The thing that strikes me most about this letter is that the business was initially flagging. A few decades later, it is the 800 pound gorilla of the software industry.
I don't agree with everything Micro-soft has done and they have certainly had some luck. However, Bill Gates had an impressive perseverance to take the business from the days of this letter to what it is today.
The text you quoted points to a real flaw in thinking on the part of the EU commission. If the commission has a problem with Microsoft due to monopoly practices, that is one thing. However, once they state they are seeking for Microsoft's products to reach a certain point of market share, they are on a very slippery slope.
This just points to socialist thinking in that the EU commission wants the market to be divided 'fairly'. The commission should be focused solely on specific incidences of anti-competitive practices and specific resolutions. They should never be interested in arranging the market just right so that companyA has 50% share, companyB has 20%, etc.
The fact that the commission is focusing on this really brings credibility questions to mind and makes me wonder what their real goals are.
At the risk of bringing another contentious point into an already contentious topic, if this were an EU-based company, would the findings be the same?
The biggest problem is that this professor apparently didn't discuss how he thought the 200k was a bad deal beforehand with the founders. Or, if he had discussed it beforehand, the founders had decided it was still a deal they would like to proceed with.
Instead, he went ahead and torpedoed the deal without the founders consent. It certainly makes for good television, but I'd be pissed if I were one of the founders.
Vi. The simplicity, speed, and the fact that it is installed on any *nix system by default are my favorite aspects of Vi. I've played around with Vim, but haven't migrated to it because I just don't use the features.
At times, I have been tempted to move to Emacs due to all its cool features but have not yet, maybe some day. Emacs in slime mode has been great to use while learning lisp.
I don't agree with everything Micro-soft has done and they have certainly had some luck. However, Bill Gates had an impressive perseverance to take the business from the days of this letter to what it is today.