Read the stories about how Netscape destroyed itself. The company had incompetent management from day one. Its Navigator succeeded only because there were no competitors; as soon as there were, it failed. It's a great case study in truly bad management.
Microsoft didn't always own the operating system. Even so, it managed to succeed. Others can do the same, but they must be at least as well managed as Microsoft.
That has nothing to do with applications. Borland hit the skids because of poor management. Netscape failed because of poor management, too. There are many examples.
It's something that an unbiased observer can scarcely ignore.
It is true, and they don't want to know anything else.
What geeks fail to understand is that most people see computers as appliances--something they must use to accomplish some other task. Usually the task is much more interesting than the tool. They have no emotional attachment to their computers, or to the software running on their computers. They don't care about "choice," any more than they care about the colors available for the agitators in their washing machines. It doesn't matter to them. They use what's there, they get the job done, and they live the rest of their life, the life they have away from the computer. That's how the real world works.
Nobody "suffers" from the current arrangement except a handful of geeks who hate Microsoft, and a handful of companies who are too incompetent to compete with Microsoft and try to replace legitimate competition with endless legal harassment.
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Microsoft does almost all its business in operating systems and its Office suite. It has very little competition in both domains. It does not and cannot compete in any of the other thousands of application domains for PCs in the world, and even if it tried, it would be up against a lot of well-entrenched competition. The concerns about monopoly are thus exaggerated and not always well placed.
Microsoft will eventually self-destruct. The golden age of the company in terms of development was over a decade ago. Revenue trails development by some years but it is notable that the stock price of Microsoft is no longer on the rise. The company is increasingly concerned with maintaining the revenue stream and making money generally, and less and less concerned with actually doing business in the computer industry. All companies go through this, especially after their founders retire or after an IPO, and it is their eventual downfall.
So those who hate Microsoft need only be patient. Although it probably won't help much, because people who need to hate other people always manage to find new targets for their hate when the old ones disappear.
Sometimes, yes. It's hard to make money on it as a separate product. It's not a very good office-automation suite.
Not necessarily. A lot of public utilities are run as regulated monopolies, because that's the only practical way to provide certain goods and services. In the case of computer operating systems, the overwhelming dominance of one operating system provides standardization and stability that hugely increases the number of available applications and encourages development and innovation in application systems, because it provides a very large, guaranteed market for any application written to run with the majority operating system. If there were five equally popular operating systems running on PCs, there would essentially be five different universes of applications as well, none of them completely adequate to address all the needs of the entire market. A lot of people would have to have multiple PCs just to run all the applications they might need.
Some parts do, some parts don't. We don't have competition for the military. We don't have competition for first-class mail. In any given area there is virtually no competition for telephone service.
Sometimes monopolies serve society better. Usually they have to be heavily regulated if they are turned over to private concerns in order to prevent abuse, though.
Programmers don't always know what they are talking about.
From whom? Not ordinary consumers.
They are extremely meaningful to the companies that produce them.
Without a single dominant platform for applications, many applications would never see the light of day, because there simply would not be enough of a market to recover their costs of development. The larger the market, the easier it is to make money developing an application for that market. You see far more applications for Windows, and far more specialized and obscure applicatons for Windows, than you do for, say, the Mac, precisely because of this phenomenon. A lot of unusual applications that you can get for Windows will never exist on the Mac, because the market for the Mac is too small to cover the cost of developing (or even porting) the application.
Why just Microsoft? Lots of companies are just as successful as Microsoft. What property do you propose to seize from them? Why aren't you complaining about Intel, for example?
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His arguments seem a lot more objective and less emotional than most that one hears on USENET.
All large companies tend to commit certain abuses at some point in their lifecycles, but contrary to widely held misconceptions, in the greater scheme of things their abuses rarely make much of a dent in their success or anyone else's failure. In order to do such things to begin with, they need to have a dominant position, and if they have a dominant position, doing bad things doesn't make it much more dominant. And if they are poorly managed overall, they will go down with or without abuses, as unethical practices alone will not save a company that is fundamentally incompetently managed.
This has been proven again and again historically.
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Yes, and that's what many companies competiting with Microsoft try to do. They can't compete in business, so they try to attack in the courtroom.
Yes. Of course, sooner or later, someone smarter will come along, and then Microsoft will start its downward slide. That could be tomorrow, or forty years from now. Some people talk about Google, but I'm not convinced that Google is any kind of threat right now. Two different businesses.
