficient than QWERTY, but not sufficiently so to make
the switch worthwhile.  

From my point of view, the problem faced by companies like DR-DOS is that the
current price for DOS (which Gates claims sells at the $100M/month level)
provides Microsoft with a substantial profit.  If the vendor actually pays $8 a
copy for DOS, I don't think that there is anyway for DR-DOS to offer their
product at an positive price that won't fall below my f**k-with decision point. 
Its no more worth my time to screw around with the OS to save a few bucks than
it is to drive all over town trying to save 2 cents a gallon on gas.  DR-DOS
simply doesn't provide enough added value to make it worth my time and effort.

Novell on the otherhand does provide enough added value with their network
operating system to get people to deal with the associated incompatibilities.
Novell has a sufficient market presence to 'force' other software vendors to be
'Novell compatible'.  It may not run on Lantastic or Starlan, but it WILL run
on Novell -- even WorkGroups for Windows will co-exist with Novell! I believe
that NeXT is Novell compatible out-of-the-box, DEC PathWorks provides Novell
compatibility even though PathWorks is a hack of LanMan and so on. Now they've
bought up AT&T UNIX, and it is clear that they intend to try and make their
software as standard on networks as DOS is on PCs.  Should we break them up?
Should we flood the DOJ with letters claiming that the USL sale would be
anti-competitive?

> With OS/2 and NeXTSTEP (both of which can run DOS _and_ Windows programs) 
> Solaris, and Pink, I don't think Microsoft has faced as many competitors 
> in its history.

DOS is rapidly turning into an application rather than an OS :-) 

Don't  forget to add SoftPC for the Mac and the various 'merge' products under
UNIX. I'm curious, IBM has source rights, Sun uses SoftPC or an optional 386
board, NeXT uses SoftPC and the UNIX 'merge' products use to require a DOS
license.  Does SoftPC emulate the 80x8x and DOS, or does it emulate the chip
and then run DOS within the emulator?

I recently read an article (Dobbs, Unix Review or similar rag) to the effect
that GUI applications spend an average of 60% of their time executing in the OS
and only 40% in the application code.  This makes the future potential for
cross-platform emulators extremely interesting; especially, when you consider
the move towards micro-kernel OS models.


--rick

Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy