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[jolo]

  It never ceases to amaze me on why people just volunteer their time and money to help Microsoft off. Thus guaranteeing less competition, jobs, variety, creativty, etc.

What does XP patch 2 do for the consumer from a functional point of view ? There are claims of better security and all of you beta users loading it up right now, because this really is a beta version, are helping Microsoft avoid lawsuits and competitors who might have a better way to handle security.

Are their any performance gains ?? Additional features If the patch is NOT consumer and competition oriented, why would anyone rush into being a betga user UNLESS they are a software maker and would need to mske sure that their product integrates with XP.

With Microsoft giving those millions to stockholders, please read what they are subtracting in jobs and benefits to their employees.


Jon

[DocLotus]

Ah; a LITTLE Micro$oft bashing ?

Actually, some users have reported one performance gain... faster startup.

Yes, there are some additional features such as all of the security items are now in one easy to get at location; there is a better firewall, all of the previous patches are rolled up into SP2 along with some new ones which make installing (or reinstalling) XP easier as there is now only one major patch needed... SP2.  Also, I have read that the newer IE is much nicer then before although it still can't hold a candle to FireFox, Opera and some others for overall features and functionally but at least it is an improvement for those who still use IE.

The current SP2 is not really BETA; it has been available for general release to the ISP / Server / Network users and will soon be released for general use by everyone.

We are not helping Micro$oft, we are helping ourselves by better protection from some of those nasties out there.  It is not Micro$oft's fault that they have the world's most popular software.  When you are popular, or have money, the bad guys will attack; Micro$oft is spending millions of their own money to give us free fixes, for that I commend them.  Even Symantec will not provide free updates for Norton Anti virus definitions after the first year which really sucks, if you ask me.

Many of those millions that Micro$oft is giving to the stockholders, well, that would also be many of the employees as most Micro$oft employees are stockholders with the possible exception being the part-time and offshore workers that are not really Micro$oft employees.

I'm not real happy with some of the things that Micro$oft does either, but you got to give ol' Bill credit for creating one of the worlds most successful companies and standing behind their products by including extras in their software such as backup programs, firewalls and providing patches from the bad guys.

Now if only the auto industry would provide free fixes without the government having to threaten them to fix their cars.

PS: I have not yet installed SP2.  I will wait for my auto-update to do that for me.

[jolo]

How long do you think Media Center will be around if Microsoft views this fantaastic software as a threat !!

A company in riches, drastically cutting benefits for employees. Please read from a Seattle newspaper how much the cut effects people that tend work 60 plus hours a week for them. 93% do not like it in a survey.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001938654_microsoft26.html


No,  the first version of ALL of Microsoft's products is thought of by
Microsoft and IS in reality a beta version.  Yes the robots that keep microsoft going will get on it right away and never, ever do that for another firm. I have been through a course in the Microsoft Marketing and Project Planning tragedy at Microsoft and I am using  their words by describing the patch as a beta version. They send it out when they feel there is a reasonable amount of bugs left (in the thousands), then have the free labor in the hundreds of thousands test it and send back feedback to them, usually for no cost whatever.

I am not going to get inot much about Microsoft. But if you have kept up with the billions they are paying out in anti-trade agreements, and how they are screwing every single person who uses any type of technology, you would understand.
All of those billions first of all is sick that they have, but all of them have been to pay off companies because of their enormous control and destruction of the free enterprise system by wiping out competition. This wipes out jobs, creativity, the U.S. as a leader in IT, and basically the hopes and dreams of our nation who want to become entrepreneurs. I think it is good to think past ones own needs. If we act with ethics, values, and morals we can change everything.

Microsoft has so much earned by political payoffs, bribes and the set up where the law of the land does not effect them. It is not be innovative, creative software, it is about no competition, and doing it in illegal ways. No problem paying off those fines and other companies who get bought off before trials are over.

If you do not mind one company that is or will, because of people not caring and laws not being enforced domination operating systems, office software, PDA operating system, video games, the multimedia industry, economics of the nation, poor treatment of employees, who are left, open source, software and hardware that is not propriatary, paying rentals for software, not being allowed to own software. Doing it through bribes and having so much in resources that they can control the law with such a passive populate then good for you.

I was going to use the Sun office package which was competitng with ms Office, then low and behold, Sun and Microsoft are now in bet wit heach signing an agreement. How the heck can that be legal is beyong me, but once again, no competition, creativity, free enterprice system, a MONOPOLY, where, like in the game, everyone is broke except one player.  

