Re: A "hidden" cost

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Thu 10 May 2001 14:25:45 -0500

MICHAEL MARTINEZ <Michael_at_xenite.org> WROTE:

>You had my general agreement up to here. Unfortunately,
>the Federal Trade Commission never did anything about
>Microsoft.

>Well, I had written a long ancedote, but I think it
>will suffice to say that today's massively expensive
>applications may be replaced by tomorrow's inexpesnive
>applications. It's only a matter of time before we
>learn whether people will then pine for the "good old
>days".

TO WHICH BRANDI JASMINE <brandi_at_brandijasmine.com> REPLIED:

>That's just as well because gratuitous and irrelevant
>Microsoft-bashing bores the hell out of me. While the
>company has committed its share of sins that it may
>deserve to be punished for - it cannot compare in
>terms of scale to what the big players are doing in
>the CMS space.

Let's get one thing straight. There is nothing
gratuitous in pointing out that Microsoft's abuses
discredit your position. Microsoft's successful
marketing of badly written software has cost the
business and home-user communities hundreds of
billions of dollars in service fees, product update
costs, lost productivity, lost data, etc. An entire
industry of software support specialists grew up
around Microsoft's products. They are essentially
low-grade software. But the marketing behind the
shoddy software is superb, second-to-none. Many of
those support specialists openly acknowledge the fact
that were Microsoft to sell working software they
would be largely out of jobs.

Microsoft got a stranglehold on PC application
distribution by entering into exclusive contracts
with several hundred PC manufacturers. When Windows
3.0 came out, 2500 application vendors announced they
would not support the operating environment. They
didn't realize that as the PC manufacturers rolled
out millions of boxes with Windows 3.0 installed, the
people buying the machines would want to use the
default settings on the computers.

Within 2 years most of those 2500 application vendors
announced they could no longer afford to support DOS.
Microsoft won by replacing a barely stable single-
tasking operating system with a highly unstable pseudo-
multitasking operating environment.

Matters only became worse as Windows 3.1 replaced 3.0,
and the Win95 replaced 3.1, and then Win98, etc.
Where was the Federal Trade Commission through all
these years when Microsoft was delivering products
"so bad as to actually worsen the problem [they
purported] to solve"?

It takes some serious naivete not to recognize the
economic damage that Microsoft has inflicted on the
business community. The economy overall benefitted
in that a huge support industry was created. It's
just a sad statement about the way our society works
that there was never a legitimate need for that
industry in the first place. It was just business.
One company, Microsoft, was better at marketing its
products than other companies. The consumer wasn't
ever given an opportunity for choice in the matter.

And that is why the Justice Department stepped in.
It will be a shame to see the years of anti-trust
work unravelled by the appeals process, but the right
solution was never proposed in the first place.
The only way to break Microsoft's stranglehold on the
PC marketplace is to break it up into multiple
operating system vendors which start out with the
same basic set of code. Competition will force them
to diversify. And as for all those alarmists who
predict that software development costs will rise
because of the need to support different operating
systems, they fail to note the fact that every time
Microsoft releases a new operating it introduces
numerous incompatibilities with existing applications,
forcing the application developers to devote resources
to creating updated versions of their applications.

Backwards-compatibility is an elusive dream.

We need innovation, not more nonsense from Microsoft.
Open standards would be given a boost by the
elimination of the monopoly, and then the marketplace
could go back to rewarding good application design and
development.

Michael Martinez
 Science Fiction and Fantasy info_at_xenite.org
  Visualizing Middle-earth, a book for all Tolkien fans
   http://www.xenite.org/



Received on Thu May 10 2001 - 14:25:45 CDT