< PREVIOUS ] [ 2000 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
For much of the past three weeks, I was starting to feel sorry for Microsoft. We needed to upgrade some graphics software around the home office, and the upgrades had to run under Windows 98, rather than the Windows 3.11 we'd been using for the past six or seven years.
So I bought the appropriate CDs and went to work. Things are now working, more or less, but not smoothly.
Along the way, I encountered scores of mysterious error
messages along the line of Cannot find components of
VFAT. System halted,
followed by a hexadecimal dump of
the top of the stack segment.
Win 98 comes with next to nothing in the way of
documentation, perhaps under the mistaken assumption that
its plug and play
can easily cope with legacy SCSI
controllers.
Poor Microsoft,
I thought. The company has
obviously worked very hard on this product, but it's a
three-day job to get it running, and I still haven't made
it work reliably with our network.
When word gets out, the great invisible hand of the
free market will squash Microsoft, and it's kind of sad
that it will go the way of MicroPro, Digital Research,
Borland and a lot of other software companies that used to
be important.
That was before federal Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his ruling Monday afternoon that sent the stock market into a tizzy on Tuesday. Microsoft had engaged in anti-competitive practices, he ruled. Since Microsoft hadn't been able to reach an agreement with the Department of Justice, he would have to impose some penalties.
A year ago, I supported splitting Microsoft into three companies: operating systems, applications and publishing. Other break-ups, like Standard Oil a century ago and AT&T in 1984, have resulted in more competition, as well as more value for the shareholders.
As it is, Microsoft runs under perverse incentives. Why bother to put decent documentation with your software when its lack will force people to buy books from Microsoft Press?
If Microsoft Office were produced by a separate company, it would want to put Office on every possible platform, including Linux. But as it is, why bother? Microsoft can use Office as a way to force you to buy Windows.
I still think such a split would be best for all concerned, from Microsoft shareholders to society at large, but during the past year, it's become apparent that MicroSoft's star is dimming, no matter what the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice does or doesn't do.
The main reason is that the company has to compete for talent in a tight market where the best and brightest can find higher rewards elsewhere.
And there's the threat of Linux, the open operating system. If certain software had been ported to Linux, I'd have switched totally this time around and operated in a MicroSoft-free environment. In a year or two, I'll probably be able to do that.
Given a choice between an operating system produced by a greedy company in Washington, and one produced and supported by smart people from all over the world, I'll go with the latter. So will a lot of other people.
The market is going to fix MicroSoft before the Justice
Department can. And thus my minor feelings of sympathy for
MicroSoft, until I saw yet another statement from Bill
Gates about how he wanted to preserve his company's
freedom to innovate.
Assuming that MicroSoft has so far enjoyed this freedom before the evil anti-trust lawyers stepped in, just when has the company exercised it? It didn't invent the graphical user interface, or the mouse, or the scanner or laser printer or modem. It didn't invent the word processor or the spreadsheet or the database manager, or graphics editors, or communications software and protocols. It didn't invent any programming language, from BASIC to SPITBOL. MicroSoft didn't invent the Web browser, or the operating system, or the hard disk, or the CD-ROM, or e-mail.
MicroSoft is a great marketing company, and there's
nothing wrong with that. But there's something wrong with
proclaiming that you want to keep your freedom to
innovate,
with the implication that your company has
been innovative.
That's just spin, and people should know better than to
believe it. Alas, there are a lot of credulous computer
users who don't. Every time I write about MicroSoft, I get
a torrent of email from people who swallow the Gates line
about his innovative
company producing great
software.
If Gates had just said that he wanted to keep his freedom to produce software that is deliberately designed not to work well with other companies' software, thereby pushing you to buy more stuff from MicroSoft while putting potential competitors out of business, then I'd still have some sympathy -- I respect honesty.
But I don't like being lied to. It's not quite as bad as getting a stack dump with a cryptic error message, but it's close.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2000 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >