I don't know why this escapes so many people, particularly in the press, but it has. Let me try and put it as clearly as possible.
Have you seen the work product from Word or Word Perfect? Have you seen anybody use the products? Has the efficiency of production or quality of output materially improved over the last 10 years? User down, generates memo, letter, report what have you; user prints it. Are trying to tell me we haven't solved that problem in the last 20 years? Is there something the user needs to put on that page they still can't do because they need a gig of hertz, a gig of memory and a gig more code to do it? Unless you count features that 1% of the customer base uses 1% of the time, it's difficult to make the case that anything has changed for the better in 10 years. The installations have become an order of magnitude or more larger. The programs run an order of magnitude or more slower. That's progress? Can you imagine using a top-of-the-line computer from 1990 to do wordprocessing? We do not need another version of the wordprocessor, save a natural language interpretor that actually works. Tell you what HNS, why don't you go out there and fix Algebra, Calculus or whatever. We'll improve on the method for computing the circumference of a circle, and stuff, and then upgrade all the text books around the world. The point being, there really is such a thing as DONE. That doesn't mean stagnation, it means changing only when there is some material reason to do so.
Rather than make things easier and faster, they have made things larger and more complex and used the hardware speed increases to mask their incompetence. Hardware has allowed Microsoft to get away with COM and Visual Basic. Java has an excuse: bytecode translation, object-oriented from the ground up, garbage collection and robust security features are built right in. In terms of ease-of-use and efficient execution, the monopoly enjoyed by Microsoft has prevented free markets from solving those problems. That can only change if Gates is not allowed to put making Windows proprietary ahead of adopting the best strategies.
Has anybody wondered why we have a built-in browser but not a built in spelling checker API? Is there an application out there that cannot use a spelling checker in some capacity or anther? Then where is it? Why isn't it inside Windows? Where is this altruistic attitude Microsoft is pretending to have for the consumer on that front?
BTW, I'm glad math was developed before there was such a thing as the U.S. Patent Office: Patent #13 Method for computing the area of a rectangle, .... Patent #1292931134 Method for ordering a product using two mouse clicks... |
