Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 09:06:48 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> Cc: Gary Kline <kline@tera.tera.com>, freebsd@atipa.com (Atipa), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why we should support Microsoft... Message-ID: <20153.895680408@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 20 May 1998 00:11:06 PDT." <199805200711.AAA07314@rah.star-gate.com>
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> So what is your suggestion on how should the DOJ treat Microsoft business > pratice? I recommend that the DOJ just leave Microsoft the hell alone. People have spent a lot of time whining about the fact that Microsoft owns 80% of the desktops out there and that M$ is now the Big Bad Wolf who is crushing innovation and all these other scarey things, but they all conveniently ignore answering the biggest question of all: How did we get to this state in the first place? I've been in this biz more or less full-time since 1977, when I took my first job writing accounting applications in BASIC, and I've watched the entire process of Microsoft going from a 2-man company that wrote BASIC interpreters to the international powerhouse it is today. Some of this was due to luck and being in the right place at the right time, sure, but a lot more of it was due to a very simple fact which many in this discussion would probably really rather just ignore: Bill simply made fewer stupid mistakes than the rest of us. Don't get me wrong, I certainly remember Windows before 3.0 and M$'s disastrous foray into the world of hardware (and, more recently, packages like Microsoft Bob) as some of their bigger blunders - I'm hardly saying that M$ is infallible. What I'm saying is that while M$ might have made some big tactical mistakes along the way, their overall _strategy_ was sound and they stuck to it until they'd evolved their tactics to the point where they could properly execute that strategy. The rest of the software industry, by contrast, had no apparent strategy to speak of and could probably be best compared to the Austrian army after WW-I - dominated by generals and political leaders who still remembered the glorious days of mounted horse calvary charges and stubbornly stuck with them long after they had been rendered entirely obsolete by Maxim's new little toy. Why is that? Well, my theory is that since the 50's, programming and computers in general have been something of a black art, jealously guarded by high priests who wished only to be paid a reasonable wage and left in peace to play with their hi-tech toys. The whole messy issue of _users_ was something which the priesthood only barely tolerated, and they certainly never put a lot of time and energy into empowering those users to be able to live without them someday. Into this rarified atmosphere comes Bill, and he somehow works it out that even though the overall goal of empowering users to directly grapple with these machines may be somewhat premature, it's still something they desire and are willing to pay big bucks for. So, rather than investing a lot of time and energy into building better and better software engines, like the Unix crowd is doing, Bill focuses instead on the "outer shell", that 10% of the software were the user spends 90% of their time, and puts all of his resources into improving the man/machine interface on *commodity hardware*. This is a key point which Apple missed - they got the man/machine bit very right then screwed up by trying to mate it exclusively to proprietary hardware - a mistake which M$ had already made and learned from earlier and didn't need to repeat. Again, Microsoft made some tactical mistakes along the way but their overall strategy was exactly the right one for making a lot of money and that's exactly what they did. The rest of us just watched and thought, with our engineering minds, how silly these Microsoft people were for making all these tactical blunders and we never really focused on what the overall strategy was supposed to be, hell, I don't think any of us wanted to even _think_ about strategy - we were having just too much fun playing with all this new tech. So, I look at M$ today and I'm naturally saddened by the kind of software that 80% of the world now has to live with, but who do I blame for this? Us. Only us. We let it happen and now we're complaining, far after the fact, that somebody ought to protect us from the big bad wolf we ourselves let into the house. Bah! How is that people are so frickin' BLIND? - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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