From: Thomas Bridge (tbridge at domain vianetworks.ie)
Date: Thu 28 Jun 2001 - 13:18:57 IST
At 12:50 28/06/2001 +0100, you wrote:
>Actually, MS do excercise quite a bit of control over the PC hardware
>manufacturers, through things like the PC<year> standards, and the
>WHQL program. Microsoft had an interest in the success of the PC
>because they had a lock on the OS for it - not because it was an open
>platform.
Of course - had Apple set up its OS in such a way that you could have
"Apple Compatible" machines, it would probably be the dominant desktop OS
vendor right now.
However, it is not unreasonable for Microsfot to maintain things like
hardware standards - it is almost impossible to cover all hardware
possibilities for the Intel architecture and badly written drivers or crap
hardware can affect the stability of the OS running on it.
T.
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