Text 1633, 418 rader
Skriven 2006-06-04 11:59:00 av Robert E Starr JR (2079.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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  * * * This message was from Carl to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *   
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"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:pni482tlomeu2s985jmf09jur80i6nob28@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 21:50:32 +0000 (UTC), "Carl" <cengman7@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message
>>news:f3r382hhngpp9cbgii1em4l3g03ime4lgk@4ax.com...
>>> On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 04:21:33 +0000 (UTC), "Carl" <cengman7@hotmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>"John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@attglobal.net> wrote in message
>>>>news:yI7gg.3677$n91.1519@fe09.lga...
>>>>> Carl wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Yeah, Gates has been too busy giving $29 Billion to charities and
>>>>>> trying
>>>>>> to bring medicines to third world countries.  I can see where you'd 
>>>>>> be
>>>>>> looking for a 666  birthmark. :)
>>>>>
>>>>> Bill Gates has, almost single-handedly, brought the entire software
>>>>> industry to a screeching halt. He has ruined the careers of thousands,
>>>>> and
>>>>> he has done it by repeated criminal acts, and by a completely lack of
>>>>> personal and business ethics.
>>>>
>>>>Nonsense.
>>>>
>>>>He's made the careers of hundreds of thousands and made many people
>>>>millionares.  He's also invested heavily in communications and medical
>>>>technologies (among others).
>>>>
>>>>The entire software industry is not at a screeching halt;
>>>>
>>>>There are other (free) platforms if you don't like Windows, and the
>>>>criminal
>>>>acts you refer to (I'm assuming you mean monopolistic practices) were
>>>>mostly
>>>>criminal retroactively after MS got big.... the one unforgivable sin.
>>>
>>> I watched those things happening and they seemed plenty criminal at
>>> the time. It was a given that Gates would do anything, no matter how
>>> underhanded and odious and illegal, to put a competitor out of
>>> business
>>
>>They never did find Phillipe Kahn's body, did they?
>>
>>>  -- rewriting DOS to make his software incompatible
>>
>>Contrasted to the other big players at the time that wanted to
>>control both hardware AND software.
>
> And didn't use illegal means to do so.

No? The govt ran out of money before they could finish the case
against IBM.

Most of the means you refer to are rules thsat are applied
retroactively.

Sometimes MS plays hardball too.  So does IBM.  So does Sun.
You think not? Consider it's taken 5 years to come up with a license for 
Java on Linux.
This is the same software they declared would be open to everyone.

>
>>> , imitating his innovative program and bundling it for free,
>>
>>Apple "Stole" from Xerox, Konfabulator and others.
>
>>Do you think any software company says
>>"That's a really good idea.  Users like it, it's intuituve, let's NOT use 
>>it
>>or try to learn anything from it!"
>
> Of course not. But other companies innovate as well. Microsoft does
> not: they merely imitate, to the point at which their stolen products
> resemble the products they've imitated more than they resemble other
> Microsoft products.

When you write Windows software,  then we'll talk about whether they 
innovate.  They've tried a number of things through the years (they started 
trying to do the software for Tablet PCs in the early to mid 90's with Pen 
Windows.  They tried a number of other things that have failed miserably 
(Bob comes to mind).

From a development point of view, Borland dominated the C++ compiler market 
for years. Borland had an initial library for Windows development called 
OWL.  When Microsoft came out with their first C++ compiler, they introduced 
a much more efficient mechanism calleme message maps (as opposed to the 
complete reliance on virtual tables that OWL had).  The next version of OWL 
had message maps.

It's a bum rap that MS doesn't innovate.  A lot of it is under the covers, 
but that doesn't mean it's not there.  It is irrelevent whether you see it 
or not.

> Then, when they've driven their competitor out of
> business, they cease changing the product.

Yup, that's why they're so busy changing the hell out of Office 2007. 
They've always been working on Office. That's core business. They just 
released their Visual Studio 2005 compilers a few months ago with a whole 
new set of tools and abilities (Team Foundation Server, etc. which has some 
interesting concepts and some new things, but it's waaay to expensive to be 
taken seriously)

They get into other markets because they's scared they're going to be left 
behind or because they've  acquired a company that has pieces they find 
interesting or useful.  They purchased Great Plains accounting software and 
you haven't seen them try to drive accounting software out of business. 
Quicken and TurboTax aren't suffering because of MS.  Real is still around. 
AOL isn't failing because of MSN (which isn't doing that well either), but 
rather because it's way overpriced and people don't need a shell around the 
internet any more.   Adobe is still around. So are McAffee and Symantec.

Now, competition for a new word processor is difficult. Absolutely. Someone 
has to come up with some new feature that's compellling and unique.  MS sent 
a LOT of money on Word and Excel...and it can be easily argued that they are 
the best products of their type.  Clearly it was beneficial for business to 
standardize on a single format, and it is beneficisal that I can write a 
document in Word and email  it to almost any business in the world and they 
can read it.  Excel is simply the spreadsheet standard.  There are 
significant benefits to a standard platform.

>
> By way of contrast, we have thousands of valuable innovations from
> IBM. I can't think of /one/ innovation from Microsoft.

