Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 18:32:36 +0000 From: "Frank Pawlak" <fpawlak@execpc.com> 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: <980520183236.ZM1432@darkstar.connect.com> In-Reply-To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> "Re: Why we should support Microsoft..." (May 20, 9:06am) References: <20153.895680408@time.cdrom.com>
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On May 20, 9:06am, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > Subject: Re: Why we should support Microsoft... > > 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. > I just hate to get back into this, but a few comments are in order. Your example of how things became the way they are is correct as far as it goes. However, part of the reason M$ is what they are is their use of predatory marketing tactics and squeezing the life blood out of their competitors. That is exactly what unbridled capitalism is all about. The elementry economic model of the free market is nothing more than an abstraction of how things work in an ideal market situation. The key word is ideal. Looking back to the later part of the last century and the early part of this one, you had robber barrons running rough shod over everyone, by raising entry levels for competition. This is the very definition of monopoly, the large firms dictate the market conditions and who does what not the market itself. This is the very opposite of the free market condition. That is the issue with M$. They are dictating what gets sold and who sells it, or conversly what gets developed, on what platform it's developed on ,and on what platform it runs on. That's market control, the buyer has virtually no say in what gets implemented. It is either the M$ solution or nothing. You either develop to the M$ standard or you don't develop at all. All of this adds up to the safe solution in the bet your job corporate world where the rubber hits the road. That was where IBM was before they messed themselves up in not embracing the PC world as fast as they should have. M$ got MS-DOS by default from IBM's mistake, and that was their cash cow to allow them to grab the desktop market by the throat. Look what they did with OS/2, they developed an inferior OS (NT) and killed a superior OS with crap using their OS dominance and market power. And don't make the case that that is IBM's fault totally, when M$ closed off the API's for Win 32. Everything they produce is proprietary. Yet you wish to lament your lack of freedom. Sorry Jordan, as much as I admire what you and the FreeBSD team are doing and stand for, you can't have you bread buttered on both sides. Eventually you number turns up on the hit list. There is one opportunity on the burner now to break the strangle hold on the desktop OS, and M$ is putting a lot of bucks into fragmenting java to prevent that from happening. Leave M$ alone as you suggest, and we all can get jobs doing sloppy coding in VB on crap system software. Not in my life time. Frank > 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. > > 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. > > 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. > > 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? > > - Jordan > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message >-- End of excerpt from Jordan K. Hubbard To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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