From: root@rkamiga.UUCP (Rick Kelly)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re:  ATARI Canada folds! MicroSoft possibly in trouble!
Distribution: world
Date: 9 Nov 92 12:33:03 EST
Organization: Rick's Amiga

In article <1992Nov9.025641.18841@cc.umontreal.ca> tsirbasc@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Tsirbas Christos) writes:
>Ian@Microshaft writes:
>_______________________
>I am sorry, MARIO, but millions of happy camper MS customers don't agree
>with you. Neither do most of the trade magazines. We do not market junk.
>I test some of what you call "junk" and I can say with confidence that
>I and my team do our best to insure it is not junk.
>_______________________
>
>That's right Ian, you do not market junk (with the notable exceptions
>of Mess-Dos and Windows), but that is not to say that you create
>good, non-junky applications.  Mess-Dos was simply a case of Schlockmeister
>Bill Gates taking the source code for a public domain operating system
>(namely CP/M) and toying with it until he came up with a usable program.  Win-

1. CP/M is not a public domain operating system.  It is a copyrighted
   product of Digital Research.

2. MSDOS 1.0 is based on QDOS, which was written by a Seattle based micro
   company to run on their S100 bus 8086 boards.  Bill Gates bought the
   rights from them.

3. If Digital Research had sued the makers of QDOS at the right time, the
   IBM PC would have probably been running CPM 86, and Microsoft would be
   a distant memory now.

>dows was a case of Mac envy.  As for recent developments, it seems that 
>Microshaft is a) either waiting for Apple and Digital Research to come
>out with something and then copying it or b) buying out a small company
>that makes a better program than Microsoft engineers will ever be able to
>create.  Case in point (regarding the first accusation):  As soon as apple 
>announced voice input technology for Macintosh, guess what Bill and the 
>boyz announced.  A few weeks after Digital Research announced DR.DOS 5.0,
>Bill and the boyz announced Mess Dos 5.0 with the same features (or similar
>features as the DR product).  Not to mention what a disaster DOS 4 was.
>Also Ian, what about the persisent rumour that MS did not have good enough
>programmers to come up with a properly running version of Excel (the first
>time around) and had to hire a programming firm to do the job?
>As for the second accusation, due to the inherent lameness of MS-File, did
>Microsoft try to develop a better product.  NNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
>They bought out Fox-base (which, by the way, is based on the arcane D-base
>language (sounds like Mess-DOS all over)).  Also, I love the thesaurus on
>Microsoft Word 5.0 for the Mac (isn't it the Houghton-Miffin thesaurus soft-
>ware, by the way).  And isn't Microsoft Mail based on the product of another
>small company you guys bought out.

And of course, Borland bought out DBASE.

>You are quite right Ian, Microsoft does not market junk.  But you go to
>very little effort to create what you market and when you do, more often than
>not, you are merely copying the ideas of more creative companies and are following an already established lead.
>BTW, how does it feel to have Apple and IBM co-operating on the Taligent
>operating system, thus shutting you out completely?  Too bad Bill and the
>Boyz shafted Big Blue by dropping OS/2 in favour of Windows.  Now that
>IBM and Apple, along with Silicon Graphics and NeXT will be pushing a
>whole new generation of operating systems and increasingly supporting
>Unix, is MS-Unix that far off, and how much lamer will it be than

MS-Unix = SCO UNIX. ( Microsoft owns ~30% of SCO )

Acceptance of OS/2 2.x is increasing daily.

It appears that Windows NT is more useful as a server OS, than a desktop OS.

--
Rick Kelly		Rick's Amiga		Framingham, Mass.

		think!unixland!rmkhome!rkamiga!root