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CHAOS MANOR MAIL
A SELECTION
Mail 74 November 8 - 14, 1999
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I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too... I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail.
If you want to send mail that will be published, you don't have to use the formatting instructions you will find when you click here but it will make my life simpler, and your chances of being published better..
This week:
Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday
-- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday
-- Sunday
HIGHLIGHTS:
- The Microsoft Opinion
- More of same
- Harm to consumers
- More of same with examples: death of a thousand cuts
- Hating Microsoft -- have a reason
- Why the empire is evil.
- Pournelle you're wrong!
- Should the stupid inherit the earth?
- A computer scientist speaks Professor Foderaro's views
- Games
- Harmed by Microsoft
- Pournelle, you're wrong and lazy
- Innovation?
- Guerrilla action
- Real guerrilla warfare
- Remembering
- Elitism
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Monday November 8. 1999
Most of the mail will be about the Microsoft Decision. To see what I had to say, see www.byte.com since it is supposed to be up by this morning.
I asked Chaos Manor associate Eric Pobirs to look over my column before I sent it in. He had several helpful suggestions, but also sent a lot of material that ought to be in the column, but there was neither time nor room. Here is Eric on the decision. It's long but exceedingly readable:
Look at this quote from a piece on MSNBC: "Jackson held that "to the detriment of consumers ... Microsoft has done much more than develop innovative browsing software of commendable quality and offer it bundled with Windows at no additional charge." As has been shown, "Microsoft also engaged in a concerted series of actions designed to protect the applications barrier to entry, and hence its monopoly power, from a variety of middle-ware threats including Netscape's Web browser and Sun Microsystem's implementation of Java."
Is it just me or is this inconsistent? Is Netscape Navigator a client app or middleware? Is JAVA an OS layer or middleware? This makes clear what a useless term 'middleware' is and why people who aren't in the business of marketing software should avoid it. By extended definition, anything sitting between your desktop OS and the server is middleware. A broad range, to say the least.
More importantly, if someone walks into the same place as you, then loudly begins declaring you as an enemy who will soon be destroyed by their weapons, which are neither secret or technologically out of reach, are you not allowed to shout "Up yours!" back and defend yourself? Netscape's Andreeson casually sent business correspondence equating Microsoft with the Antichrist. These messages also suggested that the 'good guys' would band together and destroy said Beast. (Um, isn't that collusion?) This was chalked up as high spirits and youthful indescretion. If a Microsoft exec made similar comments about Netscape it was held up in court as tantamount to plotting a literal murder.
The funny thing is that Netscape screwed themselves by approaching anything to do with Microsoft in an arbitrarily hostile fashion. At one point Microsoft offered to bundle Navigator with Windows with a royalty paid for every Windows license sold. This was rather generous considering that Web browsers had solely been freeware or shareware (as noted in item 17 of the Background page). This indicates that Microsoft viewed the browser as a value-add for the OS from the very beginning, long before they had any homegrown product that could compare with Navigator. Netscape's belief that the browser was a profit center in and of itself was not shared by Redmond. Should Microsoft be penalized for acting accordingly? Nobody else has been hassled for this business model. IBM and several other large companies gave away browsers but this doesn't seem to bother anyone. Perhaps because they weren't especially good browsers. Is that Microsoft's offense, having a better product?
Netscape's other fatal step was thinking that an enemy of Micorosoft was their friend. They enlisted the support of IBM, Sun, Oracle, and others but stupidly thought those titans would welcome another 800-pound gorilla to share the market. Netscape's failure can as easily be attributed to playing the patsy for the anti-MS crowd as any effort on Microsoft's part.
Netscape can blame nobody but themselves for their botched product development. Releasing the source code to Navigator has revealed it to be a horrible mess that the company continued to build upon long after the need for a fresh start was critically obvious. They didn't start the new rendering engine until the dread decline was well underway. (The 5.0 product is still somewhere out on the horizon. Nearly as late as Win2K but nobody seems to care anymore.) This was a company with vast funds and high glamour. Surely they could have attracted the programming talent needed to keep their most visible product up to or better than the level set by Microsoft.
If that wasn't enough, Eric sent some more:
Another problem with OS/2: IBM didn't support it. That is, many parts of IBM that were in the desktop software market did not feel any obligation to write for the company's own product. At the time when OS/2 Warp was the big alternative hopeful and Win95 was still quite new, I attended a trade show , CES or E3 (I forget which), where IBM had a big both to promote their consumer software division. All kinds of educational and entertainment items, many of them quite good. I noted than everything appeared to be for DOS or Windows. When I asked the person manning the booth, a high ranking exec in the division, where the OS/2 versions were he looked at me as if I were insane and laughed. Apparently that part of IBM felt that any effort invested in making OS/2 palatable to consumers would be an utter waste of time and money.
If IBM couldn't marshal support for it's own OS how could it possibly stand a chance against a company that had no such internal conflicts, as noted in the Gates quote? Who is to blame for that? Did Lotus lose the lead in spreadsheets because Microsoft played dirty or because Lotus took years to release a decent version for Windows. Need we mention how badly Lotus bungled their Macintosh products, leaving the market highly receptive to Excel?
Isn't great how Apple is summarily dismissed from the market early on on in the FOF? Forget all the regained market share, forget all of the iMacs supposedly sold to existing Windows users, forget the large percentage of Mac users who use SoftWindows to run Windows apps without purchasing Intel hardware. Forget all of that. You guys just don't matter. Don't that make you feel just swell, Steve? Don't feel too bad, though. It turns out Linux doesn't matter either. Even though Red Hat has had a massive IPO and Sun, SGI, IBM, Oracle, and almost every other name worth mentioning outside Redmond is backing Linix, It Just Doesn't Matter. Mighty convenient if you're trying to slag Microsoft.
Isn't it a wonderful moment of ignorance, that when the biggest story in the industry today is new standards (XML, for instance) that make client platforms superfluous, the Judge says if it ain't running on a Pentium, it doesn't matter? Get that man a Dreamcast.
Another bizarre finding is that it cost a lot of money to make a new OS successful. Well, duh! This is a big business. Try to start a new car company and see what that costs. It will set you back a few billion more than any conceivable software product. We must accept that this barrier to entry is a natural factor of tha market, one that Microsoft would also face if they decided to start from scratch with new OS. Windows CE is largely compatible at the API level but has doubtlessly consumed many tens of millions of dollars with little or no profit as yet. At the same time many companies who are successfully fielding competing product for the embedded market are microscopic compared to MS. They wouldn't have a chance in the consumer desktop sector but what excuse does the likes of IBM and Sun have? To suggest that they lack for funds invites laughter. Could it be, that when it comes to the consumer world, they just don't get it? Is that something the government supposed to offer them, like the Wizard of Oz? "And for you, little IBM, the most precious gift of all, a Clue."
And still more:
In section II The Relevant Market, there is more industry ignorance. It is claimed that servers are arbitrarily very expensive items. Really? Servers are a very broad range of equipment. Turnkey systems like the Rebel box that can support a good sized office full of users cost less than full featured consumer desktops. I can slap together a very powerful Linux box for considerably less than I would spend for a really nice desktop system. If you're talking about the big iron that IBM,Sun, and SGI sell, those don't use Intel processors. Merced/Itanium is Intel's bid to break into that market for the first time. This appears to completely ruin that claim.
The thrust of this section is that a server OS isn't a viable substitute for Windows. So is the court saying that Network Computers and server hosted apps suck? This would come as a big surprise to the people who encouraged this trial in the first place. The folks at Sun, Oracle, and IBM insist that the client is meaningless since all the action will be on the server. Which is it, guys? This is addressed in part 23 but whose fault is if Microsoft has manged to be several years ahead of the competition. To quote Woody Allen, 90% of success is showing up.
Apple is dismissed again in part 21. They aren't price competitive because they don't license their OS. Microsoft does license their OS but they aren't competitive. Is this making any sense. Later on, if it is suggested Microsoft is unfair to Apple, can we refer back to this section for judicial notice that Apple is stupid?
In Part 24 it is said that Network Computers are cut off from the Windows application market. This is simply not true. The largest percentage of the installed base of Network Computers are running Windows apps through Citrix or Microsoft's own application server. Many of these boxes are running WinCE to host the client but more recent developments from Citrix offer compatibility to a wide array of platforms.
It is notable to me that one of the closest parallels of the consumer computer market, video game consoles, is ignored. In 1995 there were only companies taken seriously in this business, Sega and Nintendo. All of the others were severely underfunded and had horribly defective business models. Four years ago Sony demonstrated that a well financed and organized effort could break into this market and even dominate it. Sony invested over half a billion dollars in bringing the Playstation to fruition. Sony knew they couldn't sit around waiting for third party support, so much of that investment went into building their own inhouse development teams and providing financial incentives to major developers. It can be said that both Sega and Nintendo made important errors that helped clear the way for Sony but it's very unlikely that anything these companies might have done would have stopped Sony from achieving a strong market. Nintendo is at least as tough a competitor as Microsoft ever was, forcing publishers to sign contracts that would make Judge Jackson scream bloody murder if he were ever to see them. It is very significant to me that Sega was able to make Nintendo retired those contracts in an out of court settlement.
So what is to prevent IBM or Sun from spending a billion bucks not only on an OS but also the applications needed to get it off the ground?
