Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Greymaus]

You clearly weren't paying attention to what the rest
of the microcomputer industry was doing while Gates was selling IBM
non-existent software. While IBM was introducing 16-bit processors and
DOS was doing a flat file system, Tandy was selliig systems - for a
fraction of the price of any MS-DOS based system - that were
multitasking, multiuser, had an optional windowing system that came
with a complete (for the time) office suite. Of course, that was while
Tandy still thought they could sell computers by selling better
computers than you could get running MS software.

Was that the Color Computer III running OS9 Level II for an operating
system, that you're talking about? Motorola 6809 processor? HELLUVA
little computer! OS9 was a bit quirky, though, even for a UNIX clone.

 

[=?iso-8859-1?q?M=E5ns_Rullg=E5rd?=]

Go down to your local car dealer and see if you can buy a new car
without an engine.

That's more like buying a computer without a CPU, which I can in fact
do. Buying a computer without ms windows is more like buying a hifi
set without a Britney Spears CD. I can do that too.

 

[John Bokma]

He was talking about the browser war, and gave a pretty good reason
why it was important. So you respond by pointing out that people
choose a linux distribution for personal (non-technical,
non-marketing) reasons. I think I missed the connection.

web based applications that work with any browser make OS irrelevant ->
not true, since for OpenOffice it doesn't matter which Linux
distribution one runs (or even if it's Linux), yet people seem to make a
point of which distribution they use.

Which is?

That it *does* matter. It doesn't matter which brand makes your graphics
card, since most stick close to the reference design of the GPU chip
supplier, yet people take the brand in consideration when they buy.

 

[John Bokma]

To you, if you don't understand it.

See my other example regarding graphics cards. Even if something comes
out of exactly the same factory (for example CD recordables), people
prefer one brand over one other, even if the only difference is the name
on the box. So even if some applications run in a web browser, there
will be people who prefer OS a over OS b, or Linux distribution c over
Linux distribution d. Even if it doesn't matter at all.

Right, and that's what Microsoft wants to avoid. They wants to
make sure
people *have* to choose a Microsoft operating system to get their
applications to work. He
Who?

doesn't want most applications to work the
same on all operating systems. MS was afraid the browser would replace
the operating system in the sense that it would be the target platform
for applications.

I have no idea what MS was afraid off. They just deny at first that
something is important, and then take over. Somehow it works for them.

Well, they have their vision of the future of computing, and you
can bet
all things made by Microsoft are at the center of it.

Yup, and I think they will be right for quite some time.

 

[John Bokma]

It may not be worth loads of money in-and-of itself now (don't forget
Netscape wasn't always free, though), but if you control how people
view the Internet you can make a lot of money in other ways,
especially if you build your browser into your operating system and
warp standards

Which standards? W3C doesn't make standards (they talk about working
drafts and recommendations), so nothing to warp there for MS.

so that people who design sites take advantage of the
proprietary features.

Yup, Netscape did the same, remember LiveScript (renamed to JavaScript
for obvious reasons), and the elements they added? (Like the, horror,
blink)

Eventually the hope is that your OS and browser
will become the only means of accessing the internet. And if your OS
and browser are the only way to access the Internet, who in their
right mind would use another system?

It's not happening, so what are you talking about? Any developer hoping
the above has no clue what he/she is developing.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

Everyone
else was still using typewriters - which was IBM's bread and butter in those
days - for their business needs.

Oh dear, no. Not quite. There were, going back decades, machines that
used punched cards, relays, stepper wheels, and punched cards. It was
/that/ that was the foundation of IBM's business, and IBM had an
effective monopoly. This was not altogether due to evil; their one
competitor, Remington Rand, made machines that were slightly better, but
had to be factory-programmed, whereas IBM's machines used panels full of
jumper wires, and the panels themselves could be swapped, so that you
could have a "program library" of prewired panels. Which would /you/ buy?

Remington Rand made a similar mistake with computers. They wouldn't give
you a programming manual until you contracted to buy the bloody thing.
IBM pulled ahead of them during the year when Univac computers were real
and IBM computers weren't, and they never looked back.

--
John W. Kennedy
"Those in the seat of power oft forget their failings and seek only the
obeisance of others! Thus is bad government born! Hold in your heart
that you and the people are one, human beings all, and good government
shall arise of its own accord! Such is the path of virtue!"
-- Kazuo Koike. "Lone Wolf and Cub: Thirteen Strings" (tr. Dana Lewis)

 

[joe]

web based applications that work with any browser make OS irrelevant
-> not true, since for OpenOffice it doesn't matter which Linux
distribution one runs (or even if it's Linux), yet people seem to
make a point of which distribution they use.

A linux distribution isn't an OS, it's a distribution, so I'm not sure
what your point here is.

In fact, there are lots of Microsoft-centric web pages that don't
work well when accessed from a linux system. ActiveX, MS Java, etc.

That it *does* matter. It doesn't matter which brand makes your
graphics card, since most stick close to the reference design of the
GPU chip supplier, yet people take the brand in consideration when
they buy.

I don't think that's true, at least not yet. I recently bought a
Compaq Presario, which came with XP installed. I wiped the disk and
installed Linux, only to find that the hardware would only work under
XP. So I then had to install network, video, sound etc cards to get it
working.

joe

 

[John Bokma]

A linux distribution isn't an OS, it's a distribution, so I'm not sure
what your point here is.

Ok, let me spell it out for you: If all your applications are web based,
and the OS shouldn't matter, why do Linux distributions matter? It
doesn't matter which one you use to run, for example, OpenOffice. Yet
people pick a certain distribution. Why? Well, one reason is that people
like to belong to a group. So even if it really doesn't matter which OS
you are going to use to access a web application, or even which browser,
people will pick a certain browser, and a certain OS, just because.

In fact, there are lots

How much?

of Microsoft-centric web pages that don't
work well when accessed from a linux system. ActiveX, MS Java, etc.

Does it matter? There are webpages that just don't work for some people,
no matter that they do work for others. You can't just make up one
standard average user and design the web for it.

I don't think that's true, at least not yet. I recently bought a
Compaq Presario,

Hey, me too (SR1505LA to be exactly, and it does work with Kubuntu,
or at least I get a picture).

which came with XP installed. I wiped the disk and

Me too (but that was to get rid of the Spanish XP)

installed Linux, only to find that the hardware would only work under
XP.

Now that's odd, since mine worked, network, video, sound, etc.

So I then had to install network, video, sound etc cards to get it
working.

Odd, very odd. But I am quite sure that if you don't have a driver for a
certain chip set, that it doesn't matter who puts the chip set on a
piece of PCB, it isn't going to work.

 

[Steve Sobol]

Answer: so did the German population thought Jews are morons by
heritage, to the point that Jews should be exterminated from earth.
Apparently, the entire German population cannot be morons, they must be
right.

Y'know, I'm Jewish, I have friends who are Holocaust survivors, and I still
think you're a complete asshole for even attempting to compare anything
Microsoft does to what Hitler did. It trivializes the Holocaust.

**** off.

Please.

(There, I said "please.")

 

[Steve Sobol]

no, they got their by clever marketing and generally having a product that
was easier to use for the average user than anything the competition made
and a lot more powerful than other products created for their main target
market.

People forget that Bill Gates may have dabbled in programming, but his
background is in business. He dropped out of Harvard Business School, not
MIT.

 

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

[ Followup-To set to the less inappropriate alt.religion ]

Microsoft Hatred, FAQ

Once again you fools have been tricked by the XL troll to hold an
endless off-topic discussion in several groups.

 

[Matt Garrish]

It's not happening, so what are you talking about? Any developer hoping
the above has no clue what he/she is developing.

What happened is irrelevant to what the desire was of M$ when it set out to
take the browser market away from Netscape. When you control the OS market
and make your browser a tied component of it and to the benefit of yourself
only, you limit the ability of anyone else to compete.

I'm still waiting for you to enlighten the rest of us as to the real reason,
though. The anti-trust case that they lost would tend not to bode well for
whatever altruistic argument you might have. I'd also like to hear how MS
Java and jscript show a desire for people to be using anything but M$
products to access or publish pages on the Internet?

Matt

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

Go down to your local car dealer and see if you can buy a new car
without an engine.

That's a false analogy. A better analogy is, "go to your local car dealer
and see if you can buy a new car with the tyres of your choice."

Even non-technical types can choose to run a non-Windows operating system
on an Intel-compatible PC. So why do the tier-one vendors and all laptop
manufacturers make their machines available only with Windows? Or on the
very few occasions they will offer a naked PC, the price is the same as
for PC + Windows.

I'm aware of talk that Dell is selling Linux PCs at Walmart for less than
the same hardware plus Windows. Talk is cheap -- I'm not aware of anyone
who has actually seen these Linux PCs. I'd love to know either way.

(Oh, and since I am in Australia, and we haven't yet been invaded by
Walmart, I can't go and look for myself.)

 

[Mike Schilling]

Which standards? W3C doesn't make standards (they talk about working
drafts and recommendations), so nothing to warp there for MS.

Umm, a recommendation *is* a standard.

And Microsoft must disagree with you. When the spec editor for XML took a
consulting gig with Netsacpe, they insisted he be fired. (See
http://www.textuality.com/xml/Opinion.html)

 

[John W. Kennedy]

This is wrong. The dictionary definition of a monopoly is when a
manufacturer has all or nearly all of a market. Microsoft DOES have a
monopoly on PC operating systems.

That, in itself, is not necessarily illegal. However, Microsoft then USED
that monopoly power to stifle their competition, and that IS illegal.

Part of their behavior really escape me. The whole thing about browser
wars confuses me. Web browsers represent a zero billion dollar a year
market. Why would you risk anything to own it?

So they can disrupt standards and make it extremely difficult to create
websites that work both with IE and with any non-Windows browser. The
most blatant example is that, a full five years after XHTML came out, IE
doesn't render it at all.

A few years ago, they did the same thing with browser plugins. IE used
to support the same plugins that Netscape did. Then MS arbitrarily
designed a new way of doing plugins that can only work with Windows (and
which, incidentally, opens security holes), and removed support for
standard plugins. As a result, plugin makers have to support two
different plugins, or else choose between compatibility with IE and
compatibility with everybody else.

The message -- "co-operate with us, or be punished".

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

Ok, let me spell it out for you: If all your applications are web based,
and the OS shouldn't matter, why do Linux distributions matter? It
doesn't matter which one you use to run, for example, OpenOffice. Yet
people pick a certain distribution. Why? Well, one reason is that people
like to belong to a group. So even if it really doesn't matter which OS
you are going to use to access a web application, or even which browser,
people will pick a certain browser, and a certain OS, just because.

Dude, do you think that Microsoft gives a rat's tail[1] for what a handful
of computer enthusiasts and geek programmers pick? They want to control
the business world, and believe me, corporations don't pick the OS of
their computer because they want to join a community, they pick the OS
that lets them run the applications that their business needs to run.

Operating-system independent browser-based applications threaten the
ability of Microsoft to tie that choice to Windows. That is why MS decided
to bundle IE with Windows and (try to) kill off Netscape as a competitor.





[1] Or any other part of the rat.

 

[John Wingate]

Well, it might be a bit off. I am talking about 1986.


Seems about right.

So what version of msdos was around at that time? Obviously I didn't
use it!

In 1986? That would be version 3. I have MS-DOS 3.10 (Victor/Sirius
version corresponding to 3.1 for x86) dated 1986.

It seems to me that I was using 3.x. Maybe it was 3.1? I seem to
remember an earlier major ... was there a 2.8 or 2.9?

Dunno. The first version I used was 3.4, in 1987.

 

[John Bokma]

Umm, a recommendation *is* a standard.

No, it's a recommendation, an advise, nothing else. Otherwise they would
call it a standard. Why do you think W3C calls it recommendations? Because
it are no standards. There is an ISO HTML standard though, but when people
babble about HTML standards they talk about W3C *recommendations*.

"Recommendation
Specifications published by the W3C. They cannot be officially called
"standards," since the W3C is a consortium that does not have the status of
the standard body reserved for the ISO and national standard bodies. The
specifications, which are finalized and approved by the Director, are then
called "W3C Recommendations.""
(Quote from an O'Reilly book)

And Microsoft must disagree with you.

So that must mean you're right? Then wonder why there is an ISO standard
(yes) for HTML.

 

[David Schwartz]

That's more like buying a computer without a CPU, which I can in fact
do. Buying a computer without ms windows is more like buying a hifi
set without a Britney Spears CD. I can do that too.

I guess I wasn't explicit enough. Most people who want cars also want an
engine. Some don't. Dealers could sell cars and engines separately. They
just (generally) don't. There is nothing illegal or immoral about this.

DS

 

[David Schwartz]

Ok, let me spell it out for you: If all your applications are web based,
and the OS shouldn't matter, why do Linux distributions matter? It
doesn't matter which one you use to run, for example, OpenOffice. Yet
people pick a certain distribution. Why? Well, one reason is that people
like to belong to a group. So even if it really doesn't matter which OS
you are going to use to access a web application, or even which browser,
people will pick a certain browser, and a certain OS, just because.

You don't get it. The point is, you can pick any Linux distribution and
still use the same applications. This is exactly what Microsoft *doesn't*
want. They want applications to be locked to Microsoft OSes. For then to do
this, applications have to be as tied to the OS as possible. The browser as
a target platform threatened this Microsoft vision, so Microsoft reacted by
trying to corner the browser market and balkanize Java.

You can agree or disagree with the rationale and by sympathetic with or
antagonistic to Microsoft's motive. But these are historical facts.

DS