Comment of the Day - November 3, 2005 NT Open System

I remember the days of this time frame with disgust.

One example, of many; I was an engineer making a living installing CAD/CAM applications on Unix systems (joy). Anyway, the apps all fell to NT over the space of about a year or so, many of the vendors promised to continue support for Unix, only to have those promises fall through.

It was amazing to me, how many vendors did this, until I found out what happened. Basically, Microsoft promised the vendors a toolkit for developing CAD/CAM applications that would include a set of libraries that would make it easily portable to any Unix.

Vendors coding up new CAD products under Unix and then porting them to NT said "Whoa -- we can make one code base, and hit the port button, and have multiple products with less hassle". Made economic sense, as taking Unix CAD products to NT was often painful and required some serious creativity (Bentley, in my not so humble opinion, seemed to do an incredible job of this).

What happened, though? Microsoft bascially waited a year or so, and said "oh, we decided that porting kit didn't make economic sense."

Suddenly, all but a few Unix CAD/CAM products were gone. Great work on the shady side of the fence. Awesome move business wise.



The problem is that this is standard fare -- used to be at least. I seriously have my doubts that Microsoft is done with this kind of "promise now, but only deliver the goods that help us, later" mentality.



You had to be there to seriously appreciate the stupidity of this. Basically, tons of stuff like this was going on, to the point where people were saying things like "It's just like the way Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown" -- every time Charlie goes to kick the ball, whoosh, Lucy would pull it out of the way, each time offering a different excuse as to why.