You're not lookig in the right place.

>
>>> forcing him into a fire sale,
>>Yeah, let's see.  Microsoft Money took the world by storm. MSN has taken
>>over.
>>Not charging for IE made Netscape reduce their price from ... Free.
>
> Yeah, and the neighborhood crook doesn't always succeed at his bank
> robberies either. Doesn't mean I'm going to let him off the hook for
> the ones that do succeed.

MS wassn't let off the hook. They paid their money, settled some suits and 
are complying with the court.

>
>>> writing licenses so that companies couldn't sell
>>> competitors' products, what have you.

You've never heard of such exclusive contracts in other businesses?  If you 
think that's unique, you're dreaming.

>>
>>>And he ruined the software
>>> industry and, by sticking us with cruddy, high TCO software,

Hyperbole.  Nothing was ruined.


>>As opposed to what?   If you wanted to lock yourself into a platform that
>>was closed and expensive (Apple) you always could. OS/2 PM sucked.
>

> The people I know who used OS/2 loved it. It was /way/ ahead of both
> Windows and the Mac.

I both used and programmed to OS/2.  It was ahead of Windows 3.1 (which was 
already old at the time) but not NT.  I have to be specific;  OS/2 was ok. 
Presentation Manager was terrible...and most people think that PM was OS/2. 
I could kill an OS/2 system almost as fast as I could kill a Windows 3.1 
system. The failure of OS/2 was completely the fault of IBM.    RIP.

>
>>The other options were worse, and you might not like Windows, but it
>>works for 850 million people. A LOT of the bloat in Windows comes
>>from having to support apps going back to the early DOS days.
>
> But it didn't work. It cost a fucking fortune to run because it was a
> piece of crap that was designed to sell rather than to work.

As to TCO, you have to factor several things that aren't often added in. 
Availability of drivers, availability and competence of support personnel.
Patch management for Linux can be a nightmare.  I seem to recall reading 
some studies by either the Meta Group or Yankee that concluded that the TCO 
for Windows and Linux is about the same when you consider everything.

And you're competetant to judge software engineering?

There are some real fusterclucks in Windows.  I've beat my head against them 
so often I think I have scars...but Microsoft is a victim of its' own 
success.  It has to develop new things without changing things so much that 
it makes software that  850 million customers are using for their 
businesses.  If you had even the smallest clue what that involved, you'd 
give them some slack.  Well... other people would give them some slack. I 
don't think you would. :)


>
>>You try writing an OS that's backward compatable to the 80's and has
>>countless existing apps to keep running.  Do you have ANY idea what degree
>>of difficulty that really is?  That and trying to move forward too.
>
> They chose to emphasize compatibility over quality. It was a decision
> based on greed rather than on service to the customers, because they
> knew damn well that their customers would spend a lot more money
> dealing with the bugs and shortcomings than they would have on
> software upgrades.

You're competely wrong.


> And that's why they split with IBM: IBM just wasn't
> accustomed to putting out crap software that didn't run and was never
> fixed. In those days, few computer companies were.

That's just wrong.  It's hard to have this discussion with you because quite 
honestly you're making this stuff up.

MS and IBM split because IBM wasn't concerned about compatability with 
existing apps (because they didn't have any apps that anyone was using so 
they had no reason to care).  If IBM had been smart they would have used an 
extended Windows API rather than making up a new one that came close but 
made some arbitrary changes.

For instance, although it can be changed, most Windows apps draw using the 
upper left corner as origin and the coordinate system works downward.  There 
were reasons for this. IBM insisted that the native OS/2 system would more 
closely match how their terminals drew; bottom left corner up (Cartesian). 
IF there hadn't been an installed base of tens of thousands of applications 
at the time, no problem changing.  Since  MS didn't want to force everyone 
to rewrite everything for an entirely new API and IBM didn't care, they 
split ways.

MS was right; the majority of developers gave up on OS/2 because they didn't 
want to rewrite their apps for a new platform when their existing software 
was selling very well on Windows.  Sonce the vast majority of software that 
was ever run on OS/2 was Windows software, OS/2 was reduced to running in 
compatabiulity mode...and a lot of that was mediocre and unstable.  DDE 
(used heavily by business) was completely unstable.

BTW, most people at the time agreed that it was IBM that royally screwed up 
DOS 4, and it was IBM that pushed that out to market when it went; MS wanted 
more time to "cook" the code (their term).

IBM's metric to judge software at the time of was KLOCS (thousands of Lines 
of Code).  Any developer worth anything will tell you that is a terrible 
metric for software.  Just for reference, can you name any successful 
natively IBM written software?  The closest they have is Lotus Notes, which 
is being abandoned all over the place.  The major innovators of Notes have 
long since left IBM.  The head architect now works for MS.

>
>>It's easy to take pot shots.  Let me know if you can write a better OS.
>
> Anyone can write a better OS.

Just words... That's simply Bovione Manure.

> and many have.

Name 12.

