Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 11:24:11 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> Cc: Gary Kline <kline@tera.tera.com>, freebsd@atipa.com (Atipa), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why we should support Microsoft... Message-ID: <199805201724.LAA20562@lariat.lariat.org> In-Reply-To: <20153.895680408@time.cdrom.com> References: <Your message of "Wed, 20 May 1998 00:11:06 PDT." <199805200711.AAA07314@rah.star-gate.com>
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At 09:06 AM 5/20/98 -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: >I recommend that the DOJ just leave Microsoft the hell alone. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. >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? Simple. IBM handed its near-monopoly to Microsoft, which has in turn perpetuated and extended it via unethical and illegal business practices. >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. What you mean "us," white man? Also, it's not true that Bill made fewer mistakes than anyone else. Microsoft has had DOZENS of "flops." For most companies, especially in the early days of computing, one "flop" meant the end -- curtains. No second chances. But Microsoft had DOS -- its cash cow -- to finance its failures. So, unlike any other company in the industry, it had the LUXURY of being able to be almost as stupid as it could possibly have wanted. It made no difference. >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. Again, that's because they COULD. >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. Microsoft doesn't either. It blunders all the time. The only difference is that it can fall back on those cash cows. --Brett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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