An inconvenient truth?

Interesting reading: http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html

If you want success, steal from the best.
A wise man once said ;-)

Yeah well, not exactly news. Gates saw his chance and did what he had to do, even if that required using every dirty trick in the book. I’m not convinced all the now extinct hardware companies can blame Microsoft or IBM for their demise. Same goes for most operating systems, just think of BSD and the Unix Wars or something as ridiculous as Sinclair’s SuperBasic.
As for dirty tricks: even RISC OS developement wasn’t always fair game

Q: So how did you run multiple clocks at once? (In the Arthur demo)
We just wrote a BASIC program that was allowed to draw itself lots of times, absolute fraud. If they’d said “Can you run two clocks and a calculator”, I was screwed. But we went second and they went first, and they showed us their demo the night before and said “this is fabulous”, and we wrote something that did exactly the same, but better. (1)

I also like how Acorn decided to market Richard Manby’s Arthur Desktop, which he wrote as a demo for programmers (and an unfinished one at that), as actual part of the OS. How’s that for inconvenient truths?
In the end it’s Thucydides all over again: “The strong do as they can and the weak suffer as they must”. (2)
No use in crying about spilled milk, really.

(1) http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/index.html

(2) “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.”

Ah, but how many people considered the Arthur desktop as much more than a toy? It was a prelude for what was to come, but in itself it was way too simplistic to do a lot.
That said – the old Ground Control teletext software ran on the Arthur desktop, but single tasking and not with the known desktop “demo”.