This substitutablity business bothers me. Who is really at fault here? If you wanted to drive a car that ran on other than fossil fuels are the big oil companies responsible for retrofitting their gas stations to support an unrewarding market? The most visible case is GM's EV1 electric cars. To save weight this design cannot plug into just any old outlet. Instead it requires an installation where it can be charged up. These aren't cheap and there isn't any incentive for placing them in gas stations since it takes hours to charge a single vehicle. The natural location for these is in parking garages where the vehicles would normally be sitting for hours anyways and the space is already allotted. However, most garage operators don't have much incentive to put in a row of charging stations since the tiny market would never pay for this investment unless exhorbitant prices were charged. So GM bit the bullet (they were after all being blackmailed by laws requiring zero emmission vehicles) and spent a goodly amount of money to subsidize charging stations. GM has been forced by pollution laws into this but at the same time they are keeping an eye on being in the lead if the electric vehicle ever becomes a profitable product. Are the fuel and electrical utility companies being unfair to GM by creating barriers to entry, essentially by doing nothing?
If a company chooses to write for a new OS isn't an incentive to being in on the ground floor? At worst the company has they opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond. If there isn't enough pond to make a decent business, well, them's the breaks. Capitalism is about opportunity. Many people forget that before Windows Micorsoft tested the waters on almost every box that ever came down the pike in the form of a BASIC interpreter. They made a bet on Apple and did very well in that market to the extent that Apple's suicidal behavior allowed. In fact, they often made a profit from the Mac in years when Apple didn't.
Virtually every OS that ever existed led to the creation of new companies writing for those systems. Some of those companies rise to become major players in the industry, while others remained obscure as their platforms and fade away accordingly. It's called opportunity. If the game scares you don't play.
All of which is good stuff indeed.
Dear Jerry,
You said that it is possible that Microsoft may be split into OS company and an Applications company, though not any time soon. I disagree. This would just result in an OS company with the same market share currently held by Microsoft. If Microsoft's supposed monopoly of Intel Operating Systems is in fact the problem, the solution would have to involve splitting up the OS division of Microsoft. Server and Workstation, perhaps. Or Corporate and Personal? Intel and AMD? I don't think such a split would have many positive results.
As to your question regarding declining hits, I suspect three culprits. One, some people will be satisfied with reading your columns at byte.com. Two, some will be checking in less frequently now that your format is pretty stable and information easier to find. Three, some, including me, may have been bored by the months of battles with Office 2000. I'm not saying the lessons you learned weren't valuable, just over emphasized at the expense of variety. Now that you have started to give space to a wider range of topics I have decided to re-subscribe. I guess I am a lapsed subsciber now - it has been more than a year since I paid - but I promise to rectify that REAL SOON NOW.
Greg French
Welcome back, and thanks.
Here is a fair warning. You may already know all this, but tell your friends.
809 Phone Scam
Ok, here's a little pop quiz to test your dialing IQ; Which of the area codes below is located in the U.S., where domestic long-distance rates would apply?
a) 809
b) 758
c) 664
d) 242
e) 868
f) 473
g) 902
h) 709
i) 869
j) 345
Answer: none of them. They are all international calls, each of them billed at a different rate based on carrier and international agreements. And calling them could lead to a phone bill of hundreds of dollars. The area codes are:
a) 809: Dominican Republic b) 758: St. Lucia c) 664: Montserrat d) 242: Bahamas e) 868: Trinidad and Tobago f) 473: Grenada g) 902: Nova Scotia h)709: Newfoundland i) 869: Nevis/St. Kitts j) 345: Cayman Islands
Here's how the scam works: you get an urgent e-mail or phone message asking you to call a special number (usually beginning with 809) to win a prize, settle an outstanding account, or alert you of an ill relative. You call the number, someone at the other end puts you on hold, and a month later you get a huge charge on your phone bill.
What makes this so clever, and the reason why it works, is that you don't have to dial 011 to reach certin countries. But there are locations outside the United States, many of them in the Caribbean, where you simply dial the area code and number to reach your party. And there are scam artists who have taken advantage of this confusion by promoting calls to "809" numbers in the Dominican Republic. While these telephone numbers may look like domestic long distance calls, international telephone rates apply.
Here's the e-mail circulating this warning:
SPECIAL ALERT. DO NOT EVER DIAL AREA CODE 809. SCAM: Don't respond to emails, phone calls or pages which tell you to call an "809" phone number. This is a very important issue of Internet ScamBusters because it alerts you to a scam that is spreading extremely quickly, can easily cost you $100 or more and it is difficult to avoid unless you are aware of it. We'd like to thank Paul Bruemmer and Brian Stains for bringing this scam to our attention. This scam has also been identified by the National Fraud Information Center and is costing victims a lot of money. There are lots of different permutations of this scam, but here is how it works.
Permutation #1: Internet Based Phone Scam via e-mail. You receive an email, typically with a subject line of "ALERT" or "Unpaid Account." The message, which is being scammed across the net, says: I am writing to give you a final 24 hours to settle your outstanding account. If I have not received the settlement in full, I will commence legal proceedings without further delay. If you would like to discuss this matter to avoid court Action, call Mike Murray at Global Communications at 1-809-496-2700.
Permutation #2: Phone or pager scam: You receive a message on your answering machine or your pager which asks you to call a number beginning with area code 809. The reason you're asked to call varies: It can be to receive information about a family member who has been ill, to tell you someone has been arrested, died, or to let you know you have won a wonderful prize, etc. In each case, you're told to call the 809 number right away. Since there are so many new area codes these days, people unknowingly return these calls. If you call from the US, you will apparently be charged $25 per minute! Sometimes the person who answers the phone will speak broken English and pretend not to understand you. Other times, you'll just get a long recorded message. The point is, they will try to keep you on the phone as long as possible to increase the charges. Unfortunately, when you get your phone bill, you'll often be charged more than $100.00.
Here's why it works: The 809 area code is located in the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas. The 809 area code can be used as a "pay-per-call" number similar to 900 numbers in the US. Since 809 is not in the US, it is not covered by US regulations of 900 numbers which require that you be notified and warned of charges and rates involved when you call a "pay-per-call" number. There is also no requirement that the company provide a time period during which you may terminate the call without being charged. Further, whereas many US phones have 900 call blocking (to avoid these kinds of charges), 900 number blocking will * prevent calls to the 809 area code. We recommend that no matter how you get the message, if you are asked to call a number with an 809 area code that you don't recognize investigate further and/or disregard the message. Be "very" wary of email or calls asking you to call an 809 area code number. It is important to prevent becoming a victim of this scam, since trying to fight the charges afterwards can become a real nightmare. That's because you did actually make the call. If you complain, both your local phone company and your long distance carrier will not want to get involved and will most likely tell you that they are simply providing the billing for the foreign company. You'll end up dealing with a foreign company that argues that it has done nothing wrong. Please forward this entire issue of Internet ScamBusters to your friends, family and colleagues to help them become aware of this scam so they don't get ripped off.
Thanks.
On that score I have received:
Note that the message you posted on 11/8 is itself a spam of a scam: see http://www.scambusters.com/809scam.html
I fear I do not know that this means; I haven't had time to look. But it seems to be another warning...
Jerry,
You wrote... << Imagine the consequences of going to Janet Reno for permission to distribute Internet Explorer << free as opposed to charging a price "competitive with Netscape."
I wonder... what was your position when Japan was dumping DRAM's in the US IC market? It was widely recognized then that their purpose was not to give Americans the best product for the best prices but rather to harm US IC manufacturers. Japan knew that if they wiped out the US-made DRAM business they would also be cutting off the path to further US-led IC innovation since mastering the DRAM design and production process was a critical first step in getting "good" at building more complex circuits.
In the case of the Microsoft browser (free and/or embedded within the OS) - the judge had to make the call as to the intent of Microsoft's pricing/bundling strategy and saw it in the same light.
My take...It is not enough to say that Microsoft missed the boat on the internet. Mr. Gates did not see the internet as a paradigm shift. I believe that he was putting the finishing touches on his fat-client version of client/server computing and for that reason REFUSED to believe that a major paradigm shift had taken place right under his nose.
He originally tried to belittle the internet until somebody coined the phrase "intranet". That's when he realized that browser-based applications architectures were superior to what he had just put together at Microsoft for deploying client/server systems. I think it was a critical mistake based upon his belief that the Microsoft vision of where computing was going was infallible. But this new browser-based approach "felt" right from the get-go. I think the realized that this stubborn position could eventually cost him his company.
His reaction was to use his monopoly in the desktop operating system and Office suite businesses in a predatory manner to eliminate rather that compete with the innovative companies that saw the future as browser-based. He did this because he new that it was too late for him to compete fairly and still retain his desktop monopoly let alone drive the future of computing which, I believe, based upon this ruling, will be a bright one.
Regards,
Tim McCoy mccoy@pond.com
I am generally in favor of dumping. I wish the Germans would become furious and dump Mercedes at $5000. That would cause us to close down Detroit and fire all the workers in the Detroit auto industry.
You are inconsistent. Microsoft missed the boat on the Internet and gave its competitors a big head start. As usual, Microsoft ten became very careful. Netscape went around telling people how they were going to destroy the Anti-Christ and bring down this evil empire, and drive Microsoft into bankruptcy. While they were doing that, Microsoft caught up with them. I do not find myself harmed by being given my choice of two major and a half dozen minor web browsers, all free. You have chosen the wrong examples.
And in the memory chip wars, the US created a cartel to keep the price of memory high. The profits from that went to two large US companies, and lots of Asian companies which could now sell memory in the US for far more than a competitive price, this courtesy of the US Department of Commerce. The effect of this was to bar entry into the PC Clone business, since in those days disk size and memory were the two features systems competed on. While the DOC was artificially raising memory prices for the rest of us, the FCC was closing down small startup disk drive makers for not paying tribute to have their products (to be enclosed in cases) certified as electronically quiet enough. The government created artificial prices that really did harm the consumer.
But I know: any stick will do to beat the devil.
Eric Pobirs, who must not sleep, has added this. It raises important questions:
The critical aspect of a Microsoft split into separate OS and Application companies is that the motivations of those companies change considerably from the current parts of the whole. Currently Microsoft developers have a vested interest in making the OS favor Office and vice versa. Much of the barrier to entry complaints relate directly to this. A standalone Microsoft OS company would need to offer every possible encouragement to ISV's since it would no longer be beneficial to give the Office developers priveliged API information not available to the public.
The Application company would in turn have reason to withhold support for other platform, provided the promise of good sales volume was apparent. The Microsoft hostility to JAVA would no longer have much reason to exist for either company. The Application guys would simply view it as another platform and the OS folks would see another source of supporting apps and try to run them better and faster than the competition.
This raises an entire set of new problems. What goes to which company? Nobody has a truly definitive answer for what is the OS and what is an application. Some might say an OS is nothing more than what you need to get to the command line. After all, isn't much of Caldera's complaint that the Windows GUI should be sold separately from DOS to allow a market for alternate versions of DOS? (Never mind the fact that the great majority of consumer don't want to see or know about DOS anymore.) Of course, this would make Apple the original offender in shipping a system with a preinstalled GUI application. Or is it an OS layer? A matter of perspective that depends largely on what business you chose to be in.
If you're Intuit and have several features in Quicken tied to the functionality of Internet Explorer, you certainly want those components shipped on as many computers as possible. If you think there is a commercial market for HTML renderers, though, you'd prefer that lie solely in the Applications realm. In this particular case you could make a compromise by including the core DLL files without the bits that provide the user interface. That would allow anybody to build a browser into their application. (Actually, Win98 and IE does this now. Netscape doesn't lend itself to this due to a rather archaic design. Surely another plot hatched in Redmond.)
That is one compromise but the conflict will never end. What if all the hundreds of coders who've produced shareware version of Solitaire decided that the version bundled with Windows was unfair competition? Where does it end? I can only shudder at the idea that this might become the decision of some government committee.
Also, if this split does happen, what of all the other companies with substantial OS and application divisions? Does Sun have to turn around and divest Star Division? Does IBM spin off part of Lotus? Corel?
Think about this when you ask the government to solve your problems for you.
Which pretty well speaks for itself.
The following seems representative, so I'll use it as generic for the questions asked in it:
As a consumer, I feel I was harmed many times by the practices of Microsoft, and find your statements that none occurred as one sided as perhaps the judges findings.
Example: I buy a PC in 1992 and it comes with MS-DOS. I want to run DR-DOS. I ask for the price on the system to be reduced by sending it to me with no operating system. They can't; their OEM contract makes them ship to me a configuration I don't want. Price of MS-DOS built into the system price. I end up paying for MS-DOS in the purchase, and again for DR-DOS at the software mart. To me I was harmed with a directly attributable $$ cost.
Example: I buy another PC in 1994/95 time frame. Of course it comes with both MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, neither of which I want and I can't again get a price break for having MS's OEM contract force my PC OEM to preload their software to the exclusion of anything else.
Example: I wipe this PC clean, install DR-DOS and and later load Windows 3.0. I have a question about a setting for video and go to the CIS forums run by MS. When I explain that I'm running DR-DOS,I'm told that I cannot get any support on the product unless I'm running PC-DOS or MS-DOS. I'm told to delete DR-DOS and install MS-DOS and they'll answer my questions (which was, recall, only about a video setting, nothing operating system related about it.) So here I was with a product I had forced upon me that when I set it up the way I want I'm told I'm not eligible for any assistance.
And let's not forget when MS changed the makeup of a few key files when Windows 3.1 was coming out to make it not run on DR-DOS. I personally experienced Windows 3.1 not running and per the support staff in the DRDOS support forums on CIS at the time, the changes make seemed, to them, to have only had the effect of breaking Windows if DRDOS was used; no other technical improvements were visible due to this change MS made. "It ain't done till DRDOS won't run"
Note also that while DRDOS provided competition, MS was upgrading DOS in response. We had consumer choice, and MS responded with upgrades. Until DRDOS basically lost all market share and MSDOS was never upgraded again. And is there a need for it to be upgraded as a product? IBM has upgraded PC-DOS and Novel rerelased DRDOS and it's been upgraded by Caldera. By then these were no longer competitors, the lesson having been learned by the industry not to screw with MS in a core area.
Example: So, contrarian that I am, I settle on OS/2 and work with that for a while. And I was key in getting you help from IBM when you were playing with it; you were on your area on GEnie moaning about how MS teats you so well but IBM was not giving you any help. I spoke with Dave (forget last name, started up Team OS/2) and he got IBM help to you.
Anyway, I find that Windows 3.1 under OS/2 is far more stable and runs like windows should have run. It was truly a pleasure to run Windows programs under OS/2. Then MS makes changes to the Win32 API to move some processes above the 1 gig level (or so I recall) in memory and OS/2, limited at 512 Megs, all of a sudden can no longer run newer Windows apps.
People who know things look at the technical changes MS made and the result seems to be that aside from 1 or 2 minor tweaks, the prime result of this change is to break OS/2's ability to run Windows.
I consider that behavior that harmed consumers.
Example: Yes, the price of all other software has trended down while MS operating systems have not. Is having Windows 98 $30 cheaper a big deal? Sure, when you multiply that by a couple hundred million purchases. That's money consumers could have spent on something else that they ahd no option but to give to MS.
You can and will disagree, but I don't care how benevolent the despot is. It matters not that they have been innovators and all the other flowery prose they throw around if, at the bottom line, they used means that enhanced their growth and profits in an unethical and illegal fashion.
I, as a consumer, feel I have been harmed and I am glad that someone is looking out for me. Certainly MS has not been, or rather, they have been only when it suited them.
We'll agree to disagree, I suppose.
John McGing
That's as clear a statement of the position as I know.
First, Microsoft's discounting policies in the "per CPU shipped" agreements may or may not have had the effect you describe, but that was all in the DOS days: you could have bought an Apple, or an Amiga, or an Atari. There are many reasons for the failure of the Non-IBM PC compatible systems to capture a lot of the market, but Microsoft was a small potatoes outfit then. You could also have insisted on PCDOS by buying a genuine IBM PC. Those were the days when Microsoft Basic was in ROM because of arcane contract language. In any event that discount policy was ended by the consent decree in the first Microsoft case.
Second, you are simply wrong about "It ain't done until DRDOS won't run." Microsoft did have an intimidating message which was designed to frighten naive users, but anyone who read the computer magazines -- BYTE for instance, or Dvorak's columns -- knew it was only bluster. The more serious charge was that Microsoft jiggered the OS so that it would break Novell. That was never proven, but there were plenty of rumors that the real secret motto of Microsoft was "It ain't done until Novell won't run." As to competition between Microsoft and Digital Research, I agree completely: the world was a better place while that was happening. And when Borland brought out a BASIC compiler Microsoft got off its duff and put some effort into BASIC again for the first time in years. But what happened to Digital Research and Borland wasn't the result of illegal actions by Microsoft but disastrous decisions on allocations of resources. DR went nuts over various languages and displays largely intended to keep Gary Kildall's growing child happy. Programming effort that might have gone into DRDOS improvements went elsewhere. Likewise, Borland's foray into BASIC was good for us, but a commercial mistake. And so on.
Market forces tend to be unforgiving.
Regarding OS/2, do you recall that I was the principal columnist for Edwin Black's OS/2 Professional magazine? The failure of IBM to keep OS/2 going cost me about 2 grand a month, no small sum. I had a hell of a stake in keeping OS/2 going just as columnists for Apple magazines had a stake in Apple success. And, of course, I thought the competition healthy. Your Win 3.1 apps will still run under OS/2 if that's what you want. Your DOS apps will still run in DRDOS too. Use them in good health.
And one of your points is silly. If I buy a Ford car, take the motor out and put in a different one, change my mind, replace the original motor, and invoke the warranty, I do not think I will get much sympathy from Ford. Your milage may differ.
As to disagreeing, is we disagree over giving the government more power over this industry, then we aren't merely in disagreement. You describe disorders that I can agree are disorders: but when I look for remedies, al the cures I see are worse than the disease. Dan Bricklin is unhappy about business ethics. So am I, But that doesn't mean I want to empanel a Department of Ethics to be appointed by the President. That would REALLY cause harm to consumers.
One more on Harm:
A sterling example of the judge's logic:
"152. Moreover, many consumers who need an operating system, including a substantial percentage of corporate consumers, do not want a browser at all. For example, if a consumer has no desire to browse the Web, he may not want a browser taking up memory on his hard disk and slowing his system's performance. Also, for businesses desiring to inhibit employees' access to the Internet while minimizing system support costs, the most efficient solution is often using PC systems without browsers."
