Apple Computer, unlike IBM, sought to prevent the cloning of their machines. As a result, IBM clones won the price war, and Apple almost went out of business, until saved by support from Microsoft. Apple only controls a small percentage of the hardware market, despite having machines of equal or better quality, that were designed for desktop publishing from the word get-go. When Microsoft introduced Windows, the look and feel of a Macintosh slowly came to the PC world.

IBM gained platform acceptance by allowing the cloning of their hardware, but tried to reserve special niches for itself -- by not allowing IBM basic to be copied, since it was ROM-resident. As a result, Microsoft came out with RAM-loaded GW-Basic and then Q-Basic, which eliminated the need for IBM Basic altogether. A second attempt by IBM was to come out with the Micro-Channel Architecture. As a result, the rest of the industry came out with the EISA bus, then the VESA local bus, and finally the PCI bus. These three advances made IBM's Micro-Channel Architecture obsolete. When IBM introduced OS/2 Warp (a system probably technically superior to Windows-95) AHEAD of Windows-95, hardware manufacturers (probably still with memories of the Micro-Channel Architecture fiasco fresh in their minds) failed to give OS/2 the critical hardware support it needed -- as a result it was uninstallable by CD on many machines. The hardware manufacturers backed Windows-95 instead. A few years back, IBM almost went out of business. Nowadays, the company has mended its ways and is in the forefront of pushing Linux and open-source computing.

Novell came to prominence by making MS-DOS networkable (to its servers), providing an alternative to mainframes and terminals. It has faded from glory, and is not successful in new sales -- only in maintaining loyalty of customers who already have its networking operating systems. Novell has outperformed Microsoft Windows-NT as a pure file and print server (according to its advocates) but lacks the server applications of the Microsoft Back Office Suite. (Incidentally, one of the reasons Microsoft decided to rescue Apple from the graveyard was that its operating system could connect to Macintosh computers, whereas Novell networking only works with PCs.) But with the increasing prominence of Linux, network administrators are increasingly choosing Linux (which is free) or a combined Windows-linux network instead. At last report, Novell is even considering spinning off Netware altogether!

In all three of the above cases, Microsoft was able to portray itself as the savior coming to the aid of customers who resented the monopolistic practices of other companies.

ATT needs to be mentioned because in the early days it introduced Unix. But with the company broken up it is no longer in a position to monopolize anything.

Sun Microsystems bought out the Star Office company and is distributing Star Office (a suite that can read Microsoft Office files and is available on all major PC platforms) for free, as well as its Solaris operating systems. Their main purpose is to try to get you to buy their hardware, but in the effort, they are helping the open-source community.

America Online is the company we really need to keep an eye on, with their number one position as an internet service provider. Their proposed merger with Time Warner will likely fail because of government concerns that too much media power will be concentrated in one company. Netscape is now part of AOL, but its browser provides crucial internet connectivity on platforms that Microsoft refuses to distribute Internet Explorer on. In fact Netscape Communicator is now distributed free with many Linux distributions (remember how Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer for free in an unsuccessful attempt to put Netscape out of business?). Over the years, Netscape Communicator has become more than just a browser / email program. It is slowly evolving into a cross-platform applications-programming-interface, in spite of Microsoft's efforts to stop this. The upcoming version 6 will have XML capabilities.

There should be a lesson in all this -- if you abuse your monopoly power, you may be legally right. But customers and competitors can and do get offended by these tactics and they do take actions to get even. In the end, IBM and Apple lost more than they gained from their tactics. The same may happen to Microsoft in the marketplace, even if they should get the court ruling against them overturned.