| Friday,
November 5, 1999 The little Rebel.com NetWinder Linux box
works wonders. I still have not figured out how to make FrontPage 2000 ftp
work with it -- it doesn't like connecting through that box, but it's
probably a matter of settings -- but I can make WS_ftp32.exe work just
fine, which is how you're seeing this stuff.
I also have high hopes that Microsoft will fix one of the major
problems with FrontPage 2000 so that I can enable the FrontPage extensions
at my site and have all that working properly. Meanwhile it's column
deadline time.
Morning: still cannot make FrontPage do ftp to my remote site although
I can make do with ws_ftp95 to get this stuff up. It almost works: I have
all the settings done properly, but when it tries, it trundles a while and
then says it cannot connect to a dns number that turns out to be the local
intenal network address for the machine it is itself running on; followed
by a colon and a 4-digit number that seems to have no meaning whatever,
and changes every time so may be related to timing out or something.
I've told Microsoft, but meanwhile this is annoying.
AN IMPORTANT
ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT COMDEX
My son Alex is producing the BYTE.COM COmdex
Awards ceremony. He just sent this:
Everyone:
PLEASE forward this to all your droogs, your buds,
your enemies, PR people, slackers, dinks, and geeks. Broadcast it to the
four winds. Put it in your personal webzines and email newsletters.
9 days and counting, Alex
Text follows:
Header:
Byte.com Best of Comdex Awards: The Longest-Running
Computer Show Awards Return Awards Ceremony Wednesday, November 17,
4:45PM, during Comdex
Text of message:
Dear Friends, Subscribers and Readers:
Continuing a tradition started over a decade ago,
Byte.com will be celebrating the best new products at Comdex/Fall '99 with
the Byte.Com Best of Comdex '99 Awards. As always, these awards will
highlight the most worthwhile products and trends seen at Comdex. Awards
will include Best Technology, Best Computer Hardware Product, and of
course Best of Show. To recognize the many products shown around Las Vegas
but not at Comdex, we'll also be giving out the "Area 51" Award.
WHERE AND WHEN: The awards will be staged in the
Computer Reseller News Test Center, in the main foyer of the Las Vegas
Convention Center, starting at 4:45PM on Wednesday, November 17. You are
cordially invited to attend. If you can't attend, be sure to check out the
continuing show coverage at http://www.byte.com
, which will include pictures and analysis of products both on and off the
show floor.
WHO: The awards will be presented by Paul Schindler,
the editor of Byte.Com and Winmag.com, Daniel Dern, Executive Editor for
Byte.com, and Jerry Pournelle, Byte.com's Senior Contributing Editor and
the industry's longest-running columnist. The awards are being produced by
our Byte Graphics Labs columnists, Alex Pournelle and David Em. Other
judges include columnist John D. Ruley and Byte.com contributors Eric
Pobirs and Darnell Gadberry.
NOMINATING PRODUCTS: Even our team of dedicated
judges won't see everything at or near the show; we need your help. If you
see or have a product worthy of nomination or coverage, we want to know
about it! We've set up an email account just for such tips, mailto:bytecomdex@hotmail.com
. (Due to the volume of email, we probably won't be able to reply.)
We look forward to hearing from you, and seeing you
there!
Sincerely, The Byte Staff
P.S. We also invite you to check out the Computer
Reseller News Test Center, our host location and fellow CMP publication.
They'll be testing products and conducting their popular "Stump the
Expert" show throughout normal Comdex show hours.
Alex Pournelle, Freelance Thinker, Senior Analyst,
System Integrator Contributing Editor, Chaos Manor Online and BACK! Byte
Magazine at www.byte.com Annoy me
at "Alexp@earthlink.net
"
The Microsoft decision will be today. Stand by. See www.byte.com
Hours later. Well, we sat there with telephones in our ears, nothing to
eat, little chance to go to the bathroom, and long periods of listening to
stuff as we attempted to react to 98 single spaced pages of decision we
didn't get until late in the day and then had trouble downloading.
Interestingly, I was able to download it quicker than most because I
have a rebel.com net server up, and although I am at 56K modem rather than
a t1 I had several systems out looking for the source, found it, and got
it. Of course the rebel.com box is running Linux.
Microsoft keeps making the point that no one guarantees you a wining
position in an industry that moves as fast as this. The government keeps
saying that Microsoft ought to lose sometimes. Well, yes: if they had ever
faced serious and competent competition. But Apple, until recently,
interested in maximum profits for its top officers, not in market share.
IBM shot itself in the foot, leg, groin, and other places; despite having
a far better technical staff than Microsoft when the game opened, IBM by
removing the spine and frontal lobes of anyone before promoting them to
Executive saw to it that OS/2 would go nowhere. Pity. I know many of
the OS/2 architects, and they were very good people with a lot of ability:
but trying to innovate in the IBM corporate environment at that time was
just about impossible.
So where are we? Well, we have Linux boxes that run many
Microsoft applications, and free office suites that are as good as
Microsoft Office was only a few years ago: unless Microsoft products are
clearly better, why would you pay money for them? It isn't as if there
were not suites based on Word Perfect (I note that the Government's
decision was available in Acrobat pdf, Word Perfect, and HTML, but not in
Word), and that is at the government's site.
A very great deal of effort has been expended and will be expended.
