ment, particularly on the DOS platform. Cringely makes the point that in both hardware and software, the PC market has a bottomless appetite for innovation and that products must compete in some arena--price, power, speed, etc.--in order to survive. Products that have been eclipsed, Cringely argues, were created as ultimate, not as works-in-progress, always vulnerable to competition or updating. For example, Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc was eclipsed and later absorbed by Mitch Kapor's Lotus 1-2-3, which "became the single most successful computer application of al" (1996, p. 147). However, Kapor failed with the Symphony version of Lotus and an Apple version of Symphony, resisted a buy-out from Microsoft because of pressure from a partner, and then basically lost interest in Lotus altogether, which led to Lotus's disappearance (Cringely, 1996, pp. 155-158).
Today, according to Stephenson (1999), the practice of the two major PC players--Microsoft and Apple--is to continually offer new features to increase the perceived value of operating systems that are fundame
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