Windows is the free OS 15156

Philip Callan

A tempest in a teapot, Phil, and all the more misleading due to your out of context references, but the scenario is as follows:

1. Microsoft has a general belief, as all software companies do, the they will support their products according to their own product plans and will not support package software outside some specific boundaries. OSS has the same sort of atbreastude and generally require a person with a problem to first have that problem on a supported release in a supported environment.

Microsoft only supported its products in 1989 on its own OS. That is a reasonable thing to do and was the industry practice then and remains the practice today.

2. Some marketing folk got the idea that they should explicitly check for a supported environment and if it were not found, the product should at least warn the user that the environment was not supported or even refuse to run in it. The general belief was interpreted by Phil to be that a desirable application, such as Windows, could leverage the underlying OS although this was not said in the emails referenced and none of the parties to the emails was Bill Gates.

3. Brad Silver noted that such a test had to be 100% accurate in not rejecting a valid environment under any circumstance. A customer with MS-DOS who saw a warning or could not run their MS application absolutely had to be avoided.

4. A blind test was structured for one of the last Win3.1 betas to make this positive determination and any tester who was not using the approved OS versions were expected to report the findings as failures to detect the approved OS and any tester reporting would be investigated to make sure that they were not running an approved version of MS-DOS.

5. Results of the test are not documented, but it is a matter of fact that the test was not active in the product release versions of Windows 3.1. For whatever reason, Microsoft chose to not attempt to use Windows to leverage MS-DOS against DR-DOS or any other MSDOS compebreastor at the time.

6. Microsoft had a policy of not revealing any trade secrets or offering any form of aid to a group of companies that were direct compebreastors of Microsoft. Although that is not true today, due to a variety of things including the DOJ-states Debt Settlement conditions and agreements subsequently made to the EU, that is not such a heinous act, IMO, and no one reasonably can expect their compebreastor to roll over for such. If a compebreastor is so inept that they need this kind of help to stay in business, they don't belong in that business to begin with.

Now Phil sees an unethical criminal behavior in all this, but I only see that Microsoft contemplated being proactively harsh vis-a-vis DRDOS and decided, in this case, not to be. Phil presents the issues out of sequence in the hope that the reader is mislead into thinking that the contemplated action was performed after careful testing rather than in the order that it actually occurred and resulted in a non-action.