>
>>Businesses didn't have to use it.  They could have chosen Apples or Unix.
>
> Apple was never competitive except in niche markets, and their OS was
> a piece of crap before OS X. Unix was too difficult for small
> businesses and end users.

Ahh. So you you judge Windows against OS/2...by which you're make judgements
because of what you heard from friends.  Of course there was almost no 
native OS/2 software available for it, so you can't judge software.

Again you also seem to forget that IBM was trying to take control of both 
the hardware and software side of the OS and have a total monopoly on the 
platform.

>
>>> And, of course, the courts have ruled again and again that Microsoft
>>> violated the law. The man is a criminal, pure and simple.

>>
>>No...the company commited criminal acts that became criminal after
>>a retroactive change in the rules because they became successful.
>
> No, that just isn't true: retroactive laws are unconstitutional. Many
> or most of the antitrust laws date back to Teddy Roosevelt. Microsoft
> violated them repeatedly and knowingly, and Gates lied about having
> violated them in court, and then ignored the court when they were
> ordered to change their behavior.

But the same business practices that were fine for MS when it considered a 
monopoly suddenly became illegal one morning (and no one can state the exact 
date).  One day everyone looked back and said "Now that you're a monopoly, 
what you did back then was wrong."

Everyone knoew about the MS pricing on a per machine basis veryt early on 
before MS got big.  That was put into place initially as a means of keeping 
people from steraling the software (as they had done with Gate's QBasic).

>>> As to those millions, they would have been employed if he'd lived --
>>
>>Sure, but at one point 20% of MS employees were millionares.  I doubt that
>>would have happened.
>
> No, but the wealth would have been spread elsewhere.

Wealth was created by the success of the industry.

>
>>> people were writing operating systems and software long before Gates 
>>> stole
>>> their work.
>>
>>Whoa.  Check this nonsense at the door.
>>
>>IBM (a company with OS writing experience) approached Bill asking about an
>>OS.  There weren't any 16 bit OSs for the 8088 Bill sent them the Kildall
>>(of CP/M fame) with a high recommendation of Kildall's ability. Kildall 
>>(or
>>Kildall's wife, depending on who tells the story) blew them off and 
>>refused
>>to sign the non-disclosure agreements.
>>
>>IBM went back to Bill, who saw the opportunity and bought the rights to 
>>the
>>code (and distribution rights) from someone else
>>that was... here it comes.... porting (stealing?) CP/M to the Altair.  At
>>this point the effort was a hobbyist effort....much like the rest of the
>>"industry" at the time.
>>
>>There really weren't any other options at the time.  So much for the 
>>absurd
>>assertion that Bill stole the OS or that OS programmers were out there in
>>droves.  That just wasn't the case.
>
> Yeah, he bought DOS. Doesn't change what I said. He's a software
> thief. He creates nothing, imitates everything. It's the old Japanese
> business philosophy, less the devotion to quality.

Never mind... There's no point in continuing this.  You have yor mantra and 
you're not really
listening to anything I say.

Anyone else reading this thread will make up their minds for themselves.


>
>>> But they would have been part of a larger, more diverse, competitive 
>>> group
>>
>>Josh...that's just wrong.   From an IBM perspective, IBM made a serious
>>mistake by allowing MS to release MS DOS as well as PC DOS, but they never
>>considered that the PC would become anywhere near as popular as it did. 
>>The
>>whole project was done almost as a garage project within IBM.  The goal 
>>was
>>to slap together something out of off the shelf parts that could connect 
>>to
>>the mainframes.
>>
>>The fact that Bill thought to release MS DOS as well allowed for the
>>creation of the IBM compatable market, which lead to the rise of Compaq
>>early on.   If that didn't happen, the market would have been fragmented
>>between business users (IBM) and hobbyists and the whole market would have
>>been a mess.
>
> Not sure I follow you there. In any case, I'm not just talking about
> DOS days, but about the whole history of Microsoft. They put
> competitors out of business using illegal tactics. Result: no
> competition, no innovation, low quality and a high TCO which is in
> effect a tax on American business.

DOS is a huge part of MS history.
There is plenty of competition in the market.
There is plenty of innovation in the market.
If you consider every cost of doing business a tax. Otherwise it's just 
rhetoric.

>
>>> -- more people producing more and better
>>> and more innovative and more useful products. Market competition as
>>> opposed to socialism.
>>
>>What do you do for a living Josh?  It doesn't seem that you work in the
>>industry, because there is a lot of innovation...more now than in a number
>>of years.  A lot of people are doing a lot of interesting things and the
>>nextr few years will be a lot of fun.  If you don't see that, then you
>>aren't looking closely enough.
>
> One doesn't have to look closely to know that software has become a
> static bore, or come to me to find people who will tell you that.
> Sure, innovation still happens around the edges, but it doesn't affect
> the major niches that Microsoft controls.

<Heavy sigh>

Josh, I'm going to stop here.

There's really no point in continuing.  You have your view and I personally 
think it's rather extreme but that's ok.  You're true to your beliefs, and I 
respect that honesty.We've disagreed before, we will no doubt disagree 
again.  No harm done.

Let's move on to something else. OK?

Carl
                                                                               
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