Is it just me, or isn't the *most efficient* solution found in not providing internet access, regardless of the software resident on client computers?
Tony Evans
Precisely. If I want to keep my kids off the Internet I pull the plug on the phone. But the Judge is from the government, and he is here to help you.
And finally I will exercise a prerogative: it is my site after all -- to put in a letter I particularly like, and I am going to get dressed and have breakfast.
Dear Jerry;
After reading the whole mind-numbing Microsoft decision, I've got only two thoughts (the rest have fled from the "legal light").
1) While each incident cited in the Finding of Fact seems to be independent of the others, and each seems pretty innocent, the combination of all of them seems fairly damning to Microsoft. Yet again we need to remember your favorite Napoleon quote - "Never ascribe to malice..."
2) This whole situation gives me the creeps. While I cheered inside that Microsoft was finally being taken down a peg, we've got to look at the bigger picture. If the third-party dictionary makers had howled like Netscape did back when their products were first integrated into word processors, would we have the computer and software technology we have today?
Microsoft needs to be aware that they're the big kid on the block - and stop acting like a bully. However, when it comes to computers and computing, the government and legal system are still fumbling their way through the dark ages. Are these the people we want handling our technological society? People who don't, can't, or won't understand computers?
I sure hope God is on our side this time, instead of the "United States V. Microsoft."
Thanks for the good work and works - Your view is my new home page... Thanks!
Just one voice in the millions - if you publish this, please put my personal address on it - JDominik@Goldengate.net
You and I have remarkably similar views. I have watched with astonishment as Microsoft grew beyond all reasonable grounds. I have cheered on the opposition, like OS/2, not because I thought IBM a more ethical company, but because competition is a very good thing indeed. I even used the Netscape browser rather than Internet Explorer as a mater of principle, and I by God PAID for my Netscape browser subscription (a painful process; those arrogant whiners didn't know what to do with a customer when they got one). I have no brief for Microsoft as a monopoly, and I am thoroughly in agreement that they ought to walk a bit more softly and stop acting like a bully.
But this certainly gives me the creeps, because conceding that the government has the power to second guess decisions like what features belong in an operating system -- whether or not it exercises that power through political appointees, or asks the National Academy of Science to do it -- is such a fundamental change in the way this country works as to be terrifying; and sometimes I think I am the only one who sees that. Ah well. Thanks.
One more. It's like salted peanuts:
Jerry,
While I agree with your telling of history, I have a slightly different perspective on the process.
Like you, I believe the end result of the trial will be meaningless and probably have little to no effect on the industry. I do however believe that the existence of the trial is producing a number of positive effects. While people may argue whether Microsoft is technically a "monopoly" it is clearly an 800 pound gorilla. The trial is forcing Microsoft to behave more civilized towards its competitors lest it provide too much fodder to the government. This creates the perception of greater opportunity in the industry resulting in fostering more innovation. So while I have little interest in the legal wrangling, I believe its continuance is of great benefit to the industry.
Thanks for listening, David Jacobs
Well, if I thought this were no more than a two by four to get the mule's attention, I'd be all for it. Certainly Microsoft deserves to be whacked up side the head and told to change its ways. The trouble is, we all have different ideas on what ways to change.
If I could dictate to Microsoft I would require them to spend some fixed percentage of their technical talent hours on fixing bugs -- take what they put into it now and double it at the least. Second, as I reported long ago, require them to document and publish any API call used by any Microsoft programmer in any product, and do that the instant that that call is used in the application development cycle. In their defense they seem to try to do that now, but I would make it mandatory, with a heavy reward for whistle blowers. I can think of other things I'd make them do, some having to do with pet peeves. And that's the point, isn't it? I can dictate to them and risk nothing.
What I don't want is Bernie Nussbaum, or Ed Meese, or Ray Klein, or Robert Bork making those decisions for Microsoft. And that's where we are headed. If you don't like Clinton's Justice Department deciding, will you prefer young Bush's? Or Buchannan's? Or Gore's?
Sure, if this has the effect of making Microsoft pay more attention to the kind of ethical considerations raised by Bricklin, I'd be pretty happy about it. But I am afraid it will feed the real 800 pound gorilla, namely, the bureaucrats in Washington DC.
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Tuesday, November 9, 1999
I may open a special mail page for the Microsoft mail. There is a great deal of it, much repetitious. Most sorts easily into categories like "hurrah for you!" and "you evil brute" and "you used to be smart so why are you so stupid" and "But you don't understand, Microsoft is evil." And finally, "But after all is said and done they ARE a monopoly."
Most of it is intelligent. And of course Microsoft IS a monopoly or nearly so, and certainly they have acted like arrogant brutes sometimes. So has every successful company. The difference is that Microsoft isn't stupid about it, and their enemies have been arrogant, brutish, mean, and stupid. Should the stupid inherit the Earth?
Then there is mail like this one, sincerely meant but marred by an attitude. I am trimming off the sender's name; if he wants to claim it, he can send mail saying so and I'll put it on.
The subject line was "Death of a thousand cuts", and there were a couple of preliminary letters before:
As a software developer I have to work where the money is just like everyone else. Judge Jackson explains this effect quite nicely. And so, unhappily, I have learned to tolerate limping around with stones in my shoe. I would in an instant switch to another OS if the judge's portrayal of the software market were untrue.
Have you ever tried to copy a URL off of the IE5 properties dialog? You can't use the "cut" function and you can't drag it to Explorer's URL input field. But you can drag it into notepad and from there cut it into your cut buffer. IE4 didn't behave this way. It just worked. This functionality was deliberately crippled to impede people from taking advantage of deep links.
I'm all in favour of MS's innovation. They produce very capable software when they choose to. What I'm not in favour of is the extra effort they put into negative innovation and the corruption of common sense. The features of Windows which cause me the most aggravation were done against prevailing engineering practice for purely competitive reasons.
When a company can hobble its own products with impunity for the purpose of destroying alternatives it is high time for the government to act. If they did put Windows into open source within two months it would be only half as painful to use, and not by virtue of anything new being added.
The accusation seemed serious so I sent an official inquiry to Microsoft, name removed, on whether this is true. I also sent a copy to a Microsoft tech who had written me about my column. His reply:
Thanks for the response. I can only comment on this "off the record", as I am a lowly support grunt, and am not paid to make statements for MS.
I had never heard of this before. So, I went to IE5 and tried it. Sure enough, if you try to highlight the URL and do a "ctrl-C", it does not copy (it would never "cut", it is not that type of text). However, if you right click, the context menu will come up, and "Copy" is one of the options. It works just great this way. I fail to see why the person who sent you this just does not do what the rest of the world does and copy the URL out of the "Address" combo at the top of IE. That is where addresses are held and manipulated, and that is what that combo is for.
Clearly my original correspondent saw evil where none was intended. I also got from a Microsoft lead programmer a note to the effect that he was not in the IE team so should not comment, but:
I'm not part of the IE team, so I shouldn't comment on behalf of Microsoft on this. Going through Microsoft PR is the best approach.
As a user, I don't really understand the problem based on the description. I just copied a URL from the IE5 propety dialog into my URL test box. What is the user activity they are trying to perform? What is a deep link?
This may be a simple case of the "evil" Microsoft syndrome. If something is broken or doesn't work exactly the way expected there must be some sinister motive behind it all. This really makes me sad. In my personal experience working with Microsoft developers I've never sat in a meeting where a developer proposed creating a bad product to hurt the competition. If I were to propose such a thing to my own dev team, they'd take me outside and shoot me. It would be an insult to them.
Which, I think, is both true and an interesting statement. It should be recalled. Microsoft exists only because a lot of bright people work there. Most could work elsewhere by making one phone call. Some stay for the money, but few people that bright work only for money since money is easy enough to come by. I know a lot of Microsoft geeks from geekfest and I do not know one single one who would sell his integrity for a few bucks. Maybe some managers, but I know a number of them, and I don't know any with criminal mentality. Up at the top levels, who knows? I don't move around there. But implementing clearly dumb and criminal things like deliberately breaking something is not easy to do and is harder to keep secret.
Jerry,
I'm so glad I'm not the only one that thinks the DOJ and the honorable Thomas Penfield Jackson don't know what the heck they're doing. We've been bantering around the same sentiments here in the office concerning his "findings" and are extremely disappointed with our government.
We are far from Microsoft bandwagoners and we run both Novell and NT in our shop. We have made the commitment to the MSOffice suite because it was, and still is, the best bang for the buck on the desktop. We toyed around with OS/2 years back and dumped it as soon as NT became available for the exact reasons you state: no product, pitiful connectivity. Remember when AT&;T was broken up and our phone service went to hell in a handbasket for 10 years? You'd think the goverment would learn from it's mistakes, but I guess when you make so many of them...
Thanks for providing an industry take on the situation and speaking the minds of serious IT professionals that don't hate Microsoft just because they're Microsoft. Hate them for a reason. Right now I hate them because IE 5.0 keeps crashing my system. Tomorrow it'll be for some other reason, but that doesn't mean I'll stop buying their products.
Scott Youngs
And the judge just hates them. And their competitors had a dozen meetings with Klein before DOJ got in the act. Oh well. As you say, have a reason to hate them.
Incidentally what system does IE 5 crash? It seems stable enough on this Windows 2000 Professional work station. Mostly.
