How to rool the world by Bill G
Become the main supplier of an OS for PCs while IBM snoozes, replete with profits from existing business. Adopt the 386 processor while IBM messes about with the 286 perhaps because of sunk investment in that CPU. Make deals with the hardware makers they can't refuse and shut out any competition. Introduce the first GUI to become widely used on the machines soon to become predominant in desktop computing. Leave the superior OS/2 in the dust, and get IBM to sell Windows. Excel. Actually first came to fame on the Mac iirc, and rapidly drove out just about all other spreadsheets in its Windows guise. On its coattails came all the other applications we know today as MS Office, effectively wiping out all competitors. Get networking in the box with Windows and crush Netware and eventually Novell with it. And so it went until perhaps MS became like IBM in the 1980s and failed to see the next big thing on several occasions, or at least failed to achieve the same level of dominance as in the past in new fields. 2 cents is the suggested donation, I'll pass the hat around.
On Thu, 19 Feb 2015 17:00:54 +1300, Ian Young wrote:
Adopt the 386 processor while IBM messes about with the 286 perhaps because of sunk investment in that CPU. Make deals with the hardware makers they can't refuse and shut out any competition.
If you remember, the first 80386-based PCs started to ship in 1986. Windows was strictly a 16-bit layer on top of DOS at the time. But the 386 chip had this neat feature called “virtual-86 mode”, which meant that software designed to run in “real” (unprotected) mode on an 8086/8088 processor could be fooled into working just fine within its own little hardware-protected sandbox on the 386. This led to a burgeoning market for “DOS extenders”—layers on top of (underneath?) DOS to provide these sandboxes. Windows was never all that popular during this time. It had to contend with a bunch of competing GUIs being sold to run on top of DOS, such as GEM and GEOS. Or even things that were not quite GUIs, but provided similar multitasking abilities, like DESQview and TopView. Finally, a version of Windows 2.x was released (in 1988, according to Wikipedia) called “Windows 386”, which integrated the virtual-86 mode of the 386 chip so that multitasked DOS applications could each run in their own little window (even though they thought they were running full-screen). This was the breakthrough that made GUIs on DOS machines really popular. Hardly any software was being developed specifically for Windows, yet that didn’t matter, since it was still so useful out of the box with existing DOS software. With Windows 3.x, Microsoft convinced OEMs to include the software in the box, but it was not preinstalled. I can remember stats being quoted by Apple at the time that only about a third of these copies actually got installed, the rest stayed in the box. Windows 95 was the one where OEMs started to ship it preinstalled.
Leave the superior OS/2 in the dust, and get IBM to sell Windows.
All the major software developers of the time (e.g. Lotus, WordPerfect) were concentrating on OS/2. Trouble is, the users were going for Windows (see above). There is a lesson there which we are going through again today (cf Android versus IOS).
Excel. Actually first came to fame on the Mac iirc, and rapidly drove out just about all other spreadsheets in its Windows guise. On its coattails came all the other applications we know today as MS Office, effectively wiping out all competitors.
Like I said, the major competitors were concentrating on OS/2, leaving the Windows field wide open.
Get networking in the box with Windows and crush Netware and eventually Novell with it.
That was actually very hard. Microsoft tried for years with OS/2 (!) LAN Manager, but could never seem to make much headway against Netware. I think it was finally Windows NT that moved the contest to a whole new level, where Novell couldn’t compete.
participants (2)
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Ian Young -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro