Article: How Microsoft prevents other operating systems from competing

[Warren Togami]

http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1115/byt20010824s0001/0827_hacker.html

The first part of this article talks about Palm buying BeOS, but the second
part talks about the reasons behind the failure of BeOS to be adopted in the
market.  It turns out that Microsoft had secret licenses with the OEM's
(Micron, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Compaq, etc.) that said that they were not
allowed to include other operating systems in a dual-boot configuration
alongside Windows.

This means that OEM's could not include alternative operating systems like
BeOS or Linux even if they were ZERO COST to the manufacturer.  I'd say that
is a clear example of how Microsoft prevented the growth of other operating
systems.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com