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Paul remembers the migration of applications from UNIX to NT following the NT being declared an "Open System". He writes: " 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."
Related to the article: How Microsoft Got its OS Declared an "Open System" and wound up in Government
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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.
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