Re: Not "Satanism;" realism.

[Mitch Stone <mstone@vc.net>]

--- From a message sent by stan johnson on 1/2/99 3:30 PM ---

>First, I do not mean to imply that we should be grateful over the M$   
>involvement. Not at all. I fervently wish that IBM had chosen an   
>honest company to deal with, and had made decisions with some   
>semblance of a brain. But I think (I'm not an historian) that the   
>personal computer field would be *much* less developed had IBM not   
>enabled the clone industry. I do think there is some cause to be glad   
>that IBM didn't [wasn't able to?] prevent clones. M$ is not a necessary   
>element of that whatsoever.  

I believe the industry would be much _more_ developed today had IBM held 
onto the PC architecture copyrights, as they originally intended -- the 
industry would not have gravitated artificially to their hodgepodge 
design. The PC architecture had the very odd distinction of both carrying 
IBM's imprimaturs and effectively falling into the public domain. This 
only worked out well for Microsoft and the clone companies.
 
>Obviously speculating about what might have happened had events   
>been different from what they were can never come to certainty. But   
>I've not seen any suggestion that a similar industry would have   
>developed other than via the PC clone route. Certainly Apple has   
>never shown any inclination to enable any such thing (save one recent   
>desperate gasp). And IBM was able to say then, I believe, 'computers   
>'R us'. 

A much more robust, diverse and competitive industry would have emerged, 
IMHO.

The clone experiment might have eventually worked for Apple had they been 
willing to bleed the kind of money ($5 billion plus?) IBM bled after 
losing control of their intellectual property. Of course they would be 
out of business by now, but it would make a nice epitaph, I suppose.

Mitch Stone
mstone@vc.net