Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 11:25:57 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>, Gary Kline <kline@tera.tera.com>, freebsd@atipa.com (Atipa), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why we should support Microsoft... Message-ID: <20855.895688757@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 20 May 1998 11:24:11 MDT." <199805201724.LAA20562@lariat.lariat.org>
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> I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Indeed. :) > Simple. IBM handed its near-monopoly to Microsoft, which has in turn > perpetuated and extended it via unethical and illegal business practices. Far too simplistic. People have been handed staggering inheiritances before, and far more directly, and blown them quite handily. It takes a bit more than sheer luck to occupy a postition where everyone else is sniping at you and would love to have a piece (if not all) of your revenues. Remember something called VisiCalc for Visi Corp? In the 80's, there was a time when they could do no wrong and had plenty of cash coming out of that cow. Then they failed to follow on with their next trick and we all know what their competition did to them after that. Microsoft could have stumbled and gone down for the count any number of times, but they kept bouncing back with more marketable ideas (which were also well marketed - a crucial distinction) and it's really _that_ which has perpetuated Microsoft. Sure, they've also acted like total sharks and probably committed more than one illegal (to say nothing of "unethical") act in getting to where they are today, but I don't see anything particularly damning or even new about that. You think IT firms like Honeywell and GTE get all those fat military contracts by being just really swell companies which the government happens to like? Hardly. We just focus on Microsoft's larceny a lot more because of their position in the consumer's eye. Most folks could give a fig about who builds our air defense computers or writes software to process election results in Brazil, so all the nasty briberly/strongarm tactics with procurement in those markets go largely unnoticed. Welcome to capitalism. > What you mean "us," white man? Us. Us, the people who were around in the late 70's and 80's and fought in the Unix / UI wars which spent so much of our energies arguing things like OpenLook vs Motif while Billy was busily banging out interfaces for the rest of humanity. Unless you yourself were frozen and in a state of suspended animation during this time then you were either just as misguided/apathetic as the rest of us or you were totally ineffective at communicating and directing a more enlightened approach to dealing with this problem - I'll let you take your pick of sins. :-) > Also, it's not true that Bill made fewer mistakes than anyone else. > Microsoft has had DOZENS of "flops." For most companies, especially Perhaps I should have phrased that differently: "Fewer strategic mistakes." He made plenty of tactical ones, yes, but his overall strategy would appear to have been consistently sound or he wouldn't be where he is today. Again, it's not all just luck as some of his more sour-grapes detractors would have us believe. It took some sort of overall vision to continue to pound on Windows and take a number of risks in essentially _forcing_ the user base to adopt to it. Doesn't anyone remember all the industry naysayers predicting that Windows would be Microsoft's Waterloo? That DOS was simply too powerful and did everything the novice user might possibly want to do anyway, making Windows a solution in search of a problem and a sure-fire flop? Well, as history now shows, M$ stuck with it despite considerable adverse publicity and several initial versions which didn't even work and they kept pushing until everyone suddenly woke up one day and said "Windows! What a fine idea! We'll have some of that!" Luck? I don't think so. I see it as tenacious pursuit of something which was rightly pegged as the next necessary bit of enabling technology for mass-market acceptance, and something which takes a lot more will than luck. Of course, we Unix-heads all pooh-poohed the value of this at the time and pointed to our much more elegant X Window System solution as the answer to everything and, of course, we got our fannies whacked but good - we'd totally missed the point. I also see a similar danger with the server, to be honest. We've sort of retreated on the desktop front and grudgingly admitted that maybe Windows has the desktop now but we have the SERVER, dammit, and that still makes us #1! Don't kid yourselves. Without any sort of overall strategy, and strategy has always been somewhat lacking in the Unix world, any initial advantage swiftly erodes in the face of an enemy who _does_ have a strategy and is constantly maneuvering for a better position which will allow him to nullify your advantage and use his own strength in a follow-up move which overwhelms your defenses. NT is taking a lot of heat over its lack of remote management capabilities and general instability, but getting complacent about this is the last thing we need to do. Whether M$ got to where it is today purely on the strength of a single "cash cow" is also more or less irrelevant since that's most certainly not the case today. Today's enemy is far more versatile and has shown itself, as it did with IE, able to react far more quickly than anyone would have given such a large entity credit for. I have a very healthy respect for Microsoft as a competitor, whatever I might think about the technical quality of its products. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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