Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 20:08:18 -0800 From: "David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> To: "Jonathon McKitrick" <jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>, "freebsd-chat" <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: windows debate Message-ID: <000601bf490d$84164e00$021d85d1@youwant.to> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.9912180115250.13403-100000@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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> I'm having a debate with my brother-in-law over microsoft's business > tactics and bill gates. He argues that gates is a genius for getting PCs > in the hands of average people, not just computer geeks. He argues that > gates was brilliant for his marketing tactics that locked people into > windows, and that he gave people what they wanted: easy-to-use > computers. He argues that there may be better OSes out there, but that > gates just had the wherewithall to market it correctly and make it cheap > enough and easy enough for the average person to use. He agrees that > crashes are no fun, and agrees that M$ may be a monopoly, but thinks that > gates did good for consumers, not bad, and that M$ singlehandedly brought > the computer industry to the cutting edge of the eceonomy and brought the > US to its economic growth it enjoys right now. Any thoughts? Well, the points that I most disagree with are: 1) Gates really did not do much to bring the prices of operating systems down. What he did do was bundle features into operating systems, bringing the total price of the operating system plus features down, but there's no reason to think that this wouldn't have happened without Gates. Look at FreeBSD's feature set over the same time period. 2) Much of the ease-of-use that Windows brings is mythical. Windows computers are really not that easy to use. And they're especially hard to troubleshoot and maintain. Making computers easier to use just allows less competent people to get into more trouble. How much lost productivity is due to this? (Ever heard of the productivity paradox?) 3) The computer industry's economic position is more or less inevitable, unless you want to credit Microsoft for the entire information revolution. If anything deserves credit for the information revolution, it's the cheap, low-cost availability of computing power and the explosion of the Internet. Gates/Microsoft has very little to do with either of these factors. 4) The US's economic growth (in the information sector at least) is due to far more than just Gates/Microsoft. Intel, for example, has more to do with it. I do agree, though, that Gates deserves some credit for localizing portions of that growth to the US -- but let's not forget, Microsoft is not even in Silicon Valley. It's hard to credit the explosion of productivity and development in Northern California to Bill Gates. DS To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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