"Paul, By the way - have you noticed the near-universal hating of Microsoft by the AMDroids on the Banny Mani Thought Control thread?
"That is just more evidence that losers hate winners !
"I guess the droids have a size matters problem."
It's useful to remember that the "Pentium envy" the AMDroids show is minor compared to the envy/hatred that the denizens of Sun and Netscape (now folded-in to AOL Time Warner CNN etc.) showed and still show towards Microsoft.
Remember how Netscape wanted to be "the next Microsoft," how they even talked in terms of "the browser being the OS"? (Which makes a certain amount of sense, in the sense that a good browser acts as a form of virtual machine for running office suites, graphing programs, communications, applets, and so on. But the devil is in the details, and the world chose not to embrace the "browser as OS" model.)
Remember how Sun wanted to do the same thing with Java? We would all be running Java VMs and Java applets and Sun would be "the next Microsoft."
Had either of these companies succeeded in these plans, would they be calling for their own breakup?
Their whines are just the whines of losers.
The hatred of Microsoft goes beyond all reason...it has become pathological, just as the hatred by the AMDroids and the Maniban for Intel is pathological.
The nonsense about Microsoft being a "monopoly" is just that: nonsense.
Look, I use Macs. I don't "have" to use Microsoft products. I happen to use Explorer, which I like more than Navigator. (And I also have OmniWeb, done by some talented NeXTStep developers in Seattle who now develop for OS X on the Mac.) I also have Microsoft Office, but I rarely use it these days. (Most of my work is done in Mail, browsers, a news reader (Thoth), or in TextEdit. If I need Office-like features, I have AppleWorks, a highly-capable suite of applications that offers about 95% of the functionality of Office. (Office X for OS X is quite amazing, but is it worth the $300 upgrade fee for me? I think not.)
And there's Linux. And FreeBSD. Either is quite usable.
The irony is that the government was using Windows when it was trying to break up MS for being too popular (which is all it really boils down to). Why didn't the government simply mandate that Red Hat or Debian Linux be used (or Mandrake, or VA, etc.), with Star Office for Office-like apps? Why not use FrameMaker for their WP needs?
Or why not Macs?
The whole thing was something out of "Atlas Shrugged," with the government piling on Bill Gates and MS because they sensed they could shake him down for a few tens of billions of dollars in fines, campaign contributions, bribes, and "special programs." They have gotten part of their bribes paid to them in exchange for dropping the case.
And McSqueally is still squealing that MS should be broken into little pieces so he can finally succeed in crushing them.
(Personally, I think breaking up MS would have been the death of Sun and the like...because then each of the 3 or 4 pieces would have competed like banshees!)
Sometimes it takes Mac users like me to point out the obvious: that NOBODY is prevented by "monopoly power" from using Macs or Linux or Suns or Amigas or whatever.
--Tim May |
