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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Andy Thomas who wrote (1502)	2/19/1999 1:00:00 AM
From: MICHEL GUIBERT	Respond to of 1600

Maybe time to visit www.stardivision.com MG

To: Andy Thomas who wrote (1502)	2/20/1999 7:39:00 PM
From: JC Jaros	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1600

The more you know, the more repugnant Microsoft becomes. I used to be merely ambivalent. Suddenly, I'm advocating subversion. I'm not a WaReZ kiddie. I'm not a 'pirate'. I'm a pretty mainstream, middle of the road, American citizen with equity interest in global enterprise. I've spent the larger part of my working life in an industry that is economically based in intellectual property. I've come to understand the extent that Microsoft goes to enhance shareholder value at the expense of the "end user". The driver is the (farcical) EULA, in consort with the political patronage of expanding copyright law and treaties. I'm OUTRAGED to read Steve Ballmer and the BSA on MSFTs behalf, talk about citizen "moral" duty in protecting MSFT intellectual property. I'm outraged to the point that I've changed my entire viewpoint on intellectual property. The way I feel about Bill Gates and Microsoft must be the same way our founding fathers felt about King George III and England. Independant investors and fund participants who hold MSFT shares, should be clear on what it is exactly that drives this equity. It's not savvy management. It's a long con. It's a parasite with reliance upon the compliant host that is a populace of morally upstanding "end users" who are in fact, it's victims. It's bullshit. One of the revelations I've had through recent reading is that as a practical matter, the product royalty engine of USCA Title 17 (ammended) isn't in MSFT's arsenal at all. The threat of criminal and civil consequence as applied to "end users" is hollow. The constitutional intent of copyright law, contrary to what the BSA and Microsoft, as well as the RIAA and Jack (FBI warning) Valenti would want you to believe, is to PROTECT citizens against this very type of tyranny. And that's almost a side point. The growing internet of liberated information is on a collision course with this ongoing ruse of evolving property under revocable license. Ironically, in the breakup of AT&T, the UNIX operating system, which is the ubiquitous code base of our networked paradigm, was denied to AT&T as property and set free by government decree. Perhaps it is against that backdrop and the subsequent existence of the various free Unices that I come to weigh Microsoft and it's every proprietary 'property' angle against, particularly when it seeks that same government's assistance in collecting Microsoft monopoly revenue from the citizenry inside and outside of the United States. Bill Gates' grandmother, or whomever it was that encouraged young Bill to play ruthless and endless Parker Brothers Monopoly on those rainy Seattle days in the 60's, can take pride in having helped create an American success story for the ages, and arguably the ugliest American of our age. But that's his legacy. That's his innovation. He's George III of the digital new world. It's an odd direction for a board game to take. In our haste to become 'connected' we clicked through the fine print. That which was sold to us as personal empowerment wasn't sold to us at all. With blind faith we bought pre-installed promise of technology made easy. What we received was an End User License and technology obscured. What trash have we dumped so thoroughly on our schools? Along the way, we left the vagaries of the bits and bytes to a corporate collective of contract lawyers and branding specialists. We have a nation of primary and secondary schools where the classrooms have "windows" that are prisms to a logo. This is where Microsoft wants our children to go today, so that tomorrow, they'll be compliant "end users". Steve Ballmer is right about us having moral duty as citizens. That duty starts with our children and our public schools. With a net centric world moving faster than litigation, the end of the end user context arrives faster than our institutions are able to recognize. The community, and Microsoft have divergent interests. The community needs technologically literate youth - quickly. Microsoft needs the status quo of product end users. While bidding billions into "Internet stocks" and creating multiples of fantastic expectation in the connected future, we should be alarmed and outraged at the unpreparedness of our youth to properly administer the infrastructure of that future. We should be alarmed and outraged that our high schools are teaching Powerpoint(tm) in place of networking fundamentals. An entire semester course examining the Microsoft EULA would be vastly more valuable and meaningful than teaching "Word(tm)". Word up- Subvert. -JC Jaros jjaros@svn.net