>George,
>
>>snip<
>
>>>I mean, isn't that what competition is all about??? *bg*
>
>>The thing that gets me, Doug, is that part of the reason for the success has come through the competition falling on its face. I'm fairly familar with Lotus products. I hate them and here's why:
>
>SO ABSOLUTELY TRUE!!
>
>Have you seen the PBS show where Ballmer and Gates talk about how they sent IBM to see Gary Kildal at Digital Research and how they were dissed? I seem to recall that Gary's wife really insulted them or something, making them stand outside while waiting for Gary to get back.
>
>IBM went back to Microsoft in desperation and they said they'd get the product done. Paid Seattle Computing 50,000 for the rights to their 8080 conversion of CP/M. Then, to topit off IBM really screwed up with respect to licensing of DOS. Apparently they thought the market would be so small they put no restrictions on Microsoft about selling the product to others.
>
>I've got to think that there are some folks "out there" who would like to roll the clock back. <g>
>
Oh yeah!:-) And I've seen the PBS show you're talking about.

I've felt for years that IBM has zero understanding of the PC and its market. Personally, I think it has something to do with the corporate culture, but that's my take. I can't recall one decent piece of PC software that IBM itself produced. My initial take on the IBM buyout of Lotus Development Corp. was, "Well, that's the end of Lotus".

The funny thing is that they apparently don't learn from their mistakes. They bring out the Intel PC, open archecture and all. Then when it comes time to upgrade some of the internals, they bring out a proprietary bus (the MicroChannel), and try to charge outrageous licensing fees. The thing was a better bus, but IBM botched it.

Some of this is true of the Mac. Better OS and chipset for a GUI interface, but it's proprietary (or was until recently). The turn around at Apple can partially be attributed to them opening up the system. Or at least that's my take.