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No, most people aren't interested because they aren't geeks, period. They have lives outside of computers. They care no more about their computers than they care about their telephones or toasters. They use computers to accomplish some specific task, and then they are done. Their are neither frustrated nor pleased by computers--they are indifferent.
I'm not frustrated with current technology. It all seems to work very well.
Non-disabled people don't need easier access. Who should pay for special accommodation of the disabled, and how much should they pay, and which disabled people should get which proportion of the money?
Nobody is clamoring for speech recognition. Most people don't use computers that much and don't care. They are no more interested in speech for their PC than they are in speech for their DVD players.
Which things?
Microsoft already provides more accommodation of the disabled than any other OS publisher. How much more do you want it to do?
Within personal computing as well. But there are many types of disabilities, and they all deserve consideration, in proportion to the number of people afflicted with them. It's a question of balance.
For example, money spent to accommodate wheelchairs exceeds all other expenditures on most other, more common disabilities combined, which is a great example of enormous _imbalance_. I don't advocate that for computers or for anything else.
Uh, Microsoft is more interested in these things than any other major software publisher.
So you are doing it with special hardware, namely, a USB microphone and speakers.
Netscape crashed and burned all on its own. It did that so quickly that it's hard to imagine anything that Microsoft could have done that would have significantly accelerated the crash.
Do you think so? Try it.
I don't believe any company that makes such a claim. Microsoft is no worse than anyone else, however.
Because you say so?
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If you're going to talk about making computers more accessible, you're going to have to offer solutions that don't require the latest, fastest, most expensive hardware available. A lot of people are running machines much slower than 400 MHz, and they cannot afford to buy new hardware. What do you suggest for them?
Why can't people use the computers they already have?
Not really. Most of these aren't running unless the user starts them.
Bigger and faster than 99.99% of all computers in the world. Hardly representative.
The only voice I see is Sam.
What built-in text-to-speech function is available on Linux? What about the Mac? What about OS/2?
I did. Works well enough to get by. If someone wants a deluxe system, he can go out and buy one (after all, according to you, he can afford a top-of-the-line PC).
Programming it to do so would be prohibitively expensive.
No, the real reason is that Microsoft servers are technically somewhat inferior to UNIX servers for most purposes. It has nothing to do with intelligence or product quality. Windows servers are of excellent quality, but they are more poorly suited to server roles than the simpler UNIX and Linux operating systems are, in most cases. Also, Windows is much more expensive, which makes a difference especially when one is purchasing thousands of licenses at a time.
So what do you suggest? Should application developers be prohibited from writing software for Windows and forced to develop software for the current underdog operating systems?
Apple should have gone out of business long ago, based on its incompetence alone. It clings to life because it has a very loyal customer base.
Summarize it, then.
Not true. I could spend it all in a year. But he gives a lot of his money away.
He has given away billions, not millions, and it has made a dent.
They are more concerned than they need to be. They could just ignore it.
There are serious security issues with such a facility, and I doubt that it was used very much, even by the disabled.
Scripting is a vector for viruses. System-wide scripting would be a security nightmare.
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The engineer is probably right, in a sense, but that won't pay the bills. Apple has come up with many interesting innovations, but it is rather blind in its belief that its ideas are the _best_ ideas, and it's also very obstinate in not backing down on its principles. I suppose that's commendable, in a way, but it doesn't bring in business. If I truly believed Apple to be the best, I might invest in it, but although Apple is distinctive, I'm not at all convinced that it's the best, so paying a price premium for it (and spending eternity under Apple's thumb for both the hardware and the OS) isn't justified.
As I recall, I skipped Apple just because it was far too expensive. I liked the concepts and the look and feel and so on, but not enough to pay such a severe price premium. Also, at work we used PCs from the beginning for everything except secretarial workstations, because they could easily be customized to work with our mainframes, whereas with Macs, there was either the Apple way or the highway.
Point taken. I guess it's easy to find ten smart people, but much more difficult to find 40,000 smart people. Eventually, you get a lot of stupid people in the company.
Yes, but conversely, the beginning of the end for many companies is marked by the departure of the founder(s). Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, IBM ... the list goes on and on. Notice that Microsoft has changed since Bill Gates left.
IBM had a history of publishing source, which was the norm at one time for mainframes. Microsoft never had any exposure to that.
If the first great idea was pure luck, that's true. But if it was the product of a really smart group of people, they should be able to come up with other great ideas.
