

Henry Blodget is a Dope - SamAtt
http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/Henry-Blodget-is-a-Dope.aspx

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sanj
I'd never heard about the skeleton crew and the engineers finding their way
around the memory limits. Anyone care to expand on that?

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wglb
I think many of the points tomstechblog is making are wrong. In particular,
insofar as I can remember, ms-dos was really the only choice that business was
making. Yes, there was cp/m, qnx, Coherent, but ms-dos was where it was at.

If his point about ms-dos is in error, then much of the rest of the article is
pretty much off the rails, no?

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madair
I woz there and the article is right. Desqview was GREAT, but wasn't much of a
shell, it was a shell for the shells. OS/2 was on everyone's lips, and many
people thought it was the next big thing. Windows 3.1 was just okay. Windows
3.11 turned the page with the workgroups stuff and that captured a lot of
imagination, even if others were going the same way, it was just easier to
grasp.

And people were ready to stop doing "Reveal Codes" in WordPerfect 5.1, so Word
started driving a lot of Windows adoption.

And like the article alludes to, OS/2 ran like a slug, even after I upgraded
to an astounding 4MB of RAM. In my case I was a bit of a diehard though and
usually ran Windows 3.11 inside Desqview, with a double tap on the Alt key I
could jump between running copies of Windows, as well as DOS and whatever else
I can't remember, maybe OS/2 Warp as well.

Microsoft was most certainly NOT a monopoly. They beat OS/2 fair and square.

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ghshephard
From: <http://www.investorwords.com/3112/monopoly.html>

Monopoly: A situation in which a single company owns all or nearly all of the
market for a given type of product or service.

There is nothing implicit in the phrase "Monopoly" that suggests you didn't
beat other people based on price, performance, features, customer service,
etc...

Microsoft has had a monopoly on the OS and Office Productivity suites for
quite a while, with the OS leading the Office Applications by a few years.

Of course, the pretty much ubiquitous presence of MacBooks around me, at
coffee shops, and in the offices suggests that they may finally be starting to
see some competition in the OS marketplace. And, if the kids these days are
any indication, this trend has a pattern:

<http://itc.virginia.edu/students/inventory/compare/>

I think Blodgett's article was reasonable, and certainly wouldn't refer to him
as a Dope.

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madair
At the time that this article was written, what you're saying was not true. I
struggle to see how your response makes any sense in the context of my comment
or the article. Word was not dominant, WordPerfect was, Windows was not
dominant, which was the point of the article. MS-DOS was dominant, but there
were lots of DOS alternatives.

And when you say "Finally see some competition" you're just demonstrating
exactly what the article is talking about, discussion that sounds
knowledgeable of the history, but isn't.

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embeddedradical
worth paying attention to: *"Windows took off because a small team had the
freedom to go of on their own and do something great."

