After reading the following excerpts on how Bill Gates' company Microsoft conducted product and revenue strategies, a very important question must be answered... "Could we have installed a more unfit person to be the US Chief Science Officer that heads up and crafts our country's vaccine response? Note the parallels already!! You can always find events in a serial killer's past that warned you what they would ultimately do. Is this any different?
From dicosmo.org
"But, over the years, Microsoft has acquired a remarkable ability to convert its technical failures into commercial successes. While its new programs are often disastrous, the big guns in its marketing department manage to sell them anyway, convincing people to wait for the future versions which slowly correct their bugs to make them more stable, or sometimes by buying or copying the often better programs sold by its competitors. Microsoft has managed to make people think that the problems with its programs are normal, and that corrections to these problems are technological breakthroughs. Even better –it is the consumer who pays for improving its products!"
"Now that MacroPress has a monopoly, they change their characters every two years, and then, every year. The old lens cannot read the new Klingon characters, and each new version requires that the public buy new lenses at great expense. One of MacroPress' competitors sees an excellent opportunity: they invent a mini-lens, which is as efficient as the MacroPress lens for reading Klingon, and less expensive. But the publishers have an exclusive contract with MacroPress and refuse to distribute the lens. Even worse: MacroPress sues this competitor who is guilty of having reverse-engineered the Klingon characters to design its mini-lens!
Does it sound outrageous? Are you thinking, "Can this ever happen"?
Well, this is exactly what happens with Microsoft customers. There is no way to correctly read a document created with Word 7 using Word 5, for example. Serious problems can also be seen when trying to open a Word for Windows file using Word 6 for Macintosh. This is something I learned at my own expense, struggling one day to open a file that I downloaded from a site belonging to the European Commission. The result was that our laboratory had to buy a huge PC with Windows 95 and Office, that we did not really need, just to be able to read these important documents. The Klingon lens is not as imaginary as you may think.
Microsoft Word users have to buy each new version of the program just to be able to continue to read files in the new format that come from other people. This constant evolution of products, which is presented as a sign of quality, is, in fact, a way to levy a monopolistic tax. Why should we have to buy a new version of a word processing program and learn how to use it every twelve or eighteen months, when people are still writing resumes and memos the same way they have for the past ten years? Even worse, if you purchased a complementary program for Word 5, for example a Spanish dictionary, you would need to buy it again to use under Word 6, since the old dictionary is incompatible, whereas the Spanish language has obviously not changed very much in recent months.
This is really just a way to kidnap your information. Because once you have entered your data into Word or Money, if you want to change the program you are using, it is very difficult to recuperate this work and transfer it to a different program. Microsoft has been very careful in not providing efficient converters to other formats.
It is also forbidden, according to American law, to reverseengineer a Microsoft proprietary format, so a company who would want to sell a mini-lens converter would be guilty of Copyright violation (note 9). But we are talking about data that belong to the users. This certainly is the land of TechnoCretins!
Could you use plain words to explain exactly why you consider that Microsoft programs are technically deficient?
On Internet newsgroups and mailing lists, people who do not like Microsoft use names such as crapware and bloatware to describe its programs. I must admit, I find it difficult to contradict them. First, even novice computer users will notice that Microsoft programs are very large –this means they take up a great deal of space on your hard disk. This is not surprising since there are all sorts of gadgets hidden inside them: some clever people discovered that an improbable series of commands (note 10) made under Excel 7 would launch a flight simulator that shows you the names of the programers! There are other surprises like this, called Easter eggs, such as a pinball machine in Word 7...
But seriously, each time Microsoft releases a new version of a program, it is larger and slower. This deterioration began with Word 3 (written with the C programming language), that ran much slower than the previous version (which was written in assembler). On the face of it, this loss in speed should be an acceptable trade-off for the advantages of the program being written with a higher level language. But this sad state of affairs has continued since then, even when the programming language, that could justify a loss of speed, does not change. We have now reached a point where the user needs much more memory today to make Microsoft products run correctly than to install a traditional Unix server, which includes thousands of sophisticated programs.