Nothing much will come of it, since Microsoft is certainly big enough and
rich enough to hire enough lawyers to keep things tied in knots. If it
gets to the Supreme Court, it will be decided by judges not yet appointed
by a President not yet elected -- and when it is, it will be as moot as
the page after page of the decision devoted to Microsoft's effort to
dominate the CHANNEL BAR. I don't know anyone who HAS a channel bar
implemented on a system in wide use. Who cares who is on it?
I note that the little AOL man appears many places that it isn't
wanted. For the first year of this site I deliberately used Netscape
rather than IE, but it got too painful: if Netscape and AOL between them
can't improve on their browser why is that Microsoft's fault? And
the notion that consumers would be better off if they had to PAY EXTRA for
a browser is a bit hard to follow. Why were we better off when we had to
buy Netscape? Which I did. I subscribed, although in fact I didn't have
to: for years you could get by with Netscape free by downloading the beta
upgrades, and many did.
And all that is as interesting as domination of the channel bar.
Well, those who dislike Microsoft will be happy, but in fact I don't
see how this decision helps anyone: not consumers, not even Microsoft's
competitors. And meanwhile I have a column to write, much of it about
Linux and the rebel.com box and how we got it working properly.
I would have been more impressed by the judge if he had given some
examples of how the consumers have been harmed, instead of theory on that,
and the facts mostly on effects on Microsoft competitors, most of whom
engineered themselves into corners and then hoped to get the government to
bail them out. And I'll ask once again: who in this industry would three
years ago have said that we would have machines as powerful as those we
see today for the prices we see in the papers? If monopoly and predatory
practices brought us machines with operating system, Works, and a fair
amount of other installed software including networking for under $600,
things can't be all THAT bad.
If you disliked Microsoft as a monopoly, wait until you see what the
government does for you.
I have mail from readers who say this is a great day for consumers, and
heralds wonderful things. I don't see how: computers are better and
cheaper today than anyone in his right mind would have predicted 3 or 4
years ago. I recall castigating Microsoft for Windows 97 as "bloatware"
because it took up about 300 megabytes of disk space. Today, that's about
35 dollars worth of hard disk space. The judge found that most of
the harm to consumers was wasted resources: those who didn't want a
browser had to take one anyway, and that used memory and disk space, and
-- and what? Those resources are very cheap. Meanwhile, we have ever
improving web capabilities.
Microsoft missed the WWW phenomenon. Their competition had an enormous
head start because Microsoft top management didn't see the importance of
the web. When they did, we began to get improvements, which caused more
people to be interested in the web, and the spiral began; but if there is
in this enormous document any proof that Microsoft slowed that process
(other than by not seeing how important it was at first and thus ignoring
it) I haven't found it yet.
I hate arguing Microsoft's case, but then I hate wasting time on all
this legal stuff anyway. What I want is more resources put into fixing
problems, not into lawyers. On which subject, we managed to get the
FrontPage developers aware of some of the difficulties, and the rebel.com
people aware of some problems which they will fix, and that, so far as I
am concerned was more important than spending the day listening to this
legal stuff. But then I have never thought a government bureaucracy was
the right way to fix a commercial problem...
But by gollies we will get some fair play into allocating that channel
bar!
Everyone go read paragraph 44 of this decision, and give some thought
to it. As far as I can see, it describes an engine giving great incentives
to new software development, and thus innovation in the industry, while
making it fairly safe for ISV's to do so. I can't disagree with much in
that paragraph, but I also don't understand why this is evidence of
barriers to entry. Barriers to entry to what?
Microsoft dominates the market for operating systems based on the Intel
Chip. This makes it a monopoly. Apple is irrelevant to this. Apple
dominates the market for operating systems based on the Motorola chip, but
that isn't a monopoly. Apple used to own the education market, but that
wasn't a monopoly (and alas, Apple didn't to a lot to keep that or earn
the right to keep it, but that's another story). Sun used to be pretty big
in high end graphics. The real question is, can any of that change, and if
so, how, and how quickly?
Long ago I proposed that Microsoft agree to the following: all API
hooks, features, and calls used by Microsoft Application Software must be
documented and published by Microsoft as soon as they are used; if the
FrontPage team decides to use an undocumented feature of Windows, then the
full documentation of that feature has to be published at the same time
that the product managers decide to make use of it.
That turns out to be easier to enforce than it sounds, because
Microsoft already has the TechNet team out looking for stuff they can
publish. It's not hard to give employees incentives to find and document
any undocumented features in use (actually the tough part is keeping that
secret even if you are trying to keep it secret). It would also end most
of the advantages the Microsoft Applications people have over Independent
Software Developers.
I think I came up with that 3 or 4 years ago, but I forget which column
it was in. I also talked about it in speeches. I don't know if anything
came of it.
I don't suppose the world would come to an end if Microsoft were
required to become two different companies, an OS company and an
applications company. On the other hand, I don't see a lot of good coming
of it either.
And I keep coming back to the same conclusion: none of it
matters, because that won't happen. This won't be settled until it reaches
the Supreme Court, that won't happen for years, and it will be decided by
justices who have not even been appointed yet. Back to work. This will
have some reverberations, particularly in the stock market, but the
effects won't be as long lasting as, say, the development of Linux and
Apache.
I should have told everyone about this a long time
ago: there is a report on a visit to Mount Wilson
by Niven and me. I told subscribers, but I didn't put it out in the
open. I had intended to, really I had...
I've also found there are pictures that got uploaded but never linked
because I never finished some of the reports, like Epcot. I would like to
say I'll get those done, but I am afraid it's more likely to be Real Soon
Now. Sigh.
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