Re: We learned, was "What Happened to Free Enterprise"

Posted by Tom Jones on May 25, 1998 at 02:45:41:

In Reply to: We learned, was "What Happened to Free Enterprise" posted by Matthew Wulfman on May 24, 1998 at 09:35:35:

: What happened to free enterprise? Well it over matured into something called monolpoly capitalism. The results in the mines, textile mills and places like the Pullman Railcar factory, ........

Noone wants Hersheytown Pa. back, but it's hard to equate this trial to the Bell Telephone and IBM trials, somehow. From their first product Microsoft has been accused of copying and outright stealing of other companys' products. (The MS DOS they sold to IBM has been called a hacked copy of CP/M, and it was a poor substitute product for sure.) They fought and won the "look and feel" war with Apple who claimed they stole the Macintosh's WIMP user interface. The STAC episode, as I recall,started with STAC licensing their disk compression and suing when MS wrote their own version, claiming it was piracy. My own employer sued MS and won over the use of OLE (the drag & drop trick). Now Netscape claims MS wants to, in effect, steal the browser concept. How much of this is the normal practice of programmers to plagarize good ideas into their new magnus opus and how much is market bloodletting I can't say, but I know I would hate to have to buy and kludge together perhaps 30-40 seperately priced utilities to get what Win 95 gives us in one install today.

The companys that should be Microsoft's competition are the likes of Computer Associates, IBM, and Oracle, big software houses past and present. Yet I don't hear them screaming for MS blood, why? Honeywell, NCR and Burroughs were not shy to add their weight to the government's IBM monopoly suit.

Follow Ups:

Post a Followup

Name:
E-Mail:

Subject:

Comments:
: : What happened to free enterprise? Well it over matured into something called monolpoly capitalism. The results in the mines, textile mills and places like the Pullman Railcar factory, ........ : Noone wants Hersheytown Pa. back, but it's hard to equate this trial to the Bell Telephone and IBM trials, somehow. From their first product Microsoft has been accused of copying and outright stealing of other companys' products. (The MS DOS they sold to IBM has been called a hacked copy of CP/M, and it was a poor substitute product for sure.) They fought and won the "look and feel" war with Apple who claimed they stole the Macintosh's WIMP user interface. The STAC episode, as I recall,started with STAC licensing their disk compression and suing when MS wrote their own version, claiming it was piracy. My own employer sued MS and won over the use of OLE (the drag & drop trick). Now Netscape claims MS wants to, in effect, steal the browser concept. How much of this is the normal practice of programmers to plagarize good ideas into their new magnus opus and how much is market bloodletting I can't say, but I know I would hate to have to buy and kludge together perhaps 30-40 seperately priced utilities to get what Win 95 gives us in one install today. : The companys that should be Microsoft's competition are the likes of Computer Associates, IBM, and Oracle, big software houses past and present. Yet I don't hear them screaming for MS blood, why? Honeywell, NCR and Burroughs were not shy to add their weight to the government's IBM monopoly suit.