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Re: why


MS killed off all the competition in huge swaths of
the software biz. Once you are totally dominant and
complacent in your dominance, what incentive is there
to innovate ?
Plenty. You want to stay dominant. All the pre-MS dominant firms, ALCOA,
IBM, DuPont, Kodak, were innovative. Even old AT&T, though protected by
government grant of monopoly, had Bell Labs.

 And what incentive is there for anyone
else to attempt to compete with new products ?
The lure of being the new Microsoft. Note that when Microsoft started up,
Digital Research's CP/M was "the industry standard." There were even CP/M
cards for the Apple II. Then Digital blew it, re the IBM PC. But you all
know that tale.

Anyway, it's not just MS software that is lousy. It's *very* rare that
software has a decent GUI and operates intuitively. I tried, for instance,
a dozen macro programs. You'd think that would be real easy to make
intuitive, and it does only one thing. But almost all of them were totally
opaque to me. I think Excel is reasonable and straightforward--not great,
but sensible.



Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx