Editorial: Where do you want to go tomorrow?

As one ponders the current state of the computing industry, one is struck by a number of things:

• the industry is dominated by Microsoft Corporation. In fact, by nearly everyone's definition but Microsoft's, Microsoft has a monopoly in the PC operating system market.
  
  
• Microsoft Corporation clearly seems to believe that it is the only player with the right to control its own technlology.
  
  Evidence:
  
  
  • As widely reported in the media, Microsoft has until recently placed rather stringent restrictions on what sorts of changes can be made by OEMs to the Windows 95 and Windows 98 boot sequence. Their justification for this position is that they have a right to control their intellectual property.
    
    
  • As widely reported in the media, almost immediately after obtaining its Java license from Sun Microsystems, Microsoft set out to make a variety of incompatible enchancements to Java and has promoted the resulting products rather heavily.
  
  
  Question: if Microsoft has the right to control what is done with its intellectual property (i.e. the W95/W98 boot sequence) then why does Microsoft also have the right to devalue Sun's intellectual property (i.e. the Java goal of write once, run anywhere) by making incompatible changes?
  
  
• Microsoft spends a great deal of time talking about its right to innovate yet any attempt by its competitors, customers or partners to innovate in a way incompatible with Microsoft's vision of the future is met with a pretty strong negative reaction.
  
  Evidence:
  
  
  • Hewlett-Packard (a Microsoft customer (i.e. reseller of various Microsoft products)) made changes to the Windows 95 boot sequence that were intended to improve the end-user's (i.e. the ultimate Microsoft customer's) experience. Microsoft forced Hewlett-Packard (as testified to in the Microsoft anti-trust trial) to remove the changes and revert back to the standard Windows 95 boot sequence. The result (also testified to in the anti-trust trial) was that HP experienced a marked increase in the number of customer support calls from customers (does one need to look any further for evidence of harm to consumers in the anti-trust case?).
    
    Apparently, when faced with the choice of improving customer satisfaction and forcing adherence to the Microsoft vision, the vision comes first.
    
    
  • Also as testified to in the anti-trust trial, Intel was forced by Microsoft to back down on the development of multi-media software for Windows 3.1 shortly before the release of Windows 95 (Microsoft threatened to not support new multi-media instructions in the latest Pentium processors). The problem from Microsoft's perspective was that anything that enhanced Windows 3.1 in that time period could negatively impact sales of the soon to be released Windows 95 product.
    
    
  • Disney (and other fairly large corporations) were coerced by Microsoft into signing contracts which prohibited Disney (and the others) from producing WWW pages which looked better under any browser competing with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (again, testified to in the anti-trust trial). The restrictions were the price that these companies paid to receive prominent placement in the Windows 95 desktop (this practice is called tied selling and is illegal under the U.S. Anti-Trust laws).
    
    
  • AOL was coerced into agreeing to not promote Netscape's web browser in any way (they were allowed to offer Netscape's browser on their site but were prohibited from providing any reasonable way for interested customers to find it (according to testimony in the anti-trust trial, you apparently needed to know some key word or phrase in order to find the Netscape browser and AOL was prohibited from telling the customer what the word or phrase was)). Again, the quid-pro-quo was prominent placement of AOL on the Windows 95 desktop (i.e. tied selling again).
  
  
• The only difference between being a Microsoft partner and a Microsoft competitor is timing.
  
  Evidence:
  
  
  • Microsoft originally set out to make Netscape a partner. When Netscape refused to play ball, Microsoft proceeded to try to cut off Netscape's air supply (quote attributed to Paul Maritz, Microsoft executive, by the New York Times).
    
    
  • Microsoft has enjoyed considerable benefits from the efforts of all the major database vendors to port, promote and tune their products to Microsoft operating systems. Microsoft's response was to develop SQL Server and position it as a direct competitor to these database vendor's products.
    
    How much fun do you suppose it would be to be competing with a major supplier (i.e. Oracle competing with the company that sells the operating system the Oracle relies on)? How much less fun would it be when you know that the supplier has a proven track record of making incompatible changes to key interfaces with each major release and withholding documentation w.r.t. to numerous important and/or useful interfaces from everyone except its own internal product development teams (eg. Oracle trying to compete with SQL Server and knowing that SQL Server is able to take advantage of undocumented operating system features).
  
  Speaking of competing with Microsoft, consider the following comment:

  Asked how small software companies could compete on products that Microsoft wants to fold into Windows, [Microsoft chief operating officer Bob] Herbold told Bloomberg News 'that they could either fight a losing battle, sell out to Microsoft or a larger company or not go into business to begin with.'

• One very common result of a Microsoft innovation is the death or crippling of a mini-industry which, prior to the innovation, enhanced Microsoft's products.
  
  Evidence:
  
  
  • Microsoft destroyed the Windows disk compression technology industry when the disk compression innovation appeared in Windows (this particular innovation cost Microsoft over $100 million US in patent infringement damages - the money was collected by the creditors of the now defunct corporation which had previously been a leader in the disk compression industry).
    
    
  • Microsoft has set out to destroy the browser marketplace by incorporating Internet Explorer into Windows 98 (they continue to develop, promote and release Internet Explorer as a separate product and essentially admitted under oath in the anti-trust trial that there was no meaningful benefit to consumers resulting from the incorporation of IE into Windows 98 which could not have been achieved without bundling IO into Windows 98). Microsoft has been pointing at the AOL/Netscape merger as evidence that the industry is strong. Strangely, others have been pointing at the AOL/Netscape merge as evidence that Microsoft's attack on Netscape was successful.
  
  This practice of bundling products together is called forced selling or tied selling (depending on the exact style of bundling involved) and is illegal under U.S. Federal anti-trust laws.
  
  
• Microsoft is feeling the heat.
  
  Evidence:
  
  
  • When Microsoft launches a full blown FUD FUD (Fear-Uncertainty-and-Doubt) campaign against you (i.e. Linux), then you know that you've got Microsoft's attention.
    
    
  • When Microsoft suddenly decides to make all sorts of unilateral changes to its contracts with ISPs and OEMs, removing some of the more onerous restrictions just as the Microsoft anti-trust case is launched and again later just as damaging evidence w.r.t. these restrictions come up during the trial, you know that that Microsoft is worried about the legality of their pressure tactics.
  
  Does anybody buy Microsoft's defense that since it is no longer violating the law (i.e. because the restrictions have been removed from the relevant contracts) that it is not guilty of having violated the law in the past? Of all the various ploys that Microsoft's spin doctors have come up with, this one has to be one of the most feeble (the we're not a monopoly claims isn't exactly rock-solid either).
  
  
• The world is changing.
  
  Evidence:
  
  
  • Linux is widely recognized as at least a potential threat to Microsoft's dominance in the marketplace. Even Microsoft has said so (see the so-called Halloween documents and testimony in the anti-trust trial).
    
    
  • Microsoft is having more and more trouble sounding credible when it claims to be an innovative company that competes hard but fairly (evidence presented in the anti-trust trial (by both sides) and a definite shift in the tone of Microsoft's press coverage are two major factors in this loss of credibility).
    
    
  • Windows 2000 is late and there don't seem to be very many people left who buy Microsoft's claims that it can triple the number of lines of source code and still deliver a robust product in 1999 or even 2000 (a lot of people wonder if Windows 2000 has reached the point where it will simply never stabilize).
    
    
  • Bill Gates seems to have been promoted to the Microsoft equivalent of VP Special Projects. Nearly missing the importance of the Internet and his amazing performance under oath in his depositions for the anti-trust trial are probably just two of the many factors which have resulted in his apparent fall from grace within the Microsoft Board of Directors.
    
    
  • the sudden support for Linux by former Microsoft partners who don't seem to be as afraid of Microsoft as they used to be (Intel, DELL, Compaq, Oracle, Sybase, Corel, etc). Frankly, I suspect that a major factor contemplated by these companies was the obvious fact that Microsoft has a track record of turning and attacking essentially every partner just as soon as Microsoft no longer needs the partner (with partners like that, who needs competitors?).

Where do you want to go tomorrow?

In case you're still having trouble deciding, consider:

• A lot (maybe even most) of the real innovation in the computing industry has come out of small organizations or companies (where does the real innovation take place in a world in which only Microsoft is allowed to innovate?).
  
  
• the pain consists of possibly using products which aren't perfectly compatible with the equivalent Microsoft products.
  
  
• the gain includes the experience of using products which are often superior to the equivalent Microsoft products and enjoying the many benefits of the real innovation that comes out of the organizations producing these other products.

• I use an Apple Powerbook as my laptop (it triple boots into MacOS, LinuxPPC or Mac OS X Server).
  
  
• I use some variant of Unix as my desktop for essentially everything else that I do.
  
  
• I try to only use and/or recommend software that runs on either the MacOS or some variant of Unix.

- http://www.bouletfermat.com/danny/tomorrow.html