The employees part of being a stockholder has to be less than 1 percent.

[Mastiff]

I agree with you in most, but not in that we can change anything. That's far too late. It could have been possible ten years ago, but now...forget it.  

[DocLotus]

Micro$oft had a lot of help in overcoming the competition; some of those companies that Micro$oft now dominates actually did it to themselves by a combination of arrogance, hard headedness, egotism, and lets not forget a little too much male testosterone.

Take the case of the three giants of the 80's... LOTUS Development, WordPerfect Corporation and Novell all of whom virtually dominated the software scene in the 80's.

LOTUS had the best selling LOTUS 1-2-3 spreadsheet, the best selling Freelance Graphics, the best selling LOTUS SmartSuite and the hugely successful LOTUS Notes.

WordPerfect had the best selling WordPerfect word processor.

Novell had the only real viable network on the market and was number one.

Every computer magazine you looked at in the 80's had LOTUS and / or WordPerfect as the cover stories; "How 1-2-3 does this or how it does that" and so on; little Micro$oft was nowhere to be found.

In the 80's, Micro$oft was only this little company that made money form the sale of DOS licenses ($60 million a year) and the Basic language program.  Windows in the mid 80's was mostly nothing more then smoke and mirrors.  Micro$oft office was not a player back then; it was all about LOTUS SmartSuite.

The two companies (LOTUS and WordPerfect), although totally separate and in different states, built up such a wonderful relationship that a LOTUS 1-2-3 user could actually call WordPerfect for 1-2-3 problems and could get help for both 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.  Most computer users at the time used both programs on a daily basis.

I worked for 16 years as a spreadsheet developer for many large companies from the mid 80's to late 90's; 1-2-3, WordPerfect and a Novell network were always the main programs in daily use.

In the early 90's Mitch Kapore, founder and CEO of LOTUS, worked out a deal with WordPerfect for the two giants to merge to fend of the upstart Micro$oft.  All was going well, an agreement was worked out, both companies saw this as a done deal, the press saw it as a done deal, until a combination of arrogance, hard headedness, egotism, and lets not forget a little too much male testosterone took over. The two CEO's could not agree on who was going to be the new CEO of the new combined giant.  The end result was that the so-called done deal fell apart all because to hard-headed idiots could not see past their own arrogance.

Next Mitch Kapore set his sights on the then giant Novell.  It was a done deal (again) only to be scuttled by you guessed it, once again a combination of arrogance, hard headedness, egotism, and lets not forget a little too much male testosterone took over.  Again, the end results being that it fell through at the last minute.

Mitch Kapore saw himself as the new Bill Gates running a mega company consisting of LOTUS, WordPerfect and Novell.  If it had all happened as Kapore envisioned, we would today be talking about someone else other then Micro$oft.

The end results to all this was that Micro$oft finally came into their own with Windows 3.1 and Office and the rest as they say, is history.

I'm no real Micro$oft fan but you have to admit that running a computer in the dirty ol' days of DOS was no fun at all...

* If you wanted to have a program pop up and do other neat things like Windows does so easily, you had to load what was called a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program.  The problem was that DOS was not designed to run with TSR's and a lot of them simply caused the computer to lock up requiring a reboot (and you thought that was a unique Windows thing, huh?).

* Each program you loaded such as 1-2-3 had to have its own set of four drivers; one each for the keyboard, monitor, printer, and fonts.

* Fonts were a real nightmare as there was no standard, you had a hard time trying to copy a document made by one program into another program as the fonts were often not recognized by the other program.  What you saw on screen seldom if every looked the same when it was printed as the screen fonts seldom matched up with the printer fonts. The problem was that fonts back then were fixed in size meaning there had to be separate fonts for each size from 8 pt to 72 pt; what a total mess.  Each program used its own idea of what fonts should look like; another total mess causing incompatibilities between programs.  Windows 3.1 changed all that with common drivers for all programs and scalable TrueType fonts that finally gave us the same printouts as we saw on screen.

In the dirty ol' days of DOS each new program came with one to three very large, thick 200 or 400 page three-ring binder(s) of instructions; it was needed as no two programs were used in the same way and the learning curve was very high.  Function keys varied from one program to other, even the Help key was often different.  There were no icons to speed us along.  Everything was menu driven and even then there were no standards.

