[comp.sys.ibm.pc] Microsoft And Friends

rjacobs@gara.une.oz.au ( ABRI) (11/09/90)

Is it my imagination or not, but every magazine I read has more than
one article or regular column on a Microsoft product. Several magazines
have put aside parts of their magazine to be devoted every month to
Microsoft Word, Windows, OS/2, MSDOS etc (I've even seen one magazine with
a regular Excel column). Microsoft does have some very good products, but
the prevalence of specialized articles and columns on these products
when the excellent products of Microsoft's competitors are either ignored
or given small recognition concerns me. 

IMHO the most blatant case of this is the
promotion of OS/2. This is a product that has been promised for a longtime,
but fails to deliver the goods. The market share of OS/2 is very small. Yet,
journals like PC Magazine continue to devote regular columns and special
feature articles to OS/2. Why does this occur when programs like Unix are 
virtually ignored. As a multi-tasking operating system Unix on the PC is
a better program and at a more evolved stage than OS/2. There are
even GUI's for Unix now, to make it more user-friendly. 

Am I being picky or does Microsoft and Bill Gates have lots of friends
who are in the sales, marketing, journalism and communication side of
the computer business and more than willing to help Bill tell us how
great Microsoft products are?

Ross Jacobs

ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) (11/09/90)

In article <4624@gara.une.oz.au> rjacobs@gara.une.oz.au ( ABRI) writes:
>but fails to deliver the goods. The market share of OS/2 is very small. Yet,
>journals like PC Magazine continue to devote regular columns and special
>feature articles to OS/2. 
PC Magazine definitely goes to bed with Microsoft.

IMHO one of the best PC-related mags around is "Personal
Workstation" which has the least blinkers on the Intel-Microsoft
front.

I see a common thread in the corporate strategies of Intel and
Microsoft.  Make sure you find a captive audience, hype products
to hell, and sit back and enjoy the adulation of the
stockholders. 

As they say about Intel's brilliant efforts at fudging benchmarks:

	"If these guys are so smart, why don't they just make
	faster machines??"

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________
Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu
                              The more things change, the more they stay insane.
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