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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (15689)	12/30/1997 7:47:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

The Reasonable Geek Test upside.com Upside is usually fairly Microphilic, so this article is somewhat unexpected from them. Not bashing, but it's about Nader's conference and it doesn't bash him either, which is a surprise. Of course, from what I read by Nader after his conference, he's sharper than I thought. There's a bunch of other links on the side too, I haven't checked them out yet. The general consensus was that Microsoft failed the "reasonable geek" test by beating up on less powerful companies in a number of ways. These included coercive licensing arrangements (forcing OEMs to pay fees even for machines on which they do not install Microsoft's OS). Then there was coercion of Internet service providers (contract language that says they cannot even imply an alternative browser is available, or the ISP will be pulled from the "connection wizard" in Windows). And finally, there's the bundling of content with Windows (such as Microsoft getting PC makers to package Encarta with new PCs until it achieves No. 1 ranking in its market, then pulling it from the bundle and selling it as a separate product). And that doesn't even include Microsoft's actions to leverage its OS dominance into browser dominance. Once again, alas poor Britanica. Of course, we know Encarta is #1 because Microsoft understands the New Media better than anyone, not because of the usual sleazy OEM arm twisting. Anyway, it's very important that Encarta be #1, so the properly Orwellian Microsoft version of history has wide distribution. Bill Gates is loved by one and all for his generous philanthropy. He's my hero, you know. The key argument against Microsoft (with which the DoJ apparently now agrees) is that in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act, Microsoft has willfully used monopoly power in one market to gain competitive advantage in a second, even though its leverage was legally attained. And while Nader's conference wasn't designed to resolve the issue, it is a step toward establishing the idea that something can be done about it--that this uniquely American but almost moribund law could actually be enforced. Poor Bill, his buddy Charles "Rick" Rule just couldn't stay at the helm of the antitrust division quite long enough. Now, he's got Urowsky daring DOJ to revive Sherman, and it sorta looks like they might just take up the challenge. Where will it go? Who knows, but I doubt this monkey will be off Bill's back any time soon. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, too, right? Cheers, Dan.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (15689)	12/30/1997 9:06:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

news.com >>>>Around the same time Microsoft started giving away the 3D licenses, it also quickly announced some very aggressive plans to deliver its 3D software on all the non-Windows platforms that Argonaut already covered. How many of those products have been delivered? Zip. How many will ever be delivered?<<<< The other vendors weren't the only ones screwed by MSFT in this episode. A lot of game developers were too. Around the time given in the article (1995), I was working on a new Star Trek game for a game developer in the SF area. Management and other team's programmers at the game company sold my team on using Rendermorphics because it was a good package and because it was cross-platform. Games written for Playstation would be easily ported to Win95, Saturn, Mac, whatever. So here we all are working along on these betas of Rendermorphics (Reality Labs 3D), and the announcement comes that MSFT has bought RM out. Now I'm not too unhappy yet, I know all about Microsoft's nasty ways but it happens I'm doing a Win95 game so I am happy for what I perceive will be better support and documentation in the future. Well, a few months later the Playstation and other teams are telling me some of their projects are cancelled. They are too far into coding to back out gracefully, and MSFT has pulled the plugs on Rendermorphics (now Direct 3D) for any platform but Win95. Also, I have got a problem with Windows market share because it looks like NT is not going to be supported right away or at all. On some of the other projects, the game inventors, the writers, copyright holders, designers, artists, sound and music folks, programmers, managers, marketers, packaging designers - all their work for a year is down the tubes. They are screwed. Some of these projects were salvageable with additional expenditures in the end by switching to the Sony 3D development environment or some other, but in the end the lack of portability added costs to many projects. I don't know how many millions were wasted, how many creative people had their time and ideas wasted, how many multimedia, educational, or game products were cancelled, or what companies went down the tubes, but I do know it wasn't pretty. Subsequently, MS and RM went quiet for quite a while as they worked on the API. Final nasty surprise for me? The new API is so different I have a major rewrite on my hands to get it all to run on the release version of Sirect 3D. Plus the 3D game accelerator board manufacturers are going to miss all their dates for matching up to this API with device drivers, so the whole thing is going to be sloooow. By this time it is nearing Thanksgiving, and we realize we are going to miss Xmas, for this and other reasons. The game co management decide the answer is to make the game twice as humongous as before (and it was already big), and bring it out the following Xmas. Not wanting to spend another year of my life on a another soon-to-be-obsolete porkware trek game, I went on to more productive projects. (On the next one, a 2D animation project, I used my own graphics and sound libs and finished in 5 months. An object lesson if there ever was one!) So, when Microsoft said the rest of Active-X was going to be cross-platform and open last year, I knew it wasn't going to happen. And it didn't. Chaz