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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (18982)	5/12/1998 5:25:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

'Bill Gates, come home!' www5.zdnet.com Oh dear. Cranky John Dvorak experiences the integrity and uniformity of the Windows experience up close and personal, and he's not a happy camper. I can relate, of course. As I write this, I've spent 8 hours so far working on these problems. I wasted more time trying to reinstall Windows, after screwing with the machine so much that most of the drivers were either blown off the system or lost. I then installed Win 98 on the machine after I erased the hard disk (on the advice of my techie contact at Microsoft, who told me it should work better on a clean system). This was a joke, since the machine booted with a 16-color display, and the software that upgrades the display drivers said it needed 256 colors to run! Catch-22 number one. I had decided to go back to Win 95, but the disks were for a Win 95 upgrade. This made a mockery of the boot disk. Another Catch-22! So, as I go into day two of this nonsense, I see Mr. Bill Gates roaming around the country, giving a speech at Time magazine's 75th-anniversary party and babbling in his ill-written daily diary in Slate magazine. Knowing he's a micromanager who gets involved in everything at Microsoft, and knowing he hasn't spent as much time at the company as usual, I am begging him to go back to work, if he actually cares about Windows entropy. Has Bill noticed (in report after report from PBS, newspapers, and user groups) that people believe Microsoft products are inferior? Then there is the perception that Microsoft only copies the ideas of others. When confronted recently with the latter perception by a New York Times reporter, Gates said that the notion was "beyond bizarre," as if he'd never heard such a thing. This question was asked when Bill was showing off a Microsoft-designed "Palm PC" that was a feature clone of the PalmPilot. The company even took the name Palm, saying it was generic. Yeah, right. Does Microsoft think that the word Windows is generic? I think not. This is not about using the ideas of the PalmPilot, but about doing a PalmPilot clone in the first place. Why, oh why, is Microsoft spending time and manpower on copycat gizmos, when the error handling in Windows stinks and the machines are crashing more often as they get older? Fix this first! I run NT now, it's a pig but seems to be more stable. Not totally, but I haven't see functionality randomly degrade or disappear over time as it did in Win95. I think the main thing is NTFS vs. crummy old FAT. It's the way we want to go, you know. I also "uninstalled" the "Desktop update" component, which seems to have given me back 10 meg of swap space, at the "cost" of not having an IE window for every directory folder I display. Less is more, says me and Dvorak. Cheers, Dan.