So, yes we can bash Micro$oft all we want, but they brought us standards that was so lacking in the days of DOS.  I often can install a brand new program and get right to work using it with a minimum of learning as so many things are now common among all programs.

Windows is not perfect, but I would not want to go back to the old DOS days at all.

[Deivit]

LOTUS Development, WordPerfect Corporation and Novale (not sure of the spelling)

Novell  

---
Listening to: 'The Sad Cafe' from 'Common Thread - The Songs Of The Eagles' by 'Lorrie Morgan' on Media Center 10

[LonWar]

Was an interesting read... Thanks Doc.

[DocLotus]

Glad you liked it

The early 80's was a very interesting (if not hard) time to use a computer as there were few real standards that we take for granted today.

People forget that the things we take for granted today with Windows simply did not exist then.

Then you had to belong to a computer club (I was VP and program director of ours in Houston) and read, read, and read some more big, fat manuals in order to make any since of the programs and equipment.

Life is better today thanks to Windows and better hardware standards and standards organizations such as VESA.

[DocLotus]

Hey imjustagamer;

Your logo of the guy beating his head on the computer is very appropriate for the way things were in the early days of PC computing.

Much of the time you felt like beating your head on the computer as so few things made any since at all.

Some of the time I wanted to throw my then wonderful Sony 13 inch color monitor out the window onto the hard concrete tennis court below.

Other times I envisioned traveling down the freeway at 80 miles per hour and tossing the offending hardware out the car window directly into the closet concrete bridge support just to get some since of revenge.

But most of the time I was simply pounding my head on the desk (so to speak) out of total frustration.

[TimB]

Nice article Doc, I'm no Microsoft lover but its important to recognize the contribution they've made to our PC lives.

-=Tim=-

[DocLotus]

So true, Tim  

And... just think what the next 5 or 10 years are going to bring

[Sauzee]

Fascinating. Thanks Doc Lotus.  It always helps to have a broader perspective on things.

I remember the dark days before the Internet when you had to go to your local library if you wanted to research anything.

[DocLotus]

Hi  Sauzee;

Yeh, I remember the days BEFORE PC's.; boy was that strange, I really had a life then!

In the 70's I was the manager of GE's QuickRental Instruments for five states.  In the late 60's & early 70's Telecommunications meant a Teletype machine (yes a real mechanical monster that had a throughput of a whopping 10 characters per second).  Most people could type several times faster then the Teletype could send or receive data.

There was paper punch tape to help speed things along a little plus we had card readers that were a little faster still.

By the mid 70's things speeded up to 30 characters per second; by the late 70's that jumped to 120 characters per second.

My DSL connection today transmits at something like 200,000 characters per second and there seems to be no end in sight for speed of throughput.

If anyone yearns for "the good old days" I for one am willing to forget them.

[jolo]

First of all, please take off your blinders. It is incredible the ignorance and fantasy about the Microsoft contribution but ....

First, if there was competition allowed before Microsoft broke anti-trade laws immaginable. Please research past the eighties.

There was a great PBS special "The Revenge of the Nerds". which laid out a lot of arrogance and stupidity of the other vendors:

The decision that made Microsoft initially was not a tech one, but a business one. When had business vision and when IBM decided to run with PCs, the man who invented DOS, called PC/M treated IBM like crap.
The last place IBM went was to what was Microsoft who had basic. Bill was ready to sign whatever contract IBM wanted, but that after
IBM. Bill would have ownership rigts for DOS, which wasn't even there yet. Bill went to to by himself DOS and did.

Then came Compaq who, through reverse engineering, came out with "clones".

Lotus bought Visicalc and was very condescending to its users and had seperate products to print graphs. etc. Microsoft ask users what the number one item they wanted in a spreadsheet and were shocked that is was Graphs. Then Excel came out for the Apple then Windows. Jobs, who is no better than Gates, just no so dominate, stole the Apple OS from the Xeros star system.

When hte MAC was an nounced by Jobe, there was only one other person on stage, the was Gates who had the only application ready for Apple, the graphical oriented Excel and the Office Suite.

Then Word Perfect did not think anyone would cafre about Windows and was too late in getting to the market. End oif dominance for them.

Ashton-Tate with their poor treatment of their user community, had so many users waiting to dump them. Then came Access.

