Old Wars Never Fade Away

Chuck Talk writes “The computing landscape is littered with many corpses from battles gone by. The technology wars have been brewing since the inception of the first computing devices; arguably the abacus gave the merchant a much faster calculation tool than his non-abacus equipped customers and rivals. All soon realized that the race to stay in the game is one that means the difference between success and merely being an also-ran.

As I sit and ponder the current messy state of legal entanglements that some are purporting to be good business practices, I cannot help but wonder what underlying currents remain below the surface. Certainly the hostility between parties must emanate from somewhere. Anger does not simply flash into existence on the whim of one mere tool of corporate greed.

It struck me that there are old battles that have remained unsettled for some time. These battles are reminiscent of times gone by, but they are repeating themselves today. Once again, the Redmond marketing machine rides out with its hordes to declare that they must be given control of the computing environment. Microsoft has not lost their war footing with competitors, no matter how much they play the cowed giant in front of the antitrust overseer (themselves in all reality).

Microsoft failed to kill Novell a decade ago; they dismissed IBM because they had been able to dupe them at every turn, promoting Windows over the better product OS/2. They even promoted Windows when they were invited to speak at OS/2 conferences. Unlike IBM, who did suffer from a real antitrust judgment, Microsoft has not suffered one bit. The market conditions “have not changed as a result of the settlement, and it is very unlikely that any real change will occur under the current Consent Decree.”