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The way it happens is that rather than offering better PRODUCTS for sale, a RB offers better incentives to BUY. A trivial example is having a sales ...
Treat the customer right.
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A less obvious example is having a well run customer help center with well trained staff so that rather than developing a product which does not require help at all from the provider, the customer is lured ...
Trained, curteous support.
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A third RB tactic is to design in rapid obsolesence of the products. Basically you ...
Value added products.
I don't know LCC. I work for a company in the computer industry (NOT MS). It's sounds like you are reading from our "Core Values".
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While these tactics have become ingrained into the mindset of corporate America, they all violate basic principles of equity. Such as "a fair exchange of value", "the best product at the best price", "fair competition and a fair deal", "may the best man win"...
This is all very nice sounding, but whose standards do you use to decide what is fair... equitable... the best? Government? Business? The public?
You?
The fact that you cannot reasonably dispute, is that the proliferation of the "Bloat" precipitated by Windoze, and others, is the very thing that has driven the advancements in hardware technology that make it possible for the more efficient operating systems to do the amazing things they can today. Supply and Demand. Economics 101. Amiga and others that you mentioned were technically advanced for their time, but they were not marketable for whatever reason, or they would have been marketed. You give Gates too much credit.
The list of technically superior products that never made it to market or lagged behind did not start with the computer age. Betamax? Diesel Engines? That's just two in this century. My gosh if Da Vinci had some of "The Bills" ability at marketing and self promotion, maybe we would be
living Space Empires IV instead of just playing it on bloated pc's full of poor quality software and useless thingamajigs.
The laize faire system is by no means perfect. It can be abused. But it is the best way available because it takes the realistic assumption of the inherent greed of all human beings, and uses that as a check against corruption in the system. In a more structured system, there may be controls over corruption at the bottom, but there is no check against it at the top.
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Do NOT tell me that this would be a configuration control nightmare, because the automated help databases could handle any combination whatsoever without human intervention.
Uh, would that be the databases running Windows NT, or some
"magical fairy" databases?
You are getting in to trouble with your argument here. None of this would even be possible without the proliferation of computers that was a
direct result of the accessibility of pc's in the Last 15 years. In this way Gates really created a market where there was none before. Again note I do not believe Gates is in anyway superior to anyone else. If he had not done it, either someone else would have done something very similar to what he did, or computers would never have gone the way of CB radio. A vary cool toy, with a loyal devoted following, but no real broad based appeal.
Geo
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Uh, would that be the databases running Windows NT, or some "magical fairy" databases?
This was a bit of a mistatement on my part. I do understand the difference between the operating system, and the database software.
My point is valid though.
[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 03 August 2001).]