Then there are those who see a bleak future:
Don´t you see that Microsoft is on it´ts way to total control over the Internet via the browser and thereby have the means to control and tax everything in the future on the net ? like e-commerce, financial transactions, banking, portals, WAP-technology, news, entertainment, music etc. Thats why their monopoly is far more serious now than a couple of years ago.
Pär Lodin, Interactive Publishing, Sweden
I fear I have missed something because no, I don't see that.
Dear Jerry,
I could not let your coloumn claiming that Microsoft's monopolistic practices can be excused on the basis that competing companies made business mistakes pass without some comment.
You claim to be happy that Microsoft used its monopolistic position to deflate the price of web-browsers and `innovated' its operating system to ensure that using non-Microsoft browsers would be an inconvenient experience (even on non-Microsoft OS platforms). It appears that you base this complacency on the fact that this distortion of the market has not led to a marked inflation of prices in Microsoft's OS and application products.
In this you make the mistake of not understanding the true extent of Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft has a controlling influence, not only over the deskstop OS and application markets, but in fact over the US stock market indicators and the investment industry. This control has recently been turned into a monoply by the inclusion of Microsoft in the Dow Jones.
Microsoft is a small company with USG$6 in net product sales in 98/99 which has used its dominance of the stock market to become a USG$350 company. Bill Gates is probably personally worth more money than Microsoft has ever earned from product sales.
Were does the money come from?
Microsoft prints stock certificates to sell to the computers that `manage' your retirement fund. It sells them to its employees instead of paying them a real wage and then gets a handout from the government to compensate it for the `loss' it made on the transaction. That is to say the taxpayer pays half of Microsoft's wage bill and your retirement fund pays the other half.
Microsoft's primary product is its own stock. It can give away any and all of its software products without any significant pain, provided it can keep its stock price growing. Its now monopolistic control of the stock market indicators means that it doesn't even have to work hard at this. Witness the amazing turn around in its share price after the Jackson decision as automated buy flags were raised by its initial price fall. The stock price is locked in a tight positive feedback loop and it won't stop until it has eaten everyone's retirement funds.
Its a difficult call for you no doubt, whether to support the breakup of this monopoly and take an immediate loss, or else to try to shore it up in the hope you'll die before the bubble bursts. Of course, even if the Jackson decision could lead to a controlled implosion of the Microsoft bubble, their business practises are now the standard.
Brendan Mahony
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Wednesday November 10, 1999
Tenth Annversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
I get mail.
Jerry,
I think you missed a few key points of legality here. The most important is that while Microsoft's tactics are not the sole catalyst for technology failure, the intent was there. If you try to rob a bank and fail, do you really think they would let you go? Also take into consideration the pitiful advancement of computers in the last 5 years. I've been on the internet since colleges and businesses were the only groups (besides SIPRNET of course) that could access it, and not a lot has changed. Yeah I can download hifi porn and access digital catalogs, but most multimedia is just starting to catch up to VHS quality (read, poor) and the e-commerce while slightly more convenient does not offer me any better or newer services than good old ink and pulp. Desktop Publishing drastically changed the way I did things, and AppleScript also did to a limited extent. Beyond that the computer industry's been worthless. Faster CPU's to run games a little better and to fuel new system sales. If they spent a bit of extra time coding software properly we'd probably do better than the 10-30% performance gains you usually see from a new CPU. Real world, not benchmarks. In the era of Word 5.1, and Internet Explorer 3.0 (slightly disjunct I know) Microsoft was actually making some half decent software. Internet Explorer 3.0 on the Mac platform ran in a 4MB footprint. Netscape at the time ran in 12, and both have bloated since. But it is quite obvious that things aren't done the way they should be most of the time. Whether or not Microsoft caused the stagnation or not, I can't say (no one can, decisively), but they certainly didn't help. What word processors to you have to choose from today? What market do they hold? How frequently are the companies able to update them to new technology?
Brian Bush
Now if you do not see the irony of asking courts to fix the complaints listed above, then I'm unable to help. What I see here is a long list of complaints about the way things are done, and in the context it implies that (1) it would be easy to fix all that, (2) Microsoft doesn't want to fix it, or (3) Microsoft has stupid programmers unable to do the things this chap wants.
I know many of the Microsoft programmers and (3) is clearly wrong. I have no evidence for (2) and a great deal against it including a simple deduction: why would people who can get a new job with a telephone call work for a company that suppresses their talents? I leave (1) as an exercise for the reader.
As to the notion that there has been no advancement in computer capabilities in the last five year, I must live on a different planet from Brian Bush.
It is mail like this that makes me think I have been in this business too long. That and the long screed by Jon Katz someone sent me about how I go kneel at Gates's feet with the rest of the computer press. The notion of Dvorak and me kneeling to Gates is so ludicrous I can't even get mad. But Katz often does that. He lives in his world, I in mine. He lives in a world under the control of people with horrid motives. I used to but we ended that 10 years ago today. Thank God.
You asked "Should the stupid inherit the Earth?" They will. The rest of us will take to the stars.
I don't see what the big deal about Microsoft is all about. The only problem I ever had with them was the disk to update for Y2K. It stuck Internet Explorer into every MS program I have. So I deleted the connections from my hard drive. Took some work to find 'em all, but big deal. If you don't want the MS programs, delete them. I don't think we need to form a new "big brother" to watch over big business because of it.
Just my 2 cents worth ... Terri
There are MANY things Microsoft does to irritate the holy hell out of me, but that's business and market decisions, not a government job. I would greatly prefer smaller and efficient and somewhat harder to use, but the market wants something Aunt Minnie can use to send email to the kids, and the rest of us are pretty well stuck with that.
Many years ago Marvin Minsky (who remains a friend) and I had a big argument over languages for small computers. I liked strongly typed languages, like Pascal and Modula-2. Minsky of course preferred LISP and accused me of wanting to see what I could do while wearing a straight jacket. The world chose C which satisfied neither of us, but that's another story.
Comes now another computer scientist:
You have always written as the representative of the computer user and once again you've shown that to be true. Your understanding of the computer industry is still only as deep as it has to be in order to understand how to install a video driver or connect Lap Link cables.
To the average user, Microsoft is a brilliant company. After all Windows 3.1 used to crash once an hour and now Windows 98 crashes only once a day. What innovation! Thank you Microsoft!
Things look quite a bit different to people in the business. I've been working with computers for just about 30 years now, not just as a user but as a systems programmer and even a chip designer. Living outside the Microsoft/PC bubble you can see it in perspective. Intel has done some amazing things since the first IBM PC. We've got 700mhz parts. Yet those 700mhz machines will still be running MS-DOS with a windowized shell over it. Even though you don't know much about the computer industry, this should cause you to think. Is there something better out there? If there is why hasn't it risen to the top?
I'm amazed that Judge Jackson was able to figure out this industry so well so quickly. I'm not alone in that feeling (as you've seen experts from all over the world say the same thing). How is it that he knows it so much better than you do, for example? Maybe it's because he's spent time studying it rather than dealing with getting around the latest blue screen of death on his pc.
- John Foderaro Ph.D Computer Science, UC Berkeley
You will note that he begins, as most do, with the arrogant assumption that because I write largely for users -- my column for many years was entitled "The User's Column" -- I have no understand of his major arcana, and I can't understand a real argument from someone as smart as he is. I am sure he believes Microsoft blindly arrogant, and unable to understand his arguments.
Even though I am not as smart as Professor Foderaro, I thought there were alternatives to Windows. Ignorant as I am, I thought Unix had been around for years, and existed to this day. I thought Linux was out there.
What the judge, who understands very little here, has done is to take the arguments of Microsoft's competitors and put them into a findings of fact. Hardly surprising when you know that Klein met privately with Barksdale some 12 times before the DOJ got into the ace. The decision purports to speak for users, but doesn't. At least Professor Foderaro sees that.
His view is different. He wants elegance. He fails to notice that most of the world wants something simple to use, not elegant and efficient and full of grep and cat -- cat, for God's sake -- commands and glob wordlist, and the vi editor. Most of the world just wants to get on with the job, and while, yes, I can think of improvements to Windows and so can everyone else I know, the real question is can you implement them with the resources available, and will the public pay for them.
Professor Foderaro, you believe you know more about the "industry" than I do, and perhaps so, but nothing in your letter demonstrates it. Not only do I know how to get around the blue screen of death, I know how to avoid it in the first place, and my usual answer to most users who want to do something very weird is "don't do that." My motto is "I do all these silly things so you won't have to..." and in fact I have a macro that prints that. And when I do manage to break things, I report it not only to readers, but also to Microsoft.
A long time ago Kernighan wrote a critique of Pascal. My son Alex, then in high school, read it and said "He doesn't like Pascal because it isn't C." This is clearly Professor Foderaro's intellectual parentage: if it is not what I learned in school, or what I invented, it is not elegant enough, and anyone who doesn't see that is a fool and probably not worth talking to. Why Professor Foderaro deigned to send me a letter is itself an interesting psychological question since he makes it clear he has no respect whatever for any views I might have.
And perhaps he is right. Perhaps the computer scientists ought to form a panel to vet business decisions, and Microsoft ought to hire lawyers to vet all their decisions after they have asked Professor Foderaro's views on the technical merits. This should not put more than a two year delay in the process.
