[Elecraft] Spilling the HF beans .....

[N2EY at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/3/07 1:44:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
brian-wb6rqn at lloyd.com writes:


> Bill Gates of Microsoft assured IBM that Microsoft had a replacement  
> for CP/M-86 even though they really didn't. (Ah, vapor-ware has been  
> with us for a LONG time.) Microsoft then quickly purchased the rights  
> to a CP/M lookalike called QDOS. That became IBM's PC-DOS which  
> Microsoft then renamed MS-DOS. The rest is history.
> 

That's the story I heard, too. Microsoft had to do some things to QDOS, 
particularly writing documentation and following up with later versions, but that's 
a far cry from developing an OS from the ground up.

But for me, the early success of Microsoft was based on some smart business 
choices by Bill Gates & friends, and by a court decision.

The court decision was the one involving Franklin computers, (remember them?) 
which involved the 'clean room' method of reverse-engineering the IBM-PC's 
BIOS. The courts made it possible for true IBM-PC compatible clones to be made 
and sold legally. 

The smart business choice went like this, as I heard it: 

IBM did not buy exclusive rights to MS-DOS. Gates could sell DOS to anybody 
else who wanted it.

If a company wanted DOS, they could buy it two ways:

1) Pay a certain fee per copy
2) Pay a fixed fee up front, and then a much lower fee per copy. But the 
buyer had to agree to include MS-DOS with every computer they made. Other OS's 
could be included as well, just so long as MS-DOS was part of the deal.

The pricing was adjusted so that option 2) was by far the least expensive for 
the computer makers.

This gave Microsoft big bucks upfront from the fixed fees, which was good. 
But even better, it caused millions of first-time computer buyers to adopt DOS 
as their default OS, simply because "it came with the computer".   

73 de Jim, N2EY


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