This leads me to present a simple statement that is often ignored: a sophisticated system, developed with a respect for quality, will require a fairly large amount of memory, but these requirements will not increase greatly as new versions are released. However, a system whose original name gives an idea of how it was constructed (Quick and Dirty Operating System), and that was purchased from another company and touched up quickly, is inevitably destined to become much more ponderous as Microsoft adds more and more layers of essential functions that were not planned at the beginning.
Elegance and economy can only be obtained if the correct architecture is planned from the very beginning. Unfortunately, in a world of financial imperatives, existing programs are never completely rewritten. Companies merely improve them by adding new layers of code, which increase their size and decrease their speed. Because of this, as Microsoft executives have admitted, the Windows 95 source code contains more than 10 million lines... This is for the operating system alone, and does not even count its additional applications. When you think that the federal aviation administration had to abandon an air traffic control program reorganization project, because it was too large and contained 2 million lines of code (note 11), it is not surprising that you often have to restart a computer using Microsoft bloatware!
This explains why we are now in the situation where we must throw away a huge number of computers that function correctly, but are not powerful enough to run Windows. These same computers could be used as efficient servers to run one of the many flavors of Unix on a PC. This is also why Intel can sell millions of chips as soon as it releases a new, faster model: people who use Microsoft programs need more and more power to make their computers run at a decent speed. Let us not forget that the first IBM PCs (using the Intel 8088 chip) ran at a clock frequency of 4.77 MHz. Today's Intel Pentium II processors run at 400 MHz. But almost fifteen years later, Microsoft Word does not run a hundred times faster than it did before. If these new programs are larger, it is to add new functions for users, claims Microsoft. But studies have shown that most of these functions are used little, if at all. So why should we sacrifice money and speed for something we do not use?
Other than the question of the size of these programs, are Microsoft programs well-designed?
Absolutely not. Here is one example: since the very beginning, since MS-DOS, Microsoft has used an obsolete file management system. If you use Windows, you have definitely heard about the program called DeFrag. When you run the program, your computer displays lots of little different-colored squares that move all around as your hard disk does some serious work. Microsoft's explanation for this is that the more you use your computer, the more your disk gets fragmented, and the slower your computer runs. So, to correct this problem, you should use DeFrag regularly, which will "defragment" your hard disk so it runs more quickly. Really? Why do computers using Linux, FreeBSD, or any other type of Unix not have this problem? With this kind of computer, under normal conditions, the hard disk is never more than lightly fragmented, and the more you use it, the less it fragments.
You see, these systems operate much differently than Windows. To use a familiar metaphor, imagine that your hard disk is the Internal Revenue Service. And that your files, saved on the disk, correspond to files that civil servants store in a huge file cabinet, containing millions of tiny drawers. Now, it is clear that if you are looking for an entire file –the one concerning Microsoft, for example– it would be much easier if all of the documents making up this file were in contiguous drawers, rather than spread out all around the file cabinet. When dealing with data it is the same: it is easier to have access to the data you want if it is organized in contiguous files, rather than spread out or "fragmented".
The problem is therefore to make sure that this file cabinet is properly organized each time you finish using it. And what does Windows do? It acts like an inexperienced file clerk: when a job has been finished and its file is not needed anymore, it throws its objects into the trash. And when you give it some documents you want to use to create a new file, it separates them into tiny groups that it files at random in the first empty drawers it finds. Well, with this type of system, you have to ask for a budget increase to hire a team of interns (DeFrag) to work every weekend to try and reorganize the file cabinet. Linux, however, works like an experienced file clerk: when you ask it to throw away old files, it systematically creates a list of the drawers that are now empty. When filing a new file, it looks in this list for a series of contiguous empty drawers that are large enough to contain the file. I'm sure you will agree with me that no office manager would be crazy enough to hire the first file clerk, who would cost him more and is inefficient, instead of the second, who works almost for free and is much more efficient. But this is what happens every day when people choose Windows.
To sum up, Microsoft's commercial propaganda bamboozles its customers by telling them that DeFrag makes their computer runs faster... whereas it is really Windows that is slowing it down! Microsoft is powerful enough to be able to distort reality in this way. It turns its programs' weaknesses into indispensable assets. In the computer industry, there has long been an ironic expression that is used when this type of weakness is discovered: it's not a bug, it's a feature!" |
