Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 12:57:15 -0400 (EDT) From: John Brann <jbrann@brann.org> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why we should support Microsoft... Message-ID: <199805201657.MAA03851@freebie.brann.org> In-Reply-To: <20153.895680408@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at "May 20, 98 09:06:48 am"
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Jordan K. Hubbard wrote...
> > So what is your suggestion on how should the DOJ treat Microsoft business
> > pratice?
>
> I recommend that the DOJ just leave Microsoft the hell alone.
>
> People have spent a lot of time whining about the fact that Microsoft
> owns 80% of the desktops out there and that M$ is now the Big Bad Wolf
> who is crushing innovation and all these other scarey things, but they
> all conveniently ignore answering the biggest question of all:
> How did we get to this state in the first place?
>
> I've been in this biz more or less full-time since 1977, when I took
> my first job writing accounting applications in BASIC, and I've
> watched the entire process of Microsoft going from a 2-man company
> that wrote BASIC interpreters to the international powerhouse it is
> today. Some of this was due to luck and being in the right place at
> the right time, sure, but a lot more of it was due to a very simple
> fact which many in this discussion would probably really rather just
> ignore: Bill simply made fewer stupid mistakes than the rest of us.
Hmm. You have seven years on me, I was sending punched cards to Imperial
College and 'borrowing' teletype time on the Manchester Polytechnic MAXIMOP
system in '77. Nonetheless, I have a different perspective here.
I have been involved in building business software for big corporations
since 1984. Since 1985 I have worked for small companies selling Mainframe /
Minicomputer / UNIX / NT software. I've always been a developer, but I've
been close to the customers as they have made purchases of significant size.
Over this period of time, I have come to the conclusion that the ONLY reason
that someone in a corporation spends a significant amount of money ($100k or
more) on hardware or software is FEAR. They have to be more frightened of
not buying than of the consequences of a bad purchase before they spend. As
a consequence, relatively small (apparent) differences in product become
enormously important and quality becomes irrelevant.
IBM introduces a PC. Everyone knows that there is a 'PC revolution'. Not
buying PCs makes the buyer look like a dunderhead. Who's PC to buy? Well,
IBM's obviously, because the buyer knows the name, and they are a
'professional' organization. What OS to buy with the PC - well, there's one
being (practically) given away, called DOS or I could pay a substantial cash
premium for CP/M which the salesman says is no different. One is branded by
IBM. Hmm, tough call.
At this point in history, nothing underhand was, apparently, being done.
Perhaps if Apple had spent big bucks on building SNA networking and IBM
terminal emulators, there would have been a different history of personal
computing. As it is, the big corporations were trying to leverage their
investments and bought from IBM because they believed that, sooner or later,
their products would work together.
>From this point on, Microsoft only ever had to be a follower. Spot a good
product or two, make an inferior version, leverage your existing position.
It worked for Word processing, Spreadsheets and C/C++ Development tools.
Sure, Word is a pretty nifty WP system now, but remember WfW 1.2 and WP51?
OK, Excel is pretty good, now, but what about 1-2-3? Does anyone remember
MS C Version 7?
Looking at the DOJ documentation, I see the Netscape story as an extension of
this pattern. The difference being that MS perceived a much more fundamental
shift in the browser world. Apps run on an OS. Java offers the possibility
of marginalising the OS, and making it replaceable by putting the browser
in between. PANIC. And the result of the panic - stepping over the line.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I certainly remember Windows before 3.0 and M$'s
> disastrous foray into the world of hardware (and, more recently,
> packages like Microsoft Bob) as some of their bigger blunders - I'm
> hardly saying that M$ is infallible. What I'm saying is that while M$
> might have made some big tactical mistakes along the way, their
> overall _strategy_ was sound and they stuck to it until they'd evolved
> their tactics to the point where they could properly execute that
> strategy. The rest of the software industry, by contrast, had no
> apparent strategy to speak of and could probably be best compared to
> the Austrian army after WW-I - dominated by generals and political
> leaders who still remembered the glorious days of mounted horse
> calvary charges and stubbornly stuck with them long after they had
> been rendered entirely obsolete by Maxim's new little toy.
>
> Why is that? Well, my theory is that since the 50's, programming and
> computers in general have been something of a black art, jealously
> guarded by high priests who wished only to be paid a reasonable wage
> and left in peace to play with their hi-tech toys. The whole messy
> issue of _users_ was something which the priesthood only barely
> tolerated, and they certainly never put a lot of time and energy into
> empowering those users to be able to live without them someday. Into
> this rarified atmosphere comes Bill, and he somehow works it out that
> even though the overall goal of empowering users to directly grapple
> with these machines may be somewhat premature, it's still something
> they desire and are willing to pay big bucks for.
Actually, here I disagree, too. My fourteen years of commercial development
have left me with a profound sense of the difference between software built
for a purpose and software built for sale. Software built for a purpose
does a job at all costs. Additional features like user-friendliness are
secondary.
Software built for sale is different. It is prepared to compromise stability,
functionality, even effectiveness to provide sufficient comfort for a fearful
buyer. That's why AOL is 'better' than Erol's. That's why NT is 'better'
than UNIX, and why Windows 3.0 was 'better' than the Mac.
>
> So, rather than investing a lot of time and energy into building
> better and better software engines, like the Unix crowd is doing, Bill
> focuses instead on the "outer shell", that 10% of the software were
> the user spends 90% of their time, and puts all of his resources into
> improving the man/machine interface on *commodity hardware*. This is
> a key point which Apple missed - they got the man/machine bit very
> right then screwed up by trying to mate it exclusively to proprietary
> hardware - a mistake which M$ had already made and learned from
> earlier and didn't need to repeat.
>
> Again, Microsoft made some tactical mistakes along the way but their
> overall strategy was exactly the right one for making a lot of money
> and that's exactly what they did. The rest of us just watched and
> thought, with our engineering minds, how silly these Microsoft people
> were for making all these tactical blunders and we never really
> focused on what the overall strategy was supposed to be, hell, I don't
> think any of us wanted to even _think_ about strategy - we were having
> just too much fun playing with all this new tech.
I'll grant this point. Playing with the new stuff is what keeps _me_ sane.
>
> So, I look at M$ today and I'm naturally saddened by the kind of
> software that 80% of the world now has to live with, but who do I
> blame for this? Us. Only us. We let it happen and now we're
> complaining, far after the fact, that somebody ought to protect us
> from the big bad wolf we ourselves let into the house. Bah! How is
> that people are so frickin' BLIND?
Too harsh, I think. The BBW got there by inventing a new door, while we
weren't looking.
I'm in favour of breaking up MS. I don't see what harm could come of it. I
do see, and have seen what harm comes from leaving it alone. This itself
isn't enough reason to do it of course, the evidence presented will,
hopefully, decide the result. The complaints look damning enough to me,
no doubt there will be arguments over authenticity.
I'm sorry to have been so long-winded, but I hope we get to learn a lesson here
and I hope that the end result is that software built for sale gets closer
to software built for a purpose.
John
>
> - Jordan
>
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