Novell who had almost all of the PC network market, never had a graphical interface. Even though a lot more stable than NT at the time, I remember looking at NT server for networking and saying to myself, "It looks just like file manager", and went with it in our oganization, although it was a stability nightmere for several years.

Wordperfect unfortunately was the standard for free technical support and was the best their was at it. When they fell behind be getting to Windows too late and dropped their free support.

Microsoft and HP, which at the time bhad this agent technology, similar to MAC,  won their lawsuits from Jobs at Apple who stole the GUI interface from Xerox anyway.

That was the old days, a lot of techs without business knowledge and treated their customers poorly when they were dominent.

NOW, we live in a different world and Microsoft is not two kids who dropped out of Harvard. They are a multi-national political machine who is eating up all technology and doing it illegally. It is not about innovation, but domination, bribes, killing off competition through illegal actions and fear. Now dominate, nothing is enough, and creativity, decency is gone.
If you want to see the true picture, check the court cases in the past few years. These law suits from not only from the feds, states, other companies, like JRiver, but from other nations. They will do things like not allow a hardware vendor to allow choices before release of their systems, unless they contain all Microsoft.

I do think the cut in benefits and oissed off employees is an incredibly stupdif thing for Microsoft to do. They had such a loyal base of employees where Microsoft became their family. That is dead.

But they are have one of the largest GNPs in the world and are a dangerous entity looking to dominate all markets, not with innovation, but with money, bribes, with the ability to handle fines in the billions and not even blink.

Get past the consmer side and look at the IT company side. Look at the lawsuits, look at the ones that list the truth about how Microsoft operates all over the world. Look at the lives they are destroying and you will get it.

It is a different world. If there was ethics, morality and values driven into Gates, it would be very different. Even the private charities Gates had given to was done for domination into health care and to own the distribution channels for medicine to the world.

Things would have worked out so much better with competition. Without competition, we have monopolies where there is only one who owns all.
There is an end to the free enterprise system and serfdom.

The contribution Microsoft is making to oour lives currently is offshoring, killing of technological innovation, working aws the savior for the RIAA to limit innovation in the multi-media field, stagnate the Office Suite technology or any innovation with their money.


Jon

[JimH]

Well said, Jon.  Very well said.

[lee269]

I checked out 'Revenge of the Nerds' - I think its some kind of teen movie. What I think you meant was Triumph of the Nerds. Theres an entertaining book-of-the-series type thing, Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely, which covers nicely the PC early days described by jolo and Doc and the way that the big egos and the circumstances involved shaped the PC and software we use today. IIRC Gary Kildall out flying his plane leaving IBM suits hanging round looking for another OS partner was a nice story. It desperately needs an update for the late 90s onwards though.

Talking of books - whatever happened to book on the run?

[DocLotus]

Much of what you say is true.

However...

What is also true is that all those lawsuits, well Micro$oft has won most of them or received only a very minimal judgement and the rest have been thrown out of court. It also looks like Micro$oft is winning most of them in Europe as well.

LOTUS did not buy VisiCalc.  Mitch Kapore worked at VisiCalc and thought there had to be a better way then how VisiCalc was doing it.  At the time VisiCalc had totally separate programs for what we now think of as a spreadsheet program; the reason at the time was simple... memory.  There simply was not enough memory in the early PC's (16 KB) to do both numbers and have a database available at the same time.  When the IBM PC came out with a whopping 64 KB of memory, MItch Kapore saw an opportunity, quit VasiCalc and started LOTUS and developed LOTUS 1-2-3.  1-2-3 stands for... 1: Spreadsheet, 2: Database, 3: Graphs (yes the graphs were still separate as even 64KB of memory was not enough).  What was really nice was that finally you could do both number crunching and have a database at the same time plus there was the very powerful macro language that was built in.

What is seldom mentioned today is that when IBM brought out their first PC in 1981 it nearly failed due to very slow sales; the reason was simple.... there were nearly 10,000 software packages for the Apple but precious few for the IBM PC.  Then LOTUS introduced 1-2-3 and suddenly every bean counter or anyone else that needed number crunching could do it on the IBM PC.  It is generally acknowledged that LOTUS 1-2-3 is the software that made the IBM PC a success because without it the IBM would of surely failed.

As far as the rest goes, well that's business and lets admit it, like it or not, Micro$oft does it better then anyone else.  They are not doing anything that GM, Ford or other very successful large businesses have done.  Over the years Ford and GM have done some of the same things, and had similar lawsuits.  Its called winning.

