[geeks] I definitely don't admire Sun "The Company" right now...

[Lionel Peterson]

--- Kevin <kevin at pipeline.com> wrote:
> It is a bit odd to me why IBM negotiated their
> licencing in this manner.  Of course, i always wondered
> the same about why they let Mr. Bill distribute MS-DOS.

Well, I have some thoughts on the above:

IBM wanted a Unix license, and AT&T (I assume they were the "owners" of
Unix then) controlled the market well. IBM probably wasn't interested
in paying a HUGE one-time payment for their license (like Sun did,
becuase their core business relied on access to Unix). At the time,
this was probably a very prudent business decision ($100? per license
sold vs. $millions and millions for a platform that may not
succeed...).

Similar thinking around the MS-DOS market - as has been mentioned here
recently, IBM did not expect the IBM PC to be as mind-numbingly
successful as it was - it was a test to see if the market really
existed...


=====
Lionel

"Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten
programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software"
Bill Gates, in "An OpenLetter to Hobbyists" dated February 3, 1976

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