JohnG,
I get so tired of hearing people attack MSFT. The software companies doing this are just disappointed that their own ruthless tactics didn't work so well.
If you look at my profile, you will see that I am not a software company. I am not attacking anyone, that's MSFT tactics. I am just observing that they have brought down the level of civility to the point that being and acting like an a@#hole is now the norm.
Please draw a distinction between tactics that injure competitors and tactics that injure the citizens of the US.
The competitors are in many cases the citizens of the US as well. There is a difference between being injured because a competitor offers a better product and your customers just leave you, and losing the customers because of anti-competitive practices.
As for the Citizens on the US, the boom we have been enjoying since 1992 is more due to MSFT's excellent success than any other one thing.
The recent boom we have been enjoying has started if 1982 if you asked me, well before MSFT amounted to anything. A VCR, cable TV are as much of a reason for the boom as MSFT. Their existence happens to coincide with the boom.
We can all speculate how different things would be if MSFT was not around. My argument would be that things would probably be better. Instead of going through 20 years of MSFT learning how to write a reliable operating system for a PC, maybe we would get one from a company that already knew how to do it, or from some other company that would figure it out in, say 10 years.
The government's proper roll is to protect the citizens of the US from anticompetitive activities. It isn't to protect companies from their competitors.
It is unfortunate that the companies can't behave themselves in a civilized manner on thier own, and we need the government involved at all. But the reason we have government bureaucrats sticking their noses into working of the marketplace is that there are companies like MSFT out there that just can't behave themselves.
I've been using puters since the TRS-80 was first sold. Back then software, hardware and periferals were both expensive and incompatible. Now they are not. And all of this has happened at the speed of light primarily due to MSFT. So fast that WINTEL has made the US the GIANT in the industry and provided the greatest entrepraneural/venture capital boom in the history of the world.
So you really think that the 5 1/4' drives became 5 1/4", instead of a mixture of 5 1/4", 5 1/8" or 5 3/8" is to the credit of Microsoft? What's with the non-standard inches anyway? Shouldn't the US live in the stone age because we didn't adapt metric system?
If yu are talking standards, how come every new version of MS-DOS was not compatible with then standard Lotus?
You can have standards without one company owning 100% of the market. Just look at Internet and the standard process there. Or just go to your local bike store and you will see that most parts you can buy there adhere to some standards, even though there is no MSFT of bicycles.
Poor Netscape had no God given right to profit perpetually form the "external file server" they call their invention. They are a bunch of whining loosers whose best business strategy was to run crying to uncle sam and clain MSFT gave them a bo bo. Their mgt is disgusting.
I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean Novell (reference to file server)? As far as Netscape is concerned, they lost me as a customer when they failed to come up with stable version of a browser. MSFT beat them to that. MSFT would have won me as a customer even without the ugly bullying tactics they used to destroy Netscape.
Netscape mgmt is a bunch of crybabies, but I still reserve the word disgusting to MSFT mgmt.
Joe |
