Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 07, 2021

Sounds pretty tame for a mad dog.

Smart working in 1996 from Montmartre.

Pain au chocalate, I looked it up thinking it was some made up frou-frou. Yeah, I’ve had that, under the general name chocolatine.

Thought she was cheating on Mike there for a moment with talk of her and her co-workers going to bed.

The Crazy Dog. Sounds about right for a 90’s tech company.

What about Apple?

My opinion is that Microsoft sells things you need and Apple sells things you want.

The early days of the Windows operating system when it was transitioning from nothing more than a DOS graphical shell to a 32 bit system. Microsoft server operating software was incredibly buggy. Many preferred alternatives to the Office suite. But MS prevailed with lots of marketing and buying up the competition.

Chien Fou? Mad Dog? Mad Dog software. I like it. To bad Microsoft crushed it.

For anyone wondering, I just Google-Translated “Chien Fou.” It’s “Mad Dog.”

For a pretty good overview of the business practices in the early days of microcomputing, check out the 1999 film Pirates of Silicon Valley, based on Michael Swaine’s 1984 book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. To oversimplify, the basic premise is that everything that we today think of as brilliant innovations from incredibly creative minds was swiped from some little guys who got quickly exterminated and forgotten. Guess which category Steve Jobs and Bill Gates fall into.

Kim was introduced as a baby,so I’m still trying to figure out how she aged much faster than anybody else in the strip.

Micro$oft owes their early success to one fact about hte Computer Industry at the time:

“No One was Ever Fired for buying IBM.”

Those early Personal Computers had IBM’s name on the Outside. And, M$ software screwing up the Insides.