[KLUG Advocacy] Interesting . . .

[Robert G. Brown]

>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.)"

At this point, a great deal of this is good history, but it is also water
under the bridge. MS technology currently on sale is beyond this to a very
great degree, much of which is sourced or contracted for my MS for these
efforts.

>Okay, enough character assassination. In spite of what MS says about
>"innovation," their true talent has always been Consolidation....
This is basicly right. The NT team was largely lift^H^H^H^H recruited
from Digital; the same bunch did VMS over there.

>Their last innovation was their license with IBM...
Well, um, they've done a couple of innovative (which I define as novel and 
useful) things since then. I can count them on one hand, and still have a
thumb and finger[s] left over, patiently waiting for the NEXT one.

>made possible by a US Government anti-trust suit, remember; IBM was trying
>to outsource some of their operations to duck the Feds. 
There were a couple of other reasons, perhaps more in the face of the IBM
people at the time. The conventional wisdom within IBM was thast this PC
stuff was pretty high-risk, not going to last real long, so why not contract
it out? After all, it might not have enough lifetime to warrant setting up
a whole IBM group to handle this stuff (at the time, the PC was manufactureed
by IBM Office Products, using largely spare capacity in NC and FL).

>Not that Consolidation isn't important....
All true! We need to recognize what MS has done well, in business and 
product terms, even if we have severe problems with the ethics or practices.
They have done an effective job of packaging and delivering software in a
form that most of the populace seems to be able to use. I actually think
they've done a better job of this than they've done on the software itself.
The lesson everyone can take from this is that it doesn't matter how good
the software is if it is hard to install. It would be very interesting to
see how much of the popularity of Linux can be attributed to easier instal-
lation procedures, which have only been available comparitivly recently.

>Microsoft's other bit of brilliance is that they occupy a chokepoint:
>basically, everyone uses their code, but MS doesn't write any apps.
Essentially, this is right. Oh, there are some apps, like Project and Money,
but IMO you can spin those off and the MS balance sheet wouldn't be any
different.

As long as Microsoft controls document standards and API's, they are going
to be the chokepoint. This is why standards and software like OO scares
the heck outta them. Put Microsoft on a level playing field and a lot of
their advantages are forfeit.

>And they will fight to the death rather than be pushed out of that
>double-point.
Who wouldn't?
							Regards,
							---> RGB <---