Why not microsoft?
or, "Where do
you want to crash today?" (updated 3/29/98)
I'm not saying we should boycott all MS products, or that they are the embodiment of evil in the PC world. But, they are not as good as their paid (or co-opted) promoters claim, nor are their products any better than what we used to have - it's just that they are the only ones that are left!
What we have lost
Word Perfect was an excellent product - with a world-wide following. They only crashed because Word for Windows was "pretty good" and was made available long before they could successfully migrate WP6 to WPWin. Prior to leveraging their Windows advantage, MS Word was an also-ran, trying to keep up with other word processors.
On the other hand, old pc users will remember WordStar as the program that wouldn't die, no matter how bad it was. It survived as long as it did, not because it was worth using, but because it was bundled for free into computer purchases. Micropro, the publishers gave away free copies to all the pc manufacturers who would have it. As a result, it gained a reputation as "the most used" word processor. Bill Gates was learning these tricks.
Lotus 1-2-3 was an excellent program with a world-wide following and a large installed base. Excel, while a pretty good product, didn't replace Lotus because it was better. It replaced Lotus because it came bundled within Microsoft Office, and was integrated using OLE, which MS kept pretty tight to the chest until their competitors stopped breathing.
They virtually put Borland out of business with their almost identical Basic, Pascal & C compilers and, yes, even Access was able to, with their monopolistic help, kill world-renowned and popular database systems Paradox and dbaseIV. They couldn't kill the other major pc database, FoxPro, so they bought them out and then killed it.
They even kill their own products to force us to their flagships - and have confounded MSWorks users by making the files incompatible. I can't read client-supplied MSWorks files in Word 6.0!* (But I can now that I've upgraded to Office '97 at a cost of $200 for a major feature - "html export" from MSWord - which is not at all better than simply formatting text files as I was doing... and html export from PowerPoint which is a joke and simply makes all your slides into simple image files - What a ripoff!)
And, last but by no means least - DOS yes, that "complicated old text-mode operating system" - which Microsoft ripped off from a small-time developer then sold to IBM as their own work. And, as a matter of fact, there are many desireable features of DOS no longer available to us even with our over-powered pentiums - Things like a fast-loading OS, stable with no surprises, able to run on any pc manufactured since 1980.... We've been forced into the fast lane.
I still keep an old 1 megabyte 286 around for DOS apps, and they perform marvelously. These old programs are often - quite often - faster than the newer versions running in Windows 95 with 32 megs of memory!
And now, Microsoft has announced the official "death of dos". It will no longer be available for purchase - but that's ok. It was stable 3 revisions ago and we still have old reliable copies hanging around. And I still prefer many of my old dBaseIII programs which still outperform and are more familiar than the new apps which have superceded the old reliable standbys.
How Tyrants Survive
See? We forget quickly. That's how tyrants survive. We forget and begin to accept their claims as truth in absence of stilled dissenting voices..
These are specific cases of killing a good competitor through brute force and financial muscle, not by offering the public something truly better.
Their graphics offerings have never amounted to much, but I'll bet Adobe and the others are certainly watching their backs.
"We're not bowing to Microsoft!"
I called a local independent Internet Service Provider today to see what browsers they supported. "Whatever you want" was the answer, "We believe you have a choice." When I explained the reason for my call, the tech stood up proudly (or, so I imagined) and said, quite firmly "We're not bowing to Microsoft."
The Internet Exploder
I have recently had many, many complaints from friends & clients that MSIE caused problems on their systems - problems which went away as soon as they removed MSIE and replaced it with Netscape.
And, their problems were not alleviated when they went to Sprint, ATT or Prolog for assistance. The only response they received was a terse "We don't support Netscape. We want you to use Microsoft's browser."
I also lost a major contract recently because we were unable to get MSIE & Netscape to co-habitate my client's computer, Bill Gates' false claims to the DOJ notwithstanding..
.. In fear and foolish panic, this client chose to move his website to a "Frontpage Server", forgetting all the problems and headaches MS Frontpage was causing him before we modified his site to run on a "real" NCSA-compliant Unix server. From my point of view, he has made a mistake, but at least now I won't have to deal with the other foolishness his mind-set encourages.....
Loss of control and freedom of choice
My own personal concern is that we are losing control of "our" internet to these monopolies.
I was excited by the internet which grew through selfless sharing of information and software- a cooperation the level of which had never before existing in mankind's history. We are seriously facing the risk of losing that to one company's selfish greed if we do not see and understand what this Microsoft Monopoly Game is all about.
We do not need Microsoft - or even Netscape, for that matter, to fully exploit the resources - the shared resources - of the internet. Browsers (Mosaic) , servers (Apache) , even an excellent windowing operating system (Linux) are all available for free - produced by organizations of individuals with no corporate policy of domination.
Bill Gates has a clear vision of domination of the PC industry - and he has already taken $40 billion + of our money to do it with.
I just hope that we are not all forced to make a choice of either "bowing to Microsoft" or struggling alone in the cold...
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Updates:
3/29 - More trouble for Excel users - third serous bug found in Excel. This could cause you money - or cause your Excel-reliant accountant to screw up your taxes....
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/zdnn/0327/301835.html
4/6 - Now, there's more:
In response to Jesse Bert's Anchor Desk article of 4/6/98:
http://www.zdnet.com/chkpt/adt0406ba/www.anchordesk.com/story/story_1952.html
"Microsoft has done much to benefit the pc community. - and even more to hurt & co-opt it. But Linux & GNU have done more to benefit all pc users. I applaud Netscape's approach. But even without them, Linux, GNU & Opera + the JAVA apps yet unwritten will do more to benefit the web & PC community than all of Microsoft's bloated MS-ware has done. This is Microsoft's wake-up call. Don't build a $40 billion fortune on software. You bastards. We'll do it for free - for the sake of sharing and proving that the future does not belong to the rich & powerful, but to the wise and sharing. We've got a lot to offer. And we're doing it. Bill Gates is not the guru, he is the interloper. There are more smart people than there are rich people, and there is a lesson in that.
- Alan Runfeldt
3 years professional internet
technical consultant,
15 years database programmer & software developer.
Who cares?
1 Bill Gates told the Senate subcommitte that you could change browsers in five seconds. Yeah. Right. Not true. Not true at all. Netscape 3.0 & MSIE 3.0 can cohabitate a system, but once MSIE 4.0 if installed, MS is in control.
2 I had a recent report from a system administrator that he found unauthorized email messages being secretly sent from his PC "to some big-brother computer somewhere" . There was no record in his system, only his mail server's traffic logs. Only a mail server system administrator could find this. You won't know when they do it to you.