Yes, we have 700 mhz parts. I have one. But Professor Foderaro hasn't written anything I need to run with it. In fact, I don't have any applications that need that, and the first people who will use that capability will probably be gamers, after which someone like Peter Warren will come up with a new AI based operating system that really does some of the things we described in data dreams. Perhaps. But for the most part, the market wants a machine Aunt Minnie can use, and Aunt Minnie isn't Professor Foderaro. Let Professor Foderaro use Unix (it's cheap at universities, but the commercial versions were never cheap), or Linux, and let him develop something for the rest of us. I will meantime continue to write The User's Column. But I do not believe that necessarily makes me as stupid or uninformed about "the industry" as Professor Foderaro who clearly believes he can write my column better than I do, and run Microsoft better than Bill Gates does.
I just read your "analysis." Good job.
One thing I notice no one ever mentions with regard to Microsoft's "dominance." GAMES! I remember clearly getting my first PC, a 386/20, about 2 months after Windows 3.0 came out. I immediately reformatted the hard drive (40MB) and only installed DOS and Turbo Pascal for programming. Later I bought Wing Commander and Windows Entertainment Pack (1), at the same time. So I had to re-install Windows 3.0 just to play Tetris.
I remember most people that got Windows with their PCs just used it to play Reversi and Solitaire. Nothing Else. In the Air Force (where I worked at the time) all PCs were just "terminals." And the networking and terminal software was all DOS.
In the home market, Windows didn't really take off until at least some decent games were there. Microsoft put those first decent games out there with the Entertainment Packs. Once people got used to using Windows for games at home, they became more comfortable using it at work for productivity.
I didn't use Word at home until Office 4.3 and Windows 3.1. But I bought all the Entertainment Packs, and other Windows games. And with my serious DOS skills (Yes, I could write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files from memory) I learned the ins and outs of Windows long before I was "working" with it.
That was one of IBM's biggest flaws... failure to understand that people will use a computer to "goof off," and provide them an outlet to do it. If OS/2 had lesser hardware requirements AND had some decent games people would have used it, and eventually more "real" applications would have followed.
What do you think?
Scott Lewis
Years ago Microsoft proudly showed me their about to be released sound card. This was when they still thought there was profit in hardware. The card had no game port. I said it would not sell because of that. They said that businesses said they did not WANT a game port on a business machine. I said "The MIS doesn't. The users have a different view." Microsoft sold hundreds, hundreds I tell you, of those cards, and few at Microsoft remember they ever sold sound cards.
A few years later there was a major game release at the Academy theatre in Hollywood. I went, and found the Executive VP of Intel was there. "Why is Intel at a game launch?" I asked. "Who do you think is going to buy Pentium chips?" he asked. I believe this was in 486 dx2 days. I forget which issue of BYTE that was in, but it was a while ago.
I think that I have been harmed by Microsoft practices. Last week I configured computers at the Dell, Gateway, and Micron websites. All machines came with Microsoft office software and no option to not get the software. I use EMACS for text editing and my word processing requirements are nil. Wordpad or EMACS are good enough for the occasional snail mail letter that I write. Neither of them is subject to the macro/Visual BASIC for Applications viruses. I am not satisfied with Windows 98. However saying that I have been "legally harmed" in that area is not as clear, but I believe it to be true. I long for the stability of HP UNIX.
John Abshier
Does it need comment? Surely there are people who will sell you computers without Office bundled in. Those are business decisions. Try to buy a new car without seats because you want a special orthopedic seat and see what happens. You have no use for those seats, but try to buy ANY brand of car without seats. Ah well.
and another:
You said:
>The real joke in this decision is the section on harm to consumers.Microsoft may in >fact have become a de facto monopoly. It may have used some questionable practices >to maintain that monopoly and, in one case -- the Stac affair -- behaved despicably >[5]. However, before the awful majesty of the law can fall on a company, it must be >shown to have harmed consumers. Harming competitors can result in civil lawsuits; >but to make this a case of the People of the United States vs. Microsoft, there >must be harm to consumers. > >And there isn't any.
umm..
What about the 100's of 1000's BSOD or required reboots daily that cuase unexpected or expected downtime and lost files. Or what about the 1000's of bugs in windows that's been around for ever. Or what about the harm of still running a real time OS?? Or the ease of a windows computer of being infected with virus?? Or the ease of a single program completely trashing a user's computer????? If Microsoft didn't crush competitors you wouldn't have to deal with viruses, slow computers, down time, crashes, lost files, headaches, or and thing else that can be thought up. I do believe this is "Harming Consumers".
I do believe it was harm for me (a consumer) when my windows 95 box crashed do to a bug left in a defected product. Due to the crash and trashed files it cuase me to lose 10,000 dollars. That harmed me (a consumer). Did you think about that before your rant? You might want to think about going back to science fiction writing.
Just think the next time windows 98 crashes on you: "I wish I had choice of OS when I bought the computer."
Steven Rice UNIX System Admin stevenrice@marnuke.penguinpowered.com
Thank you for sharing that with me.
Here is another typical letter (I have to use typical because there is too darned much and at some point I am going to stop reading it.)
Subject: WRONG!
Jerry, I just finished reading your whole article and Judge Jackson can send this case directly to the Supreme Court if he so pleases. This was stated months and months ago but only now has resurfaced in just one location. I think it was some N.Y. law journal that had a article on it yesterday.
So this case can be taken care of very quickly, while a remedy will mean
something. You sound lazy Jerry. I say that because you like that Microsoft has reduced you choices of products by preloading halfbaked applications and
kill competition for those products. There is quite a difference between a calculator and a web browser and I think you know this. I don't think we want the government deciding what a OS is and what a application is. Don't you think that MS Windows would be a better OS if it was actually a OS and not just a place for MSFT to pack product X or product Y into to put company X or company Y out of business? Microsoft Windows today is solely a mechanism for MSFT to keep people using MSFT applications and if the are not stopped, delivering MSFT content. They don't deserve to control boxes, the wire, and the data on the wire because they aren't able to handle that control maturely and legally. IMHO. ( Jerry, that "lazy" part was just for effect. I hope you didn't take it personnally. :)
Doug
Where in the world do you get the idea that the world needs to run on your druthers, or mine? Personally, I get all the software in the world free and I could afford to buy more if I needed to. I have probably been responsible for keeping more small companies, and shareware outfits, alive than any other journalist in this business.
OF COURSE Windows would be better if Microsoft could stop, start over, turn some of those young tigers at Redmond loose on writing something from scratch, and leave out all the needless stuff. Of course what is needless? UNIX comes with a kernel and libraries, but it is useless without some of those libraries. Is Notepad necessary? WordPad? FreeCell? Probably not, but I user those. Is Briefcase? I don't use it, but it takes a fraction of a cent's worth of disk space (and I don't even install it any more). Deciding what should and should not be bundled in with Windows is no easy task, and your list would not be mine. Gates has always said when in doubt throw it in. It costs very little to include.
The result has been grievous harm to some. Traveling Software, which is run by one of my oldest friends, was nearly destroyed when Microsoft put networking into Windows for Work Groups. Should it not have been included? Should Microsoft have made it a separate product and tried to market without it? Should they have asked you first? Or me?
There are many things they do that are not what I wish they had done. So? Shall we now have a committee chaired by Professor Foderaro to decide what will and will not be in the package? That it it the problem, and calling me lazy won't make it go away.
This is the letter I have been waiting for. It brings up an important subject. What is innovation depends on who is looking at it.
Dear Mr. Pournelle;
I have just been reading your recent column on the Microsoft decision. Let me start out by saying that I've been a fan of your writing since I first read "Lucifer's Hammer" in middle school and that I always used to look forward to your columns in Byte Magazine.
As usual, your article is well-written and comprehensible to one without a detailed knowledge of either the law or the software industry, and I found your insights into the failures of OS/2 and Apple to be quite thought-provoking (and it's a shame Microsoft didn't have anyone as eloquent as you working in their defense!).
But I have to wonder about this paragraph:
Many commentators loudly mourn the innovations that might have happened had Microsoft not suppressed them, but they are shy of naming them. None seem to see the innovations Microsoft has made to Windows, which now incorporates dozens of items we used to buy from third parties. These include calculators, text and programming editors, search functions, games, file viewers, audio recorders and players, networking, and, dare I say it, Web browsers. None of these are necessarily the best of their class, but most are adequate, and their inclusion does not harm consumers -- although it may well harm competitors.
Just after that you reiterate by mentioning
partisan advocates who ... do not blush to berate Microsoft for suppressing innovation while being too aggressive in bringing out innovations. Contradictory findings of fact cannot both be correct.
An app like the Windows Explorer includes, in my opinion, many features which are "innovative", or at least extremely helpful, compared to what was the previous standard for a PC GUI (i.e. Windows 3 or MacOS). But to describe "calculators, text and programming editors [notepad? wordpad?], search functions" etc as "innovative" seems to me to stretch the definition of that word. Microsoft didn't do anything innovative with any of those applications, they simply bundled them with the OS. Unfortunately, though, bundling any of those apps with Windows is enough to destroy the market for that type of application, whether it is actually useful (like the Windows calculator) or barely adequate (like the Windows search function).
That, to me, indicates a strong suppresion of innovation. Someone with the hope of making a profit could easily improve on the Windows search app, Notepad, or Internet Explorer, but the fact that nobody ever *will* make a profit on those apps hurts consumers.
