[opendtv] Re: I'm starting to feel sorry for, and worry about, Apple

  • From: Tom Barry <trbarry@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2010 09:29:45 -0400

Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> At 3:25 PM -0500 8/4/10, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
>> Obviously Craig, as in almost all of our other disagreements, I do
>> not agree with you, because I am convinced that you are confusing
>> cause and effect.
>>
>> The Microsoft dominance only happened as a result of the PC
>> dominance, i.e., after the fact.
>
> Yes, we disagree!
>
> Technically, Microsoft was the "junior partner" when IBM launched the
> PC business. I agree that the ability for many companies to build PC
> hardware DID influence the uptake of PCs, especially at companies that
> prefer having multiple sources from which they can purchase.
>
> But the reality is that neither IBM nor Microsoft opened the platform
> to competitors. It was the design of the PC around the core BIOS, and
> the ability to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS chips that allowed the
> platform to become an "open standard."
>
> But it did not take long for Intel and Microsoft to dominate the PC
> landscape. There's a good reason that the term Wintel came to
> represent the monopolistic practices that allowed MS and Intel to
> dictate and control the evolution of the PC in the '90s.
>
> If you want to see a fair discussion of this check the Wikipedia
> article on Wintel, which begins with the history of the PC market from
> its inception in the '80s.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintel
>
I had one of the very first PC's of anyone in the Detroit area (or on
this list) having mail ordered one from the Chicago Sears PC center in
early 1982 for a monstrous $4200 or so.   I also successfully lobbied
Compuware Corporation where I spent much of my career to get their first
3 PC's to get us familiar with that space. IIRC, the process involved
getting fairly drunk on the company yacht and making a nuisance of
myself all evening ranting at the company owner and chairman about
missing a new wave of technology.  But it appeared to work.

We talk about the IBM PC being an open architecture but I remember
calling IBM support at the time and being told that if I opened the case
to put in a memory card and a hard drive then IBM would void my
warranty.   Of course I did it anyway and IBM retracted that statement
shortly thereafter.

The supposed openness came more from IBM not giving a whole lot of
thought to legal protections to cloning at first so things like the
Phoenix bios and the Compaq clones could be developed without being sued
out of existence.  IBM immediately tried to rectify this but it was too
late. I remember only a couple years later listening to a presentation
by an IBM sales engineer about the new IBM PS/2 machines with the fancy
improved micro-channel bus architecture.  The engineer was crowing they
had made it so wonderfully proprietary and all locked up by patents that
nobody would be able to legally clone it.

And for the most part that was true.  For the most part nobody bought it
either, greatly for the same reason. And IBM is long out of the PC
business now.

It is a general rule that if you spend more sweat and dollars protecting
your technology instead of making it better then you will eventually
lose your market and have nothing to protect.  (see TV ;-) )

- Tom


 
 
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