[GHammer]

Funny how MS brings out the best in people.

I have been around computers since I used a Teletype with paper tape.
I bought an Apple II (not +, not e) and when their first floppy came out, went into hock to get one.

After awhile, kindly Apple decided that support was best done by its dealers and quit phone support. Apple was (and remains) a pricy product.

Soon after that I bought an Amiga. Very cool, I'm sure memory fails me but I recall great graphics and stereo sound. Too bad the company had no idea how to stay in business.

Then came a 386 SX with a 20 Mb HD! Whooo!

After running various versions of DOS and of course Quarterdeck's Desqview and QEMM, I started with Windows 2.something. Sucked rocks. Windows 3 was pretty good, but when 3.11 came out I was quite happy.

I took a detour into OS/2 but IBM frittered that advantage away, and I was soon on NT 3.51. And stayed along for the adventure to XP Pro SP2 today.

Why? Because nearly anything hardware-wise I have thrown into my machines works. If I decide that I don't like MC, I have many choices to play my music in the formats I like. With the current anti-MS pick, linux, I can't find a decent player that handles APE files for example.

As for MS' business tactics, so what? I find it funny that one of the complaints of the various anti-trust actions is that MS bundles applications into Windows for free! My! How I hate good apps for free. I'm certainly glad that the EU is making it safe for Real to charge me for their player and dump all their ads onto my machine. If only they had done these things before Netscape was forced to quit being arrogant we could all be paying our subscription fee and waiting to see what the next Netscape extention to HTML would be.

You want to compete with the free bundled apps? No problem. I think JRiver has a nice media player that many have chosen to pay for over using the free bundled media player for example. MS' free apps simply raise the bar for those who wish to compete. Their apps have to be clearly superior to the bundled apps. And personally I think that benefits me, the consumer.

As for the rant about an evil empire who bribes their way to world domination, we seemed to have missed that memo here in China. Are Windows and Office in wide use? You bet! Does MS see a nickle of the sales? Nope, in fact, I have never seen a legit copy of any MS app in my time here.


I'm curious. Which companies that MS has 'crushed' would you like to see in the software business today?

[DocLotus]

Good show

[zagor]

I think every company in every business want to be future 'Microsoft' of their businesses. Accept it, if Lotus or any other software company has won over Microsoft, then now we are arguing over 'illegal actions' or 'monopoly' of that company.
Do you think Coke is happy with Pepsi, or Nike is happy with Adidas and they don't want to get the market shares of their rivals?
That is capitalism, everybody wants to be the number one and nobody wants a closer number two.
I'm not American so I couldn't understand how some American people hate from Microsoft. If they hate Microsoft, then they hate the system that built America. Because I think Microsoft is the most successfull company of the business system.
And I think it is not hate, it is envy. Because everybody could be the founder of Microsoft, but they couldn't.

[TimB]

Its interesting that Microsoft hasn't had the same fate as AOL (where I worked for 10 years), another large company that seemed about to rule the world 5 years ago.

AOL's errors (including arrogance, ignoring the customer and over-reaching) could have been as easily made by Microsoft, but apparently either weren't or the customer and market has forgiven them.  With AOL viable alternatives appeared and people took them, its the American way.

-=Tim=-

[JaredH]

As for the rant about an evil empire who bribes their way to world domination, we seemed to have missed that memo here in China. Are Windows and Office in wide use? You bet! Does MS see a nickle of the sales? Nope, in fact, I have never seen a legit copy of any MS app in my time here.


I'm curious. Which companies that MS has 'crushed' would you like to see in the software business today?

I recall reading somewhere one time that the market in China for microsoft products has a higher profit margin per capita per year than Microsoft makes worldwide per year. There are only two kinds of Microsoft products here; Blatantly Pirated, and Deceptively Pirated. I agree with you GHammer. I dont think a single legit copy exists here. But for the sake of rational thinking. There are legitimate copies here, but the prices are so high that no one but the richest people could afford the software. For those people who whine and complain about the "Microsoft Conspiracy", look at China. China is the quintessential definition of Capitolism. Everything is an advertising space. You drive down a city street and chances are youll find that every single lampost on that street is adorned with some form of advertisement for something. I dont think there is a single building in the country that doesnt have some form of billboard or football field sized poster draped over the side of it. And yet, like was noted before, Microsoft hardly ever, if never, sees a dime of it. In a strictly commercial sense, China is the Microsoft of Asia. They have become extremely efficient at giving people what they want commercially, whether its real or fake. What amazes me is that capitalism is fixing to put a serious stranglehold on this country and yet it seems like the little "mom n pop" shops are everywhere. My local friends have even told me that since capitolism began to rise in the past 10 years, those little stores also began increasing. In my opinion, thats mainly because the competition here is so fierce. You're one person trying to do the same thing that 1.2,999,999,999
other people are doing and everyone else is trying just as hard as you are, if not harder.

