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Joel Spolsky had an interesting article on this idea [1], he said "smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements." [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Interesting how he predicts the reason for Sun demise.
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From HN Guidelines: > Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Resist quoting from HN Guidelines. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
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Yes, I'd love to hear a response from (2013) Bill Gates to this letter. I wonder if he sees this in a different light now? Could the piracy of his early programming language been what started the exponential growth/adoption of all Micro-soft software? If he could, would he go back and release BASIC for free as a springboard to sell other software?
[He said something similar about China:]( http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/461490/piracy ) > ...in 1998 during a candid moment in front of an audience at the University of Washington acknowledged the problem with enforcing software copyrights in the developing world: > Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though, and as long as…
Shrewd wisdom.
It's easy to steal if everything is compatible and connected i.e the DOS/Windows monoculture.
If that would've been at all possible, I think Linux would've had higher than 50% market share in the PC market today. For that kind of poor countries, Windows licenses were and still are prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of their citizens, so if being forced to buy Windows instead of pirating it, I think most would've just gone with Linux, and its adoption would've exploded within a few years, from the moment everyone in poor countries had to make that decision. Therefore software support from the big vendors would've arrived relatively quickly.
Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for Microsoft), there was no way to force people into that decision, so we were left with a Windows monopoly for the past 2 decades.
I readily grant that there's a huge amount of selection bias to this, but from this remove, it's difficult not to read this as, "pirate all the software you please, we'll still end up as billionaires."
Bill Gates sure is a great marketer. Igniting this issue in such direct way made people pay attention. No wonder he was able to build MS into what it was .
Yeah, note that the letter carefully mentions many different products that are available or coming soon
It's a pity that the then Micro-soft did not have copy protection technology - if they had, they might never have established such a strong foothold in the market, and the history of computing would have been quite different.
Yeah, they look like they've really been hurting for years now... (oh come one people, downvotes? You can't tell the OP is attempting humor, and I'm trying to acknowledge that?)
The contrast is with ten-comment-long Redditesque variants-on-a-theme threads, which I personally enjoy - on Reddit. Here, I'd rather cut to the chase with insightful commentary.
... and as a result poor Bill has lived in total poverty, only to die of scurvy in a slum. His business died with out trace and he never been heard of since. A tragic story. Yes, bad hobbyists. Point being, despite all the piracy, there is still some money to be made. The complaint is that such folk are not making enough money. See, Bill should be twice or 3 times as rich. Man, he's really losing out. Of course then…
But he wasn't, or anything close to it, when he wrote this letter.
Anyway, the fact that he says "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." kind of makes me wonder how he ever ended up with that thought I mentioned at the start.
And I know it sounds crazy that he would ever think that: that's why it stuck with me I guess.