Mike Miller wrote: > On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Sidney Cammeresi wrote: > >> You are ignoring a lot of evidence. The blogs are filled with info >> coming out of Microsoft about how much of a lumbering behemoth that >> company has become. Engineers buried under layers upon layers upon >> layers of management. Source code changes can take 3-6 months just to >> get from one end of the company to the other. These aren't things one >> fixes just by throwing money at the problem, and that grants that there >> is even someone at the company with vision enough to make the needed >> changes, but I will not grant that fact. > > I hope you are right! > > >> Never mind the historical evidence to the contrary. E.g. IBM which was >> another `unstoppable monopoly.' Unfortunately (for the >> anti-capitalists), IBM fell from dominance not because of trustbusting, >> but because mainframes were rendered obsolete by desktop computing, and >> they did not adapt to this fact. It's not all about who controls the >> means of production if one has the insight to turn an industry on its >> head. > > IBM hasn't been stopped as far as I can see. In fact, they still sell > mainframes. They were first to develop a widely-adopted desktop computer > design. They are currently big Linux advocates. I don't think IBM was > ever as dominant in computing as Microsoft has been in desktop OS software > -- they had HP, DEC, Wang, Cray, etc. to compete with. It takes a long > time for a "lumbering behemoth" to fall! > > Just to be pedantic, IBMs competitors were Univac, Sperry-Rand, Burroughs, GE, CDC, Honeywell and a couple others that escape my memory. HP, DEC, DG, etc. were in the mini-computer market where they got to compete with the IBM System 3x stuff and eventually Sun, SGI, etc. You'll probably notice that none of the mainframe guys are around, except UniSys and I couldn't say whether they still make a mainframe or not - they were big with utilities in the 60's so its possible. IBM was successfully sued by CDC for anti-trust in the late 60's, but by the late 80's they were fading fast. They lost $16B US in 1992, laid off 45,000 people in '92 and another 35,000 in '93. Sort of like GM or Ford today. Lew Gerstner came in 1993 and moved them from being primarily a hardware/software shop to a focus on services. Linux fits into that model fairly well because it doesn't lock people into a proprietary model - the way IBM use to do business. MS needs an IBM moment and someone with a completely new vision to replace Balmer. I can't think of anything new from MS since NT 3.51 - OK, there is the XBox, but they've been milking the NT code base for a long time. --rick