Just my two cents',
--Art
| Art Cohen | | Stumpworld Systems, Inc.
art@stumpworld.com | | http://www.stumpworld.com
My definition of innovation is likely to be closer to Professor Foderaro's than to the public's, but the public sees many of these small add on features as innovation because they were, despite the efforts of people like me, unable to go find them. They didn't know they existed. The web is changing that every day, so that it will no longer look innovative to stuff things easily available elsewhere into the package.
That wasn't always true. Never forget, it was the easy to use computer that appealed to Aunt Minnie and the kids that created this situation of a mass market. Just what was the deciding feature that caused someone to think "OK, I got to get one of these computer things" is not clear, at least not to me; but it is clear that people bought them because they thought they would do things they wanted done.
And that mass market made all this happen.
As to no one writing small elegant apps, nonsense. Try Irfan (which is free). There are alternatives to Notepad, and there are thumbnail programs like Thumbs plus. There's all kinds of stuff out there. Sure, it is VERY hard to be a garage startup in the utilities and small elegant programs business now, compared to what it was a dozen years ago. That it is not impossible is demonstrated every few years by Dan Bricklin. It's just damned hard to do.
Microsoft is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration. Companies that are all inspiration die. Companies that are all perspiration don't last. The balance between the two is the essence of the business decision in today's computer industry.
And enough. Thanks for bringing up the point.
Clearly I tend to print things favorable to me, but I have not neglected the opposition: it is just that most of it is repetitious, some to the point that I suspect a mail campaign from some forum or another. I used to get those from the Mac people.
Anyway I cannot resist this one:
Dear Dr. Jerry;
Where do all these idiots and incompetents come form?? I've been working with computers since the early 70's, using, programming, maintaining, repairing, resurrecting, teaching, training others on, upgrading, rehabilitating, etc., etc., etc. I now run Win98 at the office (8 hours a day 5 days a week) and Win95 at home (6 hours a day 7 days a week). I have lock up to the point of hardware reset MAYBE ** ** MAYBE ** ** once a MONTH on either machine. We have approximately 160 Win95 and Win98 machines and NT servers on our 100 MB ethernet at work, all running at least 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and several running 24 x 7, and we do not have ANY BSOD or lock up problems to speak of. And I would know as I am the sole technician in support of those PCs (mostly good quality IBMs, but a few good quality Compaqs mixed in).
What kind of screwball apps and/or tricks/experiments are these jokers using that they lock up 2 or 3 times a day???? I don't believe it. I think they are all rabid Mac fanatics who would do or say anything to bring down Microsoft. Don't get me wrong, I still think Bill Gates is the biggest pirate that ever sailed the seas, but I love Microsoft products. I have personally used at least a dozen different words processors, and next to Ashton-Tate's Framework, Word for Office97 is the best and easiest to use ever. I have a working knowledge of COBOL, FORTRAN, Basic, Visual Basic, dBase III, dBase III+, dBase IV, Visual Dbase, Fox Pro, Visual Fox Pro, RPG II, and one or two others that I can't remember right now, so I do know something about good programming.
I have used Apples, Macs, Commodore 16 &; 64s, Timex Sinclair ZX1000s, just about every reputable and some not so reputable brand of desktop manufactured, IBM 5360's, and every chip from the 4 MHz 8088 up to a brand spankin' new 450 MHz P III. For my money as a computer/networking PROFESSIONAL give me a WinTel platform and MS products any time. All those other people are just crying because MS beat the crap out of them in the marketplace. If it sounds like I'm ranting a little, well I am. I just get so tired of people crying because the whole world doesn't use their favorite arcane hardware or software.
YOU CAN buy a computer without Windows. It takes more work on YOUR part to find it, but it can be done. And I remember when Netscape had about 80% or more of the browser market. Where were the monopoly criers then??? Huh??? WHERE WERE THEY?? I used to use Netscape. I didn't like it. As soon as I could, at the office, I removed it from our install standard and went to IE. It is a much better product. Web pages load faster, and I don't have to Ctrl-Alt-Del and "End Task" any more. I have already expressed my displeasure to the DOJ, but I doubt if they will pay attention to me. After all, I'm just an insignificant little end user and consumer of computer goods and products. I don't own stock in any competing products, and I don't contribute much to campaign coffers. Thanks for taking time to read my rant. I think your analysis of the situation is the best I have seen yet. Keep up the good work.
Roger D. Shorney rogers@sofnet.com
Well, of course I try to break machines -- "I do all these silly things so you won't have to..." but I don't have the horrible experiences many describe in mail to me, and some of them I can't duplicate; and a few couldn't happen because clearly the writer didn't include all the information, or just perhaps it didn't really happen that way.
Pirate may be a little strong for Bill Gates, but perhaps not. He's certainly been a monomaniac in pursuit of his single goal. I could wish many things different, but then I am not responsible for employing thousands of people, a responsibility I know for a fact that he takes quite seriously. Ah well.
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Thursday November 11, 1999 Armistice Day
Hi Jerry I enjoyed your review of the judgement and found much in it to agree with. The passage below was significant for me:
"And I'll still be cursing because some new Windows 2020 feature has caused my system to crash, and I'll still be wishing there were a small, reliable, easy to use operating system-- and, who knows, maybe I'll have one, in which case Microsoft will be trying to figure out how to put out a lower cost version they can market as almost as good. That's the way this industry works. "
Three weeks ago I went to a store to buy MS Office 2000 as I needed a new license for a laptop I was using. I found it cost 519 pounds sterling. I had already become disenchanted with Windows 98 and the continuous struggle to keep it stable and correctly configured. The high cost of MS Office 2000 was enough to provide the final straw. Disgusted with the apparent arrogance of Microsoft, I went home, backed up my data, wiped the machine of all Microsoft programs (using fdisk) and installed Linux. I now use an 'Office' compatible (Star Office) over X-windows and the wealth of software available within a KDE window manager environment. Total cost for all software and materials - about 80 dollars.
The only thing holding Linux back is that it is as friendly as a tank full of sharks. That is changing though. Two years ago Linux wasn't up to the job of replacing a Windows system. Now it is. In two years time it will be as easy to configure as it's Microsoft counterpart. I hope it continues to be significantly more stable.
Microsoft will find it hard to compete with a free alternative to a Windows system.
Best
Jonathan
Thank you. Precisely. Long before government can act, this will do it. It will be a while before it's the solution for Aunt Minnie -- as you said, friendly as a tank full of sharks -- so that, if you could have had Windows for a better price you probably would have done that. But this beats heck out of inviting the government to set prices.
Spelling checkers have become common. We all have come to depend on them. Unfortunately, they are not much help with the spelling of personal names. A week or so ago, I noticed that you mentioned attending an opera by "Belini"; obviously, your spelling checker did not know, and you did not notice, that the composer spelled his name with two L's. No harm was done; the composer is long dead and no longer cares.
Today you published a letter from a Professor Foderaro (as it is spelled in the signature). Unfortunately, in your comments you cannot seem to decide whether the professor's name is "Foderaro" or "Poderaro". In this case the gentleman is alive or was very recently. I hope that this was simple oversight -- purposely misspelling a person's name is such a childish insult. If you agree with me that one should insult others only intentionally, perhaps you should consider going through the current Mail and View pages and regularizing the spelling.
Incidentally, I find myself more in agreement with your position than with the professor's. But I've only been in this profession for twenty years; what to I know...
Carrington Dixon
I have already fixed that, and my apologies to all.
Now for something more interesting:
Consider the following:
"You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn't taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter."
For more details, see:
http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/finalexam.html
--Erich Schwarz
Jerry:
A friend of mine remarked yesterday that he didn't regret anything that he had done. Only some things he hadn't done. This morning, I understood a little better what he meant by that.
In Canada, we celebrate Remembrance Day with a statutory holiday on November 11th. This is the first time in close to 15 years that I have not attended the ceremonies in person. I was tired, and a little out of sorts, it was raining outside, and I thought I could just as handily tune in to the televised coverage. It is not the same, and I very much regret my weakness this morning that kept me from honouring the veterans, and remembering the sacrifice of those who served Canada and the Allies in the wars of this century.
The reason I am telling all this to you is because of a brief passage from "Prince of Sparta" that I often think of at times like this. It has become a favourite of mine. I'm sure you remember it.
Colonel Ciotti and the 77th CoDominium Marines have landed on Sparta, and are demanding the surrender of Falkenberg's Legion. General Owensford is giving some final pointers to the Spartan commanders, and pretty much preparing to die with his command, when the following exchange occurs:
-----------
"General Owensford," Lysander said. "I think you are laboring under a misconception."
"Highness?" Lysander stared at the screen. Rank after rank of Marines swung by the pickup. The tempo of the song changed, to a flurry of drums and horns.
"You seem to think we're going to abandon you," Lysander said.
"It's the sensible thing to do," Owensford said.
"No, by God," Alexander said. "Do you think that little of us, Peter Owensford? What have we done that you think that?"
"Sire--" For some reason Peter Owensford couldn't talk.
King David raised his head from his hands. "We here in this room have no choice," he said. "But -- you all know what we have here. The Life Guards, some training units, and little else. All the first line Brotherhood units are up north. There's nothing left but the second line Militia units. Old men, and boys and women. Enough to put down riots or fight terrorists, but can we ask them to fight that?" He pointed at the screen. "General Owensford, the Freedman Life Guards are at your disposal, and me with them, but I can't order the militia to face Line Marines."
