Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 12:01:23 -0700 From: Slim <jallen@aviating.com> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: Kevin Golding <kevin@caomhin.demon.co.uk>, Dan Look <dan@electriccheese.com>, ITServices@cableinet.co.uk, Conrad Sabatier <conrads@home.com>, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG, joel2a@yahoo.com Subject: Re: Microsoft bashers Message-ID: <3B894783.7ACC5139@aviating.com> References: <001601c12e55$0d2f8340$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
You guys and others in the FreeBSD movement, who I admire extravagantly, are still doing what we would have been doing with or without Windows or MS, only there are a bazillion more people who have seen, used and learned a little bit about computers in the process. There are many, many more people, who now are learning about alternatives like FreeBSD, who are sick of MS products, for the very reasons you mention and others, who want to learn to do things on their own, who seek a better way. I just got FreeBSD up and running on my computer, with the help of some young EE students from Europe who spent the summer with us, and with some more hard work, I hope to soon become a FreeBSD newbie, and eventually say Good-bye to Bill and his products on my machines. Not because I hate Bill, quite to the contrary, he is to be admired for doing what American free private enterprise encourages us to do, if we can. He is a tough competitor, but hardly invincible. When PCs were being developed, IBM was the ruler of the roost, and thanks to a series of miscalculations, they have been laid low, a little bit lower anyway. The anti-trust ruling is shaky because the law was written for a different economic time and order. They are having a very hard time trying to make Microsoft fit under the blanket intended for US Steel. It's far from clear whether the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court will go along with the district court judgment as written, or at all. Whether it should be, or will be, is not for this lawyer to determine. I am told that FreeBSD is a superior OS because, among other virtues, it is vastly more stable and runs much faster. It will never displace Windows as the preeminent OS as it is now conceived because one must learn and struggle and work. A relative few will do so, but not the mass market. Somebody needs to package it up in a FreeBSD Lite version that can be installed without a lot of hand wringing and newbie questioning and figuring things out, clean up some good applications so that it really is plug and play, and that somebody will start running MS off the map. All those thousands of entrepreneurs who started selling computers and accessories and software in the mid-70s are all gone now, except Apple. Apple was the only one which did not put 24 lights and switches on the front panel so you had to program it byte by byte, bit by bit. They simplified it. When you took it out of the box, plugged it in to your TV, up came the BASIC prompt. No spending nights and weekends trying to learn arcane machine language, 1 and 0's and writing your own paper tape handlers, loaders and bootstrap routines. IBM did the same thing by coming up with an OS that for it's day was a wonder of simplicity, MS-DOS. CP/M might have been better, but IBM made the deal with Microsoft, and here we are. I would not use Windows for many years after it came out, because I already had more or less mastered DOS, liked the simplicity of it and was past the learning curve, but my employees, most of whom had never seen a computer, weren't going to devote that kind of time and effort to it. They needed Windows or something like it, that could be gotten hold of without a lot of heavy lifting, even at the expense of elegance and efficiency from a computer programmers view. IBM used to know that, Jobs and Wozniak knew it, and Bill Gates learned it: Don't sell computers, sell solutions! They are still around, Altair, IMSAI, Wordstar, all those outfits that came up with perhaps beautifully created but more complex applications are gone. I am feeling guilty about all the bandwidth this most interesting topic has taken up, and will now cease and desist, except privately. Thanks for indulging me. Slim Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > > I agree that there isn't anyting to be gained by bashing someone who > contributed to the buildup of the computer buisiness. > > However, there is definitely something to be gained by bashing someone who is > attempting to subvert the entire computer industry for their own ends. > > There was a line that Microsoft crossed some time ago when they ceased > _contributing_ to the industry, and started _manipulating_ it for their own > benefit. At that time they became fair game for bashing. In Microsoft's > case it is an instance of absolute power corrupting absolutely. I fault them > because many, many other people throught history have been in the same > position and have NOT taken advantage of it. > > Bill Gates and Microsoft could have used their preeminiment position to > nurture and assist everyone else, and we all would have benefited far more. > Would they have gotten as big as they are and made as many billions of dollars > as they did? Probably not - but they still would have been the largest > software ISV in the world and still been in control of Windows. Instead they > have chosen to have the attitude that only their opinion matters and that > everyone else is fucked in the head. > >> SNIP << To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3B894783.7ACC5139>