RE: Just wondering...

[Ted Halmrast <tedh@tera.teralink.com>]

I really liked this posting.

On Wed, 30 Dec 1998, Brett Glass wrote:

> ...
>
> Borland International is a particularly good example
> of a company that aided the creation of Microsoft's
> monopoly to its own detriment. I urged Borland
> executives, without success, to support GEM and
> DESQview; they refused. (I wrote some support for
> these environments on my own, in some cases patching
> Borland's runtime libraries, and they refused even
> to license the code for practically nothing.) I warned
> them that by abandoning the Macintosh, they were
> locking themselves into dependency on a competitor;
> they ignored this obvious, commonsense observation.
> Borland supported OS/2 halfheartedly and only to
> the extent that they were paid by IBM to do so, even
> though it was the one alternative to their direct
> competitor's platform. And they refuse, to this day,
> to support UNIX. (Ironically, there was once an

This is one of the main reasons I love UNIX as much as I do.  I currently 
work at a software developer that supports 10-11 flavors of UNIX with 
relative ease.  Because UNIX is (for the most part anyway) a 
standards-based OS, independent software developers don't get locked into 
a OS vendor as easily as they do with other environments that are mostly 
proprietary.  For example, it would be fairly hard to get your UNIX 
product inextricably dependent on Solaris.  Sure, you might have to do 
some work to "port" it to FreeBSD or Linux, but it wouldn't be anything 
like the port to a proprietary OS like Windows, DOS, BeOS, OS/2, or 
Macintosh.

> unreleased Turbo Pascal for SunOS, but it was only
> a bootstrapping platform for the Mac version; it never
> shipped.)

Ted