Bill Wolff wrote in a message to Kolja Brix:
 BW> just charged extra for those GEOS applications). Thus GeoWorks 
 BW> excuse was that it couldn't find enough vendors who was willing to 
 BW> purchase MS OS plus the GEOS OS. Well my personal feeling is that 
I don't think that this was the problem initially, because people would have 
required MS-DOS anyway, for Windows as well as for Geos. In addition, there 
has been a tendency (at least over here in Germany) to add massive amounts of 
application software to every new PC that is sold - a few years ago, a German 
company was legally stopped from claiming that the software they offered with 
the PC was actually worth more than what you'd have to pay for the entire 
machine + software.
Geoworks could probably have slipped into that market quite easily, because 
hardware vendors always looked for additional value to offer with their 
machines...
 BW> while this didn't help GeoWorks, I still blame GeoWorks for not 
 BW> acting in a timely matter for such mistakes like not releasing it's
 BW> developers kit in time. This merely delayed third party support and
 BW> allowed Windows to take over the market. And what's worse, when 
100% agree. I believe that Geoworks has always underestimated the amount of 
third-party support required to establish a solid position in any market - 
the problem seems to be that this misperception is still in their minds 
today... but not thinking about how the PC/Geos market could evolve after the 
release of, say, Ensemble 1.1 was probably the biggest single mistake they 
ever made.
 BW> Germany Geo-hackers started writing GEOS applications, GeoWorks
 BW> paid  them off to make them stop (so claims a guy named Tommy Usher
 BW> claims  in the DR_DEBUG echo).
Being one of the "German hackers" myself, I'd tend to call this "utter 
nonsense" - I have never encountered any effort whatsoever from Geoworks to 
stop me from what I was doing, and I couldn't remember anyone else in Germany 
who stopped Geos programming without a good excuse. :-)
Actually, the problem seems to be much on the opposite side, i.e. Geoworks 
*ignoring* most things that happen outside their company and the circle of 
their "strategic partners".
ciao marcus
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