Re:Microsoft files monopoly complaint against Google
by Natsu on Thursday March 31, 2011 @04:44PM
(#2393610)
> on Windows it was buggy and late.
There are emails that say that that was due to being deliberately hampered on Bill Gate's orders, unless I'm confusing them for one of the other companies he did that sort of thing to. I think someone else linked to that already.
> And lets be clear... VC was never shipped as part of Windows nor any bundling of VC with OEMs. So there's no monopoly ties that help push your case that VC became dominant through some monopoly manipulation.
They also had access to Windows internals and such, but I will grant that they made a good product too.
My recollection of this is a fair bit different. WP seriously began to lag Word in the 90s. While WP wss the undisputed king in MSDOS, on Windows it was buggy and late. Office 95 in particular was pretty crushing.
Borland was somewhat similar. They had a good set of dev tools, and for example, their C++ compiler was blindingly fast and the VCL was relatively clean (at least compared to MFC). But around VC 4.0 that began to change (at least build speed). VC started to beat Borland in build time and seemed to spread its lead in code quality. This coupled with a better IDE made is Visual C++ become the more common choice. Although I also think the strength of VB played a large role in the uptake in VC. No data to back it up, but anecdotcally I saw a lot of ISV shops bring VC along, because they were building a lot of internal tools with VB (and no one really had anything to compete with VB).
And lets be clear... VC was never shipped as part of Windows nor any bundling of VC with OEMs. So there's no monopoly ties that help push your case that VC became dominant through some monopoly manipulation.