In the 1980s, Bill Gates told Apple’s CEO at the time, John Sculley (the former soft drink executive), that he should license the Mac OS. As far as Gates was concerned, Apple would own the market. Well, what really happened was that Sculley, in his infinite stupidity, actually licensed some of the Mac OS to […]

Over the years, Microsoft has without doubt used every sales trick in the book with which to hawk its products. Back in the 1990s, for example, facing threats from advanced operating systems from NeXT and other companies, Bill Gates touted a formidable new technology called Cairo that would virtually destroy the competition. Over the years, […]

The other day, I had a brief exchange in a message board about operating system preferences and taste. The poster maintained that Windows is used on more than 90% of the world’s PC desktops because customers voted their preference, that they liked it better than all the rest. Now I suppose it’s easy to reach […]

It’s very easy to forget that pretty much all the companies I write about and you read about in these columns are profit-making enterprises. So naturally they want good press, and will do what they can to get those favorable write-ups. At the same time, a real journalist, as opposed to folks who just regurgitate […]