[KLUG Advocacy] Interesting . . .

[Peter Buxton]

On Sat, Sep 07, 2002 at 08:35:50PM -0200, randall perry wrote:

> >"But at their hearts, each business is successful because it has
> >managed to reduce its cost per transaction until it is lower than all
> >its competitors"
> No, they didn't.  They bought up and developed on technology that
> people were already buying.  (depending on whose history book you
> read.  Some credit Bill Gates as a great programmer-I personally don't
> think he has ever programmed anything.

BASIC was probably his. Must be the reason for VB.Net; he wants some
kind of legacy in code and somewhere in the million lines of that port
is a primitive command parser with the comment, "(c) 1978 Billy Gates.
All Rights Reserved. KEEP OUT! (No Gurlz Aloud. Heh.)"

Okay, enough character assassination. In spite of what MS says about
"innovation," their true talent has always been Consolidation. Their
last innovation was their license with IBM (made possible by a US
Government anti-trust suit, remember; IBM was trying to outsource some
of their operations to duck the Feds). Basically, everything else
they've innovated has been someone else's program (didn't they license
some of AfterDark?) or someone else's MS bugfix (Scandisk).

Not that Consolidation isn't important. Would you rather buy your car
piece by piece or as one whole, functional unit? (Yes, I know, I'd love
to build one car from scratch, too, but basically, sometimes we just
want a drive.) Apple's Macintosh is a consolidation platform, too.

Microsoft's other bit of brilliance is that they occupy a chokepoint:
basically, everyone uses their code, but MS doesn't write any apps.
Behind them is a vast cone, tapering to a point in MS, of all the
oddball hardware they must support. In front of them is all the end-user
apps, again in a cone whose point lies to Redmond, which must:

1. Draw widgets on the screen (Windows proper)
2. Be actve on the network (TCP/IP, CIFS, IE)
3. Draw up reports and display them (Office)
4. Or mail the above somewhere else (Outlook, Exchange)

And they will fight to the death rather than be pushed out of that
double-point.

-- 
http://www.killdevil.org/~peter
AIX is Unix from the universe where Spock has a beard.