| Monday
November 8, 1999
The Microsoft decision ate much of the week and weekend. My
thoughts are up at www.byte.com, and Eric Pobirs
has useful observations over in mail. And it's late Sunday night, and
I'm exhausted. Back tomorrow.
As expected, there is a flood of mail regarding the
Microsoft decision. I'll put something up later. I was also sent a link to
Dan Bricklin's Log web page
which looks into the ethical issues, not only of Microsoft but the
business community in general. I recommend it to your attention. Note that
my analysis has never been focused on business ethics, which are pretty
ghastly in nearly all big businesses. For the few who don't know, Dan
Bricklin was the co-author of Visi-Calc, a program that kept Apple alive
in the early days. He was also present the night Dvorak scooped me by
knowing about Microsoft Bookshelf when I didn't. As I recall, that same
night Dan was denied admission to the Copley Hotel Bar because he wasn't
properly dressed. I suggested to him that he ought to buy the hotel so
that we could go in and get a drink, but he wisely decided simply to find
another place where we could talk. A very good man, Dan Bricklin. But
while I may decry the modern business practices for much the same reason
he does, I have no remedy: in particular, giving government more power
over the economy would be a cure far worse than the disease.
And then I got this:
Thanks for mentioning my essay on your site. I felt
like I was going out on a limb bringing in ethics, but the feedback has
been good.
BTW, it was one of the few times I have been denied
admission at a hotel, and I remember it, too. I thought it was the
Ritz-Carlton, but you may be right.
-DanB
I don't think we can give too much attention to ethics. I
am, on the other hand, very concerned about enforcement of
"ethics". To some extent that is what courts of equity are
about: and the first rule of equity is "he who seeks equity must do
equity," and the second is like unto it, "those who come for
equity must come with clean hands." That pretty well lets out
all the parties to this case...
If we have a focus group of soccer moms chaired by Al Gore
making decisions for the industry, God help us. And don't laugh: that
would be a 'safe harbor'. Get prior permission so you will never be sued.
That's the way it works.
***
Well, I managed to get some writing done, to come back to
find that those who say Microsoft never innovates don't seem at all to
recall just how damn hard networking was before Windows 3.11, and just how
expensive it was to get any kind of peer to peer networking that was fast
and easy to use. Of course at the time Novell said it was dirty pool, and
Microsoft was being unfair by putting this feature into an operating
system. And giving it away! I am surprised that Netscape didn't sue over
that.
How incorporating Net/Buei and TCP/IP into the OS is
different from incorporating a web browser is not entirely clear to me.
Was there something about the html file format that made it sacred, and
thus reading it must be a application and cannot be part of the OS?
Another chap says all the features Microsoft stuffs into
the system are junk and useless and he never uses them, and they just slow
things down so they harm him. And so forth.
Well, I'm sure he's right, and I have other things to
do.
We can now get on with having a focus group of soccer moms
chaired by Al Gore determine what shall and shall not be part of an
operating system. God help us.
have the WORD and Excel and other applications data file formats for
Microsoft applications -- the file formats themselves -- been published,
and if so, where? I find this an interesting and perhaps important
question, and I don't know the answer.
In any event I have about had enough. I still have to
write an Intellectual Capital column. Guess what they want it on. And I am
rather tired of the subject...
I can report that my REBEL.COM Linux box is working
splendidly, and is the communications server for all of Chaos Manor now.
See upcoming column. This little box has decided it for me: I am
going to rebuild a BIG Linux box, and have at it..
This from elsewhere:
The
beer in your hand is in the processor's registers.
The
beer in the cooler next to you is in the processor's cache.
The
beer in the fridge is in RAM.
The
warm beer in the garage is on the hard disk.
The
warm beer at the beer distributor is on a server on the Internet.
===
OK: let's be clear on something. Since I don't own stock
in Microsoft, it's no great problem to me if the government harvests a few
hundred million from the Microsoft stockholders in fines. I worry a little
about what happens when a company valued at 80 times earnings falls to 50
times earnings when people begin to wonder just how it can sustain all
that growth when it has to give back a lot of the profits every few years
when its competitors squeal loudly enough. Actually, given that Microsoft
is currently valued as worth more than the automobile industry, I worry a
lot about the effect of that much wealth going down the tubes. What
happens to pension holdings? Our balance of trade, which is increasingly
dependent on royalties paid from overseas?
But doubtless we can afford it, and if the government will
then just give clear guidelines on what is and is not permissible, the
harm won't be too great.
But will it? Or is this a move to establish "safe
harbors": advisory boards, official or unofficial, that will tell you
what is and is not legal in business practices. Hire this consulting firm,
and things will be good. Don't forget to put money into this PAC. There
you go, I'm sure they will give you no problems about that now.
That's the nightmare I face.
Could things be better if Microsoft never existed? Dunno.
Would they be better if IBM had taken OS/2 more seriously and insisted
that all IBM software for Windows shipped able to run on OS/2, and every
IBM Windows box could be bought with OS/2 instead? I think so. Given that
I'd still be writing a very lucrative column for OS/2 Professional they
would sure be better for me. But how much better? I keep wondering.
We're in uncharted waters here. New discoveries could make
much of the installed hardware base obsolete. Does, in fact, and much
sooner than it used to. Set Top Boxes. Thin clients. I don't much like
them -- I want my files at home -- but that's not so difficult either,
disks being so cheap. It's possible right now to go out to Fry's and buy a
bunch of stuff and for well under $500 be on the Internet and doing just
about all I do without one single Microsoft product on my system. The web
design would be a bit harder because FrontPage, now that I have got used
to it, is simpler to do. The mail handlers available under Linux, on the
other hand, are likely as good as Outlook 2000. I'd have to learn a lot of
stuff over again, but I could be operating without Microsoft.
So could most of you. It might cost you a thousand or so.
For those who hate Microsoft so much that you're willing to accuse me of
being on the take -- you know who you are, fortunately not many -- why
don't you DO that? Indeed at least one has, leaving me to wonder why,
since he doesn't run any Microsoft products, he cares what Microsoft does?
But for most users, Windows was a blessing. It may not be
great, or even very good, but it was the best thing around that was cheap
and ran most of the software we already had.
Why was most of what we had PC software? Because Apple was
raking in 25% profit on each box sold, and sued Digital Research to make
them use those horrible drop down menus instead of pull down menus, so
Atari started off with ugly and things got worse. I miss my Atari. It was
a pretty good computer in its day. But the fact is that not due to evil
Microsoft but just plain hard competition, by the time Windows came around
the market was ready for a standard that was easy to use, and while IBM
was running for its dinner, Gates was running for his life. And won.
Aren't desktop operating systems a natural monopoly? In
which case what do we do now? I don't want competing standards. If it will
make people happy to have the government confiscate some part of
Microsoft's net worth in order to let us get on with the long boom and the
industry, then do that. And hope we haven't sent the wrong message. We
never had a boom this long. I sure hope it lasts. I've read a lot about
why it has lasted, and most of the theories are contradictory. Mostly it
has gone on because people believe it will. Perhaps, even though
government can come in and confiscate winnings in this brutally
competitive market, it will continue to grow. And perhaps, just perhaps,
it will settle into a kinder and gentler industry, not so horribly
competitive, not so crazy for growth... And I really don't know what will
happen then.
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