Since Bill Gates assumed a background role, Microsoft has shown distinctly less innovation and much more bottom-line-style management. Steve Ballmer is a businessman rather than a geek, but he has no prior experience, and now he's in charge of a multi-zillion dollar company. Inevitably, mistakes are made, and eventually too many mistakes will be made and the company will being its downward slide. Like so many big companies, Microsoft will commit suicide; it won't be killed by the competition.
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At last. I have followed this thread from the beggining waiting for the subject of Bill Gates' money to be introduced, as these fanatical Microsoft bashers always seem to reach that point in their arguments. This has been a very informative thread and I wish to congratulate the other posters on their self restraint and knowledge of the facts.
Have you ever noticed how MS bashers can usually remember every DOS command and claim to still prefer it over a GUI, How ironic is that? Perhaps they are just pissed because MS came up with a GUI that allows normal people to use a computer?
And then there is the occasional MAC Guy who just feels left out and is pissed at everybody. Ever noticed how these guys are usually left handed..
Before anyone gets pissed, is all in jest :-)
BTW, Mr. Gates gives more money to charity each year than most of you will earn in a lifetime... I suppose some of you will consider that to be tax evasion....
I'm still not sure why my freaking clock runs slow...... lol....
Well, yes, and that's what my comment "But 'best' includes more than just the technical" meant to address.
Yes, but I think you're talking about a time period slightly after the period I was, before the clones were in swing. Although, IBM *did* leave the hardware open to encourage third party add-on suppliers, just not copies, while Apple kept things much closer to the vest.
But the mainframe point is well taken and IBM would, of course, have a lot more experience in that what with them being the premier mainframe supplier at the time.
Well, 'average' people ;) or, simply, lots of people. And that'll take managing because you simply can't expect everyone to be a genius, much less a genius at everything. Not to mention you can't have even geniuses going in every which a way direction. There has to be focus.
Yes, there's the 'vision' thing.
Still, there's the matter of why would someone be induced to change the vision? Stagnation is one possibility and the other is the 'new guy' making his mark with his own 'vision', but if things are humming merrily along he'd be foolish to change things too much so we get back to "where do we go now?"
Sure it was the norm because it only ran on the company's proprietary hardware so, go to it folks, make more stuff for our proprietary hardware, which is where the money was to begin with, and you're not releasing into the market the thing that makes it proprietary, your hardware.
IBM failed to recognize just how utterly trivial it was, compared to 'mainframes', to duplicate the hardware, not to mention they had simply purchased a public domain design made from freely available parts, and then to publish the one and only 'proprietary' piece, BIOS source, *PLUS* haven given away rights to sell the DOS (same, "who cares about the software?" notion)... well, woops.
I'm not saying it should have been obvious at the time but it sure is in hindsight and I'd imagine Microsoft noticed it along with everyone else.
Sounds simple but, in practice, it isn't as it usually takes more than just a really smart group of people as familiarity, experience, insight, or whatever combination that went into the particular 'great idea' isn't necessarily translatable into another one. I think it was you, yourself, who pointed out that Microsoft was good at the business suite business but not very good in others as they just don't have sufficient experience or insight for them.
That's one reason why companies are always searching for a 'process' that is, essentially, 'one-time genius' independent. I.E. idea generation from market feedback, hire/consult 'experts' in the new thing, brain storming sessions, focus group studies, etc..
I wonder if that's because Bill Gates is 'gone' or if it's more the result of this being about as far as a business suite/'Windows'O.S. combination can take them, especially in a U.S. market, at least, that is closer to saturation than it is the wide open early days of growing by leaps and bounds and where you have to now do upgrades, or 'something', just to stay even. The wave they were riding ain't there no more.
And there isn't another 'IBM' giant poised to dominate a huge future market that you can sell DOS to and clean up when someone cracks their BIOS code nor is anyone going to give them 'sell to others' license rights, so those 'great ideas' aren't going to happen again no matter how 'smart' they are.
When you first posed that scenario I thought it made a lot of sense but the more I think about it the more I question it, at least as a 'universal'. It can certainly happen that way but you can also be simply obsoleted by the next 'great idea'. For example, the introduction of calculators put the slide rule folks out of business, at least in that business, virtually overnight without them having to make 'too many mistakes'.
Of course, I suppose you can always call it a 'mistake' to not be diversified enough (that's those bottom-line-style management types you don't like), not see that microcomputers can do almost anything (electronics wasn't their business), or whatever the 'next great idea' is (how are you going to get around the patent/copyright?) but that's stretching the 'mistake' concept a bit.
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