The "big daddies" of the business world will always exist. And just like you said. If it were not for those companies there would be a serious overage of lackluster, mediocre products out there. As long as there is a large widely used and widely accepted standard, there will exist people who are driven to raise that standard. Microsoft may be more than just software, but lets face it, thats what people see it as, and as long as the world has people who just want something that works, then Windows, Office, Media Player, etc. will continue to be the standard. Most of the people in this world who own a computer are not like most of us who spend our time discussing such things and hanging out and bug testing and requesting features that cater to our finiky tastes. Most people just want something that works. And despite all of their flaws, Microsoft products, althought not obsessively overtweaked and customized for the power user, do just that.

Now when discussing the tactics used to overpower or humiliate other companies that are developing competeing products that may threaten their standard, there have been some out and out wrong things done. But lets be honest, most people gripes are that they are a monopoly and that they are too big and etc. etc. etc. Well if you think about it, a monopoly is simply this: A company that has found a way to cater to the lowest common denominator. Microsoft products cater to the average joes of the world who own a computer. They have found a way to do that very successfully. Their products cater to the person who doesnt care to or have time to figure out the ins and out and tweaks of a computer program. They just want it to work. Look at Adobe. Their products do what their users want. Their software is extremely expensive. They are a very successful company. Because they have found their niche, which is the graphic design world. Now you dont see people complaining about them. That's because their niche is a relatively small group. Compare their niche with Microsoft's niche. How many average joes are there in the world? You can't fault Microsoft for finding that niche. If you consider how much people pay for Adobe products, and then think about how much we would all be paying for software if each of those individual companies had succeeded in becoming the ruler of their niche, non of us would own a computer, simply because we wouldnt be able to afford the software. Companies like Microsoft keep the standard high and the prices low. Sure they may be bullies, but we should all be thanking God that we don't have to pay upwards of 4 or $500 for each individual software program and not just a handful of them.

If you dont like capitolism, then consider socialism, then look at the overall welfare of certain nameless countries who have been recovering from a hardline socialist state and you may just reconsider your ideas.

I'm done, I could go on for hours.

[DocLotus]

Very well said, JaredH

[Sam]

If you want to see the true picture, check the court cases in the past few years. These law suits from not only from the feds, states, other companies, like JRiver, but from other nations. They will do things like not allow a hardware vendor to allow choices before release of their systems, unless they contain all Microsoft.

J River sued Microsoft?

[Doof]

Ask any business owner if they wouldn't like to be in Gates' shoes. If they tell you no, they're lying. I'm sure even Jim would love MC to be the number 1 media player app in the world. And if there is no number 2? Then that just even more money for him. It's simple business.

That said... competition does tend to give us more innovation, better products, and lower prices. Just look at the PC hardware market. Especially the 3D video card market. It's a perfect example. 3Dfx was the only game in town and pretty soon their only concern was framerates. They weren't interested in 32-bit color. Well, Nvidia was. And the market was. Where's 3Dfx today? I think Nvidia owns them. The same thing is happening between Nvidia and ATI right now. Only so far, the two companies are pretty much keeping the same pace with each other. The end result is that the consumer has a greater range of choice, innovation is happening at lightning speed, and the prices are constatnly falling. Competition is great, isn't it?

HOWEVER... I can't say that I think there should be a lot of choices when it comes to the OS. Too many choices in that realm just make everything more complicated and more confusing for everybody, including the IT industry and the end users. The main reason for that is because nobody can agree on a set of standards. They all want to control the standards. Well, only one entity can, otherwise they're not standards.

Imagine if you will, if there were multiple types of car engines out there that all ran on vastly different types of fuel. The gas stations now either need to support multiple types of fuel or turn potential customers away. Owners of vehicles now need to drive around to find a station that sells their type of fuel. It's a big mess for everybody.

