| > Microsoft were not initially in control of the ecosystem; it was IBM's PC cloned by Compaq and then a horde of others. At one point there were competing desktop environments - Desqview, OS/2. ... > There is also the antitrust argument: control over the OEMs restricts the possibilities for competing software. Which of these arguments would you like to keep? You can't have both; or at least, they don't refer to overlapping time periods. And I'd take issue with either: in the first case, MS always had the option early on of carving a controlled niche rather than trying for wide appeal. That's exactly what early Apple did, and I'd argue that MS could have done precisely the same on PC hardware, if they'd chosen to. As regards the anti-trust argument, why don't we see that being levelled at Apple? An MS which chose to drive a more closed ecosystem probably wouldn't have been so utterly dominant as to run the risk of antitrust accusations, and again, that was their choice. > They then faced the upgrade problem: at any point, restrictive control over drivers would mean that hardware that ran Windows N-1 would not run Windows N. Again, that was their choice. > And there's a limit to what they can do. My latest driver/hardware bug was discovering that my Crucial MX100 has some horrible interaction with write caching and link power management such that it can vanish from underneath the operating system. I'd argue that this sort of problem affects either sort of ecosystem. |