"There's no need to order them," Lysander said. He turned to the Brotherhood representatives. "Citizens and Brothers. The Kings will lead their guards in defense of the Allies of Sparta. Will the Brotherhoods join us?"
"Yes, Highness." Allan Hyson, the banker, looked scared, but his voice was firm. "How could we not?"
----------
War is not about doing the sensible thing. It is about doing the necessary thing. Not always the right thing, as is evidenced by the fact that the Nazis had armies too, and what they were doing was manifestly not the right thing.
The lion is not yet ready to lay down with the lamb. When we fail to remember and reflect on the necessity of war, and the necessity of honouring those who fight it on our behalf, we will be helpless the next time the necessity is once more brought home to us.
Aye, I regret not attending the ceremonies today, rain and out-of-sorts notwithstanding, to honour those who fought for me. I will not make this mistake again.
Regards, etc.
Paul Fieber
I have always rather thought that scene was the real climax of the novel. Thank you.
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Friday November 12, 1999
This letter and my reply are important:
In your comments on John Foderaro's letter, you make several cogent points, but also a couple that, I feel, miss the mark a bit.
I haven't been in the small computing arena quite as long as you, about 14 years or so, but in that time, and as I've progressed, I've found the holes in my earlier thinkings, and -- more importantly -- taxonomized them, so that I'm less likely to make the same _categories_ of mistakes.
An example of what I mean here is Alex's comment on "Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language" (still available, to anyone who's interested, as Bell Labs Computing Science Technical Report -- try <http://www.google.com/search?q=Pascal+Favorite+Language> for half a dozen or more places to find it). "He doesn't like Pascal because it isn't C", said Alex.
Well, yes, but the reason he _does_ like C isn't just because it's C, and he created it, it's because of the necessary things C has and does, that Pascal does not and (for reasons which _I_ thought he made quite clear) never will.
There's a related problem, I feel, in your appraisal of Dr. Foderaro's comments. You disdain the Doctor for wanting 'elegance' rather than simplicity.
In my experience, the more elegant the underlying design of something, the simpler and more efficient it will be to use, anyway. More importantly, I detect just a small amount of reverse-elitism in play: "most of the public just wants to get on with the job"; implying that the remaining group, the 'priesthood', if you will, are the only ones who are fascinated with all these delightful toys.
Perhaps.
But if there were not a priesthood, the acolytes wouldn't have anywhere to pray. My favorite exposition of this is Microsoft Access. Access, and many other low-end database/appgen packages, were created "to free users of their slavery to the priests in the Big Glass House".
But you know what? Those priests went to seminary for a _reason_?
Ask the average Access programmer if they know what third normal form is. Or why it's important. You might get a useful answer from about 15% of them. If Microsoft has it's way, that is. I'm not _solely_ dissing MS here; my point is that _some tasks are inherently complex to perform correctly_, and no amount of fancy chrome on the front is going to change that.
Yes, there are database applications that don't need to worry about 3NF and the like. Rolodex files? Anything that small.
If, however, you allow yourself to be seduced by the promises of "easy to use; no (horrible hard) database theory to learn", you _will_ eventually be shot. In the face, likely. Will you then be happy with the vendor who seduced you?
Some things are simply _hard_.
Some people don't want to hear it.
Oops.
PS: any chance we'll ever see Harvey Randall again? Seems like there might be a prequel hiding in there somewheres... still one of my 5 favorite SF novels. Thanks for the reprint.
Cheers, -- jra
Thank you for raising some important points.
For brevity I didn't reopen the languages debates but I should have. Pascal (and more importantly Modula) lost to C largely because of scarce computer resources. If we had in those days the desktop computing power we have now, C would never have had a chance. It was because C in theory was kinder on resources that it won out. The result, though, is a code base that no one understands or even pretends to understand, and that alone is as responsible for many of the annoying bugs that plague us. Microsoft doesn't fix bugs not because their programmers are proud of buggy code, but because it is very hard to do, and one reason it is very hard to do is that C is a very hard language to debug.
The debate in those days was over strong type checking, and range checking, all of which take place at compile time. The characteristics of Pascal-like languages including Modula and Ada (Wirth disowns Ada because it has exception handling, but it is clearly of the Pascal family) are that it is often difficult to get things to compile, but once compiled they tend to do what you want them to do, and when they don't it is obvious they are doing something wrong. C will compile anything, but it will happily change variable types or accept data as instruction or instruction as data; the programmer must simulate the compiler in his head when he writes it.
C needed fewer resources and made "more efficient" code but at the cost of comprehensibility. That was all right for the academicians. It turned out to be the source of many of the problems in the mass market world.
Second: of course there must be a priesthood and there must be academic computer scientists; but they must not be given control of the commercial world. If it had been left to the universities we would not have a computer on every desk and in every home and in every classroom or anything like that.
The commercial market demands that you get it out in a hurry, and Wednesday is better than "more elegant" or "more efficient." The commercial market ruthlessly enforces the adage that "better is the enemy of good enough" with "best is bankruptcy." This is the reality of it, and every company that ignored that, with a few exceptions we are all aware of, was praised by the reviewers, lauded by the academics -- and out of business. Gates, like it or not, believes the way to win is to put as many features into the product as possible, ship it quick, and rely on Moore's Law to bail him out when it uses too many resources and runs too slow. I have pointed this out for YEARS, and I try to keep my readers from using any 1.0 version of a Microsoft product.
The UNIX priesthood had its chance. It is having another with Linux. Meanwhile, better remains the enemy of good enough, and good enough has a different definition to you than to Aunt Minnie; and in this commercial world, Aunt Minnie, not you, rules. The academicians could get together -- God knows they have enough government supplied resources -- to build an OS that is "done right" but they won't do it. Larry Smarr did develop a browser for use on the web; it was at NCSA at the University of Illinois. You can find shadows of it in both Netscape and Internet Explorer....
Hi Jerry,
I read your reply to jra on Fri. Nov. 12, which sounds [to me] as though you are saying that 'C' was introduced by academics. I think that the situation is exactly reversed--most colleges continued teaching Pascal and Ada as their introductory languages long after they were abandoned in the commercial world. My Community College finally removed Ada from our catalog this Fall. We still teach Pascal as the introductory CS language, but find the choice highly unpopular with our students. If we didn't require them to take Pascal before learning C, I don't think any of them would.
I'm not sure that I'd agree with you that C is less understandable than Pascal. I learned C after learning both BASIC and Pascal, and found C to be much easier to read and understand, mostly because there was much less extraneous "stuff" to wade through. I'm not sure that I could have learned C as easily if I hadn't already learned to program, however.
Richard Gabriel, a noted "luminary" in the LISP community, has written an interesting collection of essays called "Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community." In one of the essays he explains why C, and not Pascal, or LISP, or Java, will continue to be the dominant programming language used for commercial software. I think you'd enjoy the book and find his arguments thought provoking.
-- Steve ---------------------------------------------- Stephen Gilbert, Orange Coast College CS Dept. sgilbert@occ.cccd.edu, sdgilbrt@pacbell.net http://csjava.occ.cccd.edu
Thank you: I wrote the above in haste, and I won't be able to clean it up much.
There are those who prefer systems in which the compiler catches errors particular in type, and those who like C which compiles nonsense and leaves it to you not to write nonsense. I prefer the former. Many like the latter. The question is moot today, but was once alive. I brought it up only in commentary to the relationship of academia to the computing world in industry. They need each other but neither always understands that.
And finally:
Mr. Pournelle, you state that someone had to win the operating system war, which is sad but true. Nevertheless, remember that the whole point of Java is to remove that need.
-- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) dcs@newsguy.com dcs@freebsd.org
Agreed. If not Java, something else. There is a natural monopoly in this field and there is some inertia, but it also changes like dreams. It may be that BeOS will be what people develop in for the future. It sure is neat to work with. Or Java. Or -- something neither of us knows about. It all changes and fast, and that was my point. I would rather see resources put into programming than into lawyers.
And this:
Elegant is a shifting sand to build an argument on. I suggest elegant means consensus admirable and well done and in some sense (but necessarily all senses) optimized.
Consider the proof of the 4 color theorem by proof of an algorithm for coloring a map that always terminates. At the time, the story goes, the Mathematics Department said this is not what we mean by an elegant proof and the Computer Science types responded not to worry, when the old guard dies it will be. Similarly, there is always a place for elegance, but perhaps we should not let the last generation define it, even or especially when we ourselves are members of the last generation. A valid criticism of the Microsoft Judge that last perhaps.
I think I will add Microsoft's impact on Borland (and Turbo Pascal Delphi) as another perfectly legal business mediated harm to the consumer which ought to be opposed entirely in a private way - or I'll bet you are still doing the Reading Program for Windows in a Visual environment.
So far as an academic operating system is concerned, I suggest a guest piece by Moshe Bar on the kHaos project, including the impact on the team members as a sidebar!
Clark
Clark Myers [clarkemyers@hotmail.com]
All true. Thanks. And now I have to run to get ready. COMDEX...
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Saturday November 13, 1999
Driving to COMDEX
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Sunday November 14, 1999
I am in the Las Vegas Hilton at the bottom of a modem well. Just no time and no way to keep up the mail. See you next week. Meanwhile, see www.byte.com for show coverage.
Entire
contents copyright 1999 by Jerry E. Pournelle. All rights reserved.
Comments and discussion welcome.
