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We have been basically stuck with a Rambus like company that won. I'm no legal whiz, but if some company were to attempt to sell operating systems compatible with Windows today, I think MS would have them into court pretty quick. That's if they bothered suing, and didn't simply hire away all the talent or steal all the ideas, or buy the company outright.
The basic problem is that Windows is a standard, and not an open standard. The only way beyond a standard is to create a new one, one that everybody is willing to agree to that is demonstrateably better than the old. Raw competition won't give you that, you need cooperation. If MS is found to be enforcing their standard through illegal means over any potential new ones, they should be stopped, whether you want to call them a monopoly or just ****oles.
It won't give you any alternatives, but at least the possibility will be there in the future. If MS gets to make all the rules there never will be any competition, making all the rules is what MS calls innovation.
PCI-2 is a much better standard than PCI obviously, the argument from Windows supporters is often that there is nothing better to be had than Windows and that it's because MS is the best, everybody else is incompetent. Yet if PCI-2 is the better option why isn't everybody using it? Or failing that, why isn't PCI at 66MHz at least? Or at 64 bit? Cost? I don't think so, platforms are evolving to 200-400MHz FSB's, and AGP caught on in a year, and it's still of questionable value. It's the same reason there is no competition in operating systems, an OS could be a hundred times better than Windows and still go nowhere. It takes a lot of cooperation to get a standard moving along, and that takes clout. We don't use AGP because it's better, we use it because Intel foisted AGP slots on the world and there was nothing better to stick in them.
Windows will always be with us unless there is a different situation, a set of rules allowing equal opportunity. Ideas I can come up with off the cuff are simple things like an open standard for device drivers. I mean any OS can do it's thing, it shouldn't require special case drivers to interface hardware with it. It's not taking anything away from MS to enforce this, all it does is prevent one company from making all the rules on it's own. I think that alone would allow other companies to get something going. Having to advocate, aka beg, companies to support their new OS slows them down enough to allow MS to pick and choose strategies on dealing with them. I'm sure hardware manufacturers would rather a stable known driver definition to work with than a half dozen different drivers to match each version of Windows out there. (Talking basic driver functionality, obviously user preference aspects, if applicable, would have to be tailored to each OS, but that's trivial code) I've more than half convinced MS releases new versions of Windows just to overload the ability of companies to devote time to drivers.
EDIT: Added an 'R'
[This message has been edited by Himself (edited 08 November 2000).]
The basic problem is that Windows is a standard, and not an open standard. The only way beyond a standard is to create a new one, one that everybody is willing to agree to that is demonstrateably better than the old. Raw competition won't give you that, you need cooperation. If MS is found to be enforcing their standard through illegal means over any potential new ones, they should be stopped, whether you want to call them a monopoly or just ****oles.
It won't give you any alternatives, but at least the possibility will be there in the future. If MS gets to make all the rules there never will be any competition, making all the rules is what MS calls innovation. PCI-2 is a much better standard than PCI obviously, the argument from Windows supporters is often that there is nothing better to be had than Windows and that it's because MS is the best, everybody else is incompetent. Yet if PCI-2 is the better option why isn't everybody using it? Or failing that, why isn't PCI at 66MHz at least? Or at 64 bit? Cost? I don't think so, platforms are evolving to 200-400MHz FSB's, and AGP caught on in a year, and it's still of questionable value. It's the same reason there is no competition in operating systems, an OS could be a hundred times better than Windows and still go nowhere. It takes a lot of cooperation to get a standard moving along, and that takes clout. We don't use AGP because it's better, we use it because Intel foisted AGP slots on the world and there was nothing better to stick in them.
Windows will always be with us unless there is a different situation, a set of rules allowing equal opportunity. Ideas I can come up with off the cuff are simple things like an open standard for device drivers. I mean any OS can do it's thing, it shouldn't require special case drivers to interface hardware with it. It's not taking anything away from MS to enforce this, all it does is prevent one company from making all the rules on it's own. I think that alone would allow other companies to get something going. Having to advocate, aka beg, companies to support their new OS slows them down enough to allow MS to pick and choose strategies on dealing with them. I'm sure hardware manufacturers would rather a stable known driver definition to work with than a half dozen different drivers to match each version of Windows out there. (Talking basic driver functionality, obviously user preference aspects, if applicable, would have to be tailored to each OS, but that's trivial code) I've more than half convinced MS releases new versions of Windows just to overload the ability of companies to devote time to drivers.
EDIT: Added an 'R'
[This message has been edited by Himself (edited 08 November 2000).]
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