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Subject: Re: chessbase to become the microsoft of chess

Author: Don Dailey

Date: 12:58:15 11/01/98

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On November 01, 1998 at 13:20:08, G.Mueller wrote:

>In my opinion a monopolist like Microsoft for chessprogramms would mean the
>biggest catastrophe that could happen!!! This would be the death of inovation in
>chessprogramming!
>I hope this will never happen!
>
>G. Mueller

I agree 100% with your sentiments but I can't see this happening for
chess programs.  It will always be possible to write a better chess
program and people will always buy these.  But with an OS, even
though it's possible to write much better OS's and in fact has been
done a few times, it's a whole lot easier to be a follower and not
a leader.

But since you mentioned it,  I think of microsoft as the McDonalds of
OS's!   I was in a restaurant the other day across the street from
McDonalds and noticed that McDonalds was packed solid, but the place
I was at which served MUCH better food was almost empty!  This is
hard for me to resolve but I couldn't help but draw the anology to
microsoft and a similar mass mentality.   I shook my head in puzzle-
ment and enjoyed a better meal in peace!

If you think about Microsoft, it should be very apparent that what
they have done is really hold back things.  DOS dominated the OS
market for over 10 years, an eon in computer timescale.  But how
much did DOS improve in 10 years?  Incrementally, and very little.
Now that is a sobering thought.   Microsoft is a very heavy ANCHOR
to technological improvements.  They are very conservative in their
approach but worse yet, they inhibit any other products

Don't worry about this happening in Chess.  The worse that will
happen is that programmers will get a little distracted by the
obligation to port their product to windows.  But the OS probably
will not hurt the program significantly if any.

- Don



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