Author: Moritz Berger
Date: 09:46:19 11/01/98
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On November 01, 1998 at 11:51:01, Christophe Theron wrote: >You know what is my worse nightmare? That Microsoft releases a serious chess >program. And you know how they will do it: they will take the best programs, >disassemble them, and steal the algorithms to build their own program. ... tough words ... > Of course >you know that they have already done this with the Stacker Disk Compression >Utility. Don't you remember? The result is the "Microsoft" Dos and Windows disk >compression utility. They could do the same with chess programs. Don't you remember? There was a settlement which earned Stac some money (AFAIR $100 million?) and lead to incorporation of their technology into the products you mentioned. So I doubt you have a "legal" ground to accuse Microsoft of "theft". Also, Microsoft employs more than 20.000 people world wide, while ChessBase headcount is probably less than 20 (I didn't bother to count them, www.chessbase.com has more details about every employee). Quite a different order of magnitude ... > >The result would of course be a good program. Would you call this a "wonderful >development for consumers" ? > >For the community of chess programmers, this would be the *last* development. There already is a "Microsoft-like" chessprogram: The Chessmaster series, which is the only chess related product to qualify for comparison with Microsoft if you take market share, shelf presence and brand recognition into account. Despite Chessmaster, other programs have managed to survive. 4 million copies of Chessmaster sold, maybe 40.000 copies of Fritz 5 (?) from the alleged monopolist ChessBase; again: a 100x difference (even more striking if you also take e.g. the >400.000 copies of chess programs by Ed Schröder into account, see www.rebel.nl from where I got this number). Moritz
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