It's the same way in the software market. Hell, look at the gaming industry... There's lots of competition there. You can either own a PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, or PC for gaming. BUT, if a game comes out for the PS2 and all you have is an Xbox, then you can't play that game. So where you once had a choice of which console to buy, it's only really left you with a choice to either buy multiple consoles, or go without playing the game you want. And what about the game developers? If they want everybody to be able to play their game, they now have to develop 4 different versions of it! Again, a big mess for everybody. And what of the perceived money savings from this competition? I can buy an Xbox or PS2 for $140 now. That's pretty nice. Except that if I want to play all the games I want, I actually need to buy both... so it's really $300. Plus then I also need to buy the extra controllers, memory cards, etc.  Some savings.

And if you don't think that MS is innovating changes on Windows, go back to Windows 3.1 and try to get a game running. See if you can remember what IRQ your sound card is using because the game's going to want to know. Try getting 3.1 to run on the internet. And if MS isn't innovative enough for you, then look at all of the other companies that are doing the innovation for them, creating new technologies that will either someday wind up a part of the OS, or will only ever just be part of some third party package. I don't see MS stifling any kind of innovation in this regard. Just look at what the last 5 years have brought us with wireless networking, true plug and play with USB and firewire, 3D graphics that are getting more and more realistic every year, 7.1 surround sound, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and more. None of which was dependent on MS.

I guess what it boils down to is this... Windows is the foundation. It's like the fuel our cars run on.  We're better off having one standard. Let the choices reside in what we choose to run ON that foundation. Other than some supposed rumor about Netscape, I don't see any evidence that MS is actively trying to prevent other brands of software from running under Windows. Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera are all web browsers that run under Windows. AOL and Yahoo have IM clients that work. JRiver, Musicmatch and Winamp all have media players that work. They're not stopping anybody from creating software for their OS. So what's the big problem?

[JimH]

Ask any business owner if they wouldn't like to be in Gates' shoes. If they tell you no, they're lying. I'm sure even Jim would love MC to be the number 1 media player app in the world. And if there is no number 2? Then that just even more money for him. It's simple business.

I don't agree with this.  It's not worth lying and cheating to win.

[DocLotus]

Very well said, Doof.

I don't know abut you guys, but I am sick and tired of the Beta vs. VHS wars running over and over again.

It happened with CD recordable drives, and it is happening now with DVD recordable drives.

Why the h**l can't the industry do what Sony and Philips did many years ago when they developed the original CD as a single standard.

I am so sick of every manufacturer trying to reinvent the wheel over and over again when all we want is a wheel (so to speak) that works without going flat.

[Doof]

Ask any business owner if they wouldn't like to be in Gates' shoes. If they tell you no, they're lying. I'm sure even Jim would love MC to be the number 1 media player app in the world. And if there is no number 2? Then that just even more money for him. It's simple business.

I don't agree with this.  It's not worth lying and cheating to win.

I don't recall ever saying anything about lying and cheating.

[TimB]

Hey we coulda had MC11 for DR-DOS!

-=Tim=--

[DocLotus]

Tim;

Do you remember the original PC-DOS v1.0 for the IBM PC back in '81 ?

PC-DOS 1.0 had no directories or folders; eveything was crammed into the root of drive C and it had a total file limit of some relatively low number at which time your PC simply stopped working with no warning or messages of any kind.

That's what I started with after I got done playing around with TI's little $49 home computer that used tape drives and your TV set for a monitor.

Boy those were the days... really, really crude but I larned a lot.

[TimB]

My roots are in the Radio Shack Color Computer!  

Then Apple II, Mac and finally PC's in the earlyish nineties.

-=Tim=-

[modelmaker]

Great discussion!

My fist exposure was pre DOS: an IBM 360 that took up the whole floor of an office building all climate controlled. My first summer job was a "key PUNCH operator", punching out all those IBM cards, line by line of code. Had to learn binary math, Fortran, Cobal, etc. It took 50 cards  just to make that IBM 360 add 2+2.

Thank the solar system for Microsoft, in spite of its foibles and often poor and disreputable buisness practices.  

You guys had it easy!

[GHammer]

I guess what it boils down to is this... Windows is the foundation. It's like the fuel our cars run on.  We're better off having one standard.

Shoot, there's a current example that is something we can all relate to. The downloaded music format wars.

Apple vs Real vs Sony.

All try to keep your money within their realm and think a good way to do it is to use their in-house compression format.