I said “make it available” “not make it.” In other words, unlike Apple with its OS, Microsoft offered DOS and then Windows to all hardware manufacturers.
I suspect Apple will be dragged kicking and screaming into the open playing field for iPads (and phones). For example the major disappointment/flaw from my perspective was that iWhatevers don’t natively read SMB network shares from Windows servers. Sure, they’re aiming at the concept that “here’s the app, and here’s its collection of data”. But, so much data is massaged by multiple varieties of programs, that I don’t think that’s sustainable in the networked world.
But they did create the iPad and make the iPhone the beast it has become, so someone had a good vision. I remember after I got my first iPod with a tiny colour screen (and that wheel control) and my brother-in-law the investor guru asked me if I thought Apple had enough bigger-and-better up it’s sleeve that he should hold on to his stock. (would have been early 2000’s…) I cleverly said “yes”. I was right.
And I’m saying “no they didn’t”. Microsoft did not provide DOS for the Commodore Amiga. Microsoft did not provide DOS for the Apple II. Microsoft did not provide DOS for the Commodore 64 or the Atari ST.
The software was specifically aimed at the IBM PC and originally ran only on the IBM PC.
Later, it ran on IBM compatible clones because they, were, well, deliberately designed to be IBM compatible clones.
If someone back in the mid-to-late 80s had backward-engineered the Mac ROM and any other proprietary chip in the Macintosh, they could have sold Mac clones on the same basis that Compaq and other companies produced “IBM-compatible” clones. They didn’t. Reciprocally, if the clone makers had been equally unable to backwards-engineer IBM’s PC architecture, Microsoft would have had no one to offer DOS to except IBM’s PC.
IBM was not out dancing in the streets with joy about the clones, and indeed has been effectively run out of the market — they spun off their PC business to Lenovo.
Now, if you wanted to express what you said strictly in the present tense, that’s a different story. Due to hardware convergence, a Macintosh isn’t drastically different from Windows PCs and indeed it can boot Windows natively, and yes there’s no reason other than “deliberate intent” that keeps MacOS X from booting natively on a Dell or any other PC. (Apple is, after all, both the producer of the Macintosh and Mac OS X; unlike Microsoft, they have a vested interest in reserving their operating system for their own hardware, to the extent that they can).
My point is that Microsoft didn’t start off with a different strategy than Apple for the use of its operating system. They didn’t become ubiquitous because they wrote DOS for zillions of machines. They wrote DOS for one machine. They became ubiquitous first because that one machine was from IBM, and then because of the clones, which were not of their doing.
You think that if someone had tried to sell Mac clones that Apple wouldn’t have sued their asses? Let alone the fact that Apple didn’t sell its OS to OEMs.
The first thing that happened was the Bill G snookered IBM by retaining the right to sell MS-DOS to anyone. Yes, they had purchased an early version from a company called Seattle Computing and modified it for the original IBM-PC. The only proprietary thing in the PC was the BIOS, which IBM owned. A company whose name I cannot recall then produced a “clean room” version of the BIOS that they sold to anyone who wanted it for $290,000. IBM had published a listing of the BIOS so that any third party programmer could see how to use the provided functions and this company had one person read the code and write specs based on it and another person code the same functions. Once that was done, anybody could make a clone and Microsoft would sell MS-DOS to anyone. Eventually, IBM tried to fight back by making new proprietary BUS and OS designs, but it never really caught on. First they made the OS so that it could run software designed for MS-DOS to take advantage of the large base of existing software. But this made it unnecessary for programmers to make OS2 specific software and the high price of IBM PCs put finis to IBM’s experiment with personal computing.
The funny thing about Dvorak’s column, the one linked above, was that by 1992, IBM was pretty much out of the PC business. But his prediction put me in mind of a business who predicted sometime in 2000 that Amazon would be out of business within 6 months.
Slight correction: IBM and Microsoft were still working together on OS/2 when Windows 3.1 came out, the idea was that Windows would be the low-end OS used temporarily and OS/2 would be for high end “now” and everyone in the future. The Windows release wasn’t throwing IBM under the bus, it wasn’t until well after Windows was a success that tensions between MS and IBM programmers and managers led to them breaking off joint development. The ‘throw them under the bus’ release was actually Windows NT.
Had MS never sold OSes to the clonemakers I’d agree with your thinking. But they did. Which invalidates or renders moot most of your argument.
The critical thing MS did smartly was A) get the rights from IBM to sell DOS to PC clone makers; and B) Actually sell to the clone makers. In an alternate Universe MS could have turned their nose up at selling to the clone makers and quickly found themselves replaced by somebody else making a CP/M derivative for PC clones, Amigas, Commodores, and all the rest of the platforms you cite.
Even today, if somebody made a cleanroom clone of any Apple device there is no way Apple would sell them the appropriate Apple OS.
That is the huge baseline philosophical difference between the two companies. Both then and now.
Obviously MS was always a pure play software company whereas Apple was joint hardware and software. So their bread was, and mostly still is, buttered differently. Which leads to each making legitimately different decisions in superficially similar situations.
There’s no need to speculate about this because Apple hardware is just generic PC hardware in a (maybe) nicer case. As such, you can just buy off-the-shelf hardware that matches Apple products and build a Hackintosh. It is of course totally unsupported and possibly illegal (depends on how enforceable the EULAs are), but in any case the barrier isn’t technology.
Weirdly, though, with the Surface tablet and laptop computers, Microsoft for the first time is selling its OS on its hardware. This was something they shied away from, because they didn’t want to compete with the hardware partners.
I hadn’t followed Mac hardware all that closely to know they’d fully converged on the PC platform. I knew they were driving in that direction and had been for years. I recall being hands-on in the days of needing different ROMs on hard drives and different shapes on RAM sticks. Thanks for the update.
Agreed. I’m writing this on a Surface (2 non-pro; long live WinRT!!).
Surface’s release was a first for them and caused much hand-wringing in the MS-centric ecosystem and in the punditocracy when this strategic change was revealed. Today several other hardware makers make Surface-equivalent devices. Overall Windows’ share of the total tablet market is pitiful, but within the Windows sub-market it seems the MS-branded hardware has a decent, but not commanding fraction. IOW, the dire predictions of ruinous channel conflict and MS rigging the game against e.g. ASUS, were wildly overblown.
As a separate matter MS has long had the minor sidelight in mice & keyboards although I never really understood why they bothered. I bet their total HID revenue wouldn’t be a rounding error in the catering budget for the Office dev team, much less the whole company.
What I read is that Microsoft leadership was disappointed in its hardware partners, that they were not offering good enough hardware and were loading systems up with too much bloatware. So the Surface products were a kick in the pants to HP, Dell, Acer, etc.
Sure thing. To be clear, Apple does still have custom, proprietary stuff–for instance, the graphics cards in the Mac Pro use a custom physical design and can’t be replaced with off-the-shelf units. But that’s just form factor; the chips and electrical interfaces are completely standard, and the OS certainly can’t tell the difference between that and an ordinary PCIe add-in card.
I miss TechTV. :mad: