You are thinking of Gary Kildall, the co-founder of Digital Research, Inc and the developer of the popular operating system CP/M. His dealings (or lack of) with IBM have assumed an urban myth status and the odd circumstances surrounding his death didn’t help.

This would be a good subject for Dvorak to comment on!

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/index.php?s=Gary+Kildall&submit=Search

And if you WANT to be paranoid, I WOULDNT update the older versions… As it wouldnt be very hard to render them NOT WORKING. Even if MS paid someone 1/2 the world away to Spike the software.

I said before and again…
It has nothing to DO with business apps…
Its GAMES and the pretty interface.

Even Protection, is NOT involved except for the Protection OF MS for the product.
A password is a password…I dont care if its 8bit or 128 bit…If you only use A-Z, a-z, and 0-9….Add special charactors and CTRL, SHIFT, ALT charactors into it…And you have ALOT of protection.

#2 who says we need to buy vista to use the software we need? that was the same song when xp came up. “You need xp to run the software you need” There’s no single app that I need that does not run on w2k. And even app’s that say they only run on xp, run perfectly fine on w2k. When you e-mail the companies they’ll tell you it’ll run perfectly on w2k but they will not supprot it. Just that, support, not that it doesn’t run. So I don’t buy that crap.

[somewhat on topic]
Wish I could remember the name of the guy who was so full of himself he went boating instead of meeting with IBM — he later committed suicide, and now we’re left with with the guy that _did_ meet with IBM — Bill Gates. Talk about being in the right place at the right time…

Comment by Peter Jakobs — 4/8/2007 @ 12:24 am — Bingo, thanks pj.

And to all, thanks. What a great Easter show.

1980s: “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, then IBM launched the PS/2 series. A system that brought a technological advance (32 Bit bus) at a price (lock in, especially for hardware manufacturers). Result? We all know it and the long term result is that you can buy “Lenovo” PCs today.
1990s and 2000s: “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft”, now Microsoft ships Vista. Minor technical advance but major lock in features. Let’s see if the market might create a parallel here.

Both, IBM and Microsoft have made their way to their respective monopoly in their markets by commoditizing their products. Once they had the monopoly, they tightened the screws. IBM in one big yank, Microsoft in a series of smaller turns. But even that will ultimately start to hurt the customers and with Vista, the point might be here.

pj

my point was this: Microsoft lives of the inertia of their customers. Those that will “look no further”. There’s always a cliffhanger in Windows that will pull in some other MS product. You mentioned ADS? Certainly not the world’s strongest directory system, but have you ever tried to manage Exchange without it? And why Exchange, why not notes? Certainly not because of it’s superior functionality (and I’ve worked with both) but because “everyone knows Outlook”. Of course they do, and that’s a good reason to “look no further”?
If you bring up provisioning: users don’t just live in Exchange and the logon directory. How about a serious company that might be running SAP, Oracle, Siebel, a telephone switch, an access control system, an external supplies provisioning system, a host based application and who knows what more. Now we’re talking provisioning. Add a workflow to that, who will you be talking to? IBM, Sun, Siemens, Oracle and Novell. Microsoft? Well, they’ve bought a metadirectory provider in 1999 or so and even productized it, but no mention of them in the market.
I’m not really bashing Microsoft here, I’m just trying to show that they’re a terrible innovator. They’re sitting on their monopoly, riding it hard as long as they can. And the harder they’re riding it, the more people are looking for alternatives.
I know of a few world-class businesses that have started projects to investigate at least a partial Linux desktop rollout. You may think it’s ridiculous, but it’s not. Linux is closing the gap.
What’s keeping anyone from replacing typical knowledge worker desktops with Linux? I say it’s just inertia!
Many of the applications have moved to web based anyway and in the last 12 to 18 months, Firefox has become the gold standard for web developers again.
If you need the classical office applications, Open Office.org will do just fine for the vast majority of users. For the rest, those macro coders, Office was the wrong product to start with. I’ve done desktop migrations where the IT department was truly amazed to find out how many “applications” existed in VBA or Excel Macros, how much company data was stored in Access databases or, more commonly, Excel sheets out there that they had no knowledge of and, worse, could not backup, manage or otherwise support. Those apps really belong into the network, and we usually tried to find a way to provide them web based.
So you take all those Office based desktops away, what’s left with a Microsoft lock-in? Just a few, in my experience, and on many of those, the lock-in is not very hard either.

Now, what’s Microsoft doing to counter that trend?
What were the large strides forward in productivity from 2000 to XP? The only difference I noticed was the bubblegum-colored interface (which I usually immediately switched back). Other than that? Shuffled some entries around in the start menu, hiding away those you use less (and thus annoying at least me, because I know where those I use most often are, but the others, I need to search for).
For Vista, where’s the large producivity improvements there? I can’t say, because I don’t have Vista and from what I hear from customers, they’re ticked off by the huge hardware requirements for Vista as well. Let’s remember that businesses are not in the game to provide their users with nice optical effects. If they come at no cost like with Linux XGL, they’re acceptable, but if they come at a premium like Vista, they’re not. Businesses also usually won’t just run the OS that came with the hardware, they will try to standardize on a desktop they can manage. In many cases, this is still Windows 2000, the real large ones have started their XP migrations one or two years ago. That’s about the acceptance curve that Vista will be facing, if it will be accepted. Because when you go to Vista, you can just as well go to any other OS running on the same hardware, which mainly means Linux. Ubuntu and Novell are targeting the desktop and it will show over the next few years who has the better tools to actually manage those desktops.
Microsoft has been the choice of the lazy for a long time, partly due to the fact that there was no real competition, but that’s changing. Linux is closing the gap and if MacOS was available on no name PCs that would be another prime contender for a successful desktop platform, as long as I have to through out my whole hardware investment to get it, it won’t fly.

Let’s see where this will lead to. Microsoft has braced itself with patents and might choose to go the SCO way, don’t innovate but take it to the courts. I’m not sure if that has ever been a successful business strategy, but as the XBox example shows, Microsoft can run an unsuccessful strategy for quite a while before they even notice that money might be flowing out instead of into their pockets.

pj

I didn’t say “dominates,” I said “dominated.”

Funny thing, I don’t remember listing my assets. Oh well, my mind must be playing tricks on me.

BTW, Mr. Trump, I’m surprised a rich guy like you would assume this is a “tiny little hybred (sic) car.” That’s the kind of mistake common among wage-slaves who live rich fantasy lives – but you couldn’t be one of them, since you already told us you’re rich, right?

Oh – and all the rich guys I know also know how to spell ‘hybrid.’

Here’s a tip for future attempts to impress strangers who can’t see you in your undershirt, sitting in front of your almost-paid-up Compaq at the particle-board kitchen table – try to keep it believable, instead of ramping up your claims X10 with every post. At the rate you’re going, in two more posts, you’ll have Bill Gates delivering your pizza. As it is, you’ve been spending a little too much time sitting on the john, looking through old Robb Reports lifted from your supervisor’s reception area.

If someone gave you an enema, they could bury what’s left in a shoebox.