Why I Hate Microsoft by F.W

Why I hate Microsoft by F.W. van Wensveen Why I hate Microsoft "A personal, lengthy, but highly articulate outburst" by F.W. van Wensveen Table of contents Introduction A brief introduction, or why this paper needed to be written Abstract The management summary 1. From the people who brought you EDLIN Microsoft and innovation 2. The not-so-good, the bad and the ugly The general quality of Microsoft products 3. The power to bind Formats and standards 4. World domination From business to megalomania 5. Bad practice, foul play Exploring the limits of lawful conduct 6. Caveat Emptor Think before you buy 7. Where are you forced to go today? Price gouging and other monopolist practices 8. The road ahead On diminishing returns and continuing trends Appendix A A brief overview of Windows' most serious design flaws Appendix B Links Introduction "One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them..." From the title of this paper you may have guessed that I am not very impressed with the guys in Redmond. One might even say that my dislike for Microsoft is a pet hate gone out of control in an almost quixotic fashion. Why is this? Of course I have been accused of personal antipathy, of being jealous of Bill Gates and his billions, and of being prejudiced against all things Microsoft without any reason whatsoever. None of this is true. I have nothing personal against Bill Gates. Why should I? I don't know the man, I've never met him. I agree with those who say he might be the most successful salesman in history. And I've always thought that even one billion in almost any currency is more than I could reasonably spend. No. It's rather his business practices, and that of his company, that I am opposed to, for a large and still growing number of reasons, most of which are plain, verifiable facts. This paper explains why Microsoft is bad for us. Disclaimer The following represents my own personal point of view. It does not necessarily represent the points of view of my employers, clients, associates, friends, relatives, pets or houseplants. If they want a point of view, they can go and grow their own, so there. If you read this document and a tree falls on your house as a result of any inaccuracy on my part, I shall not be held responsible. All registered trademarks mentioned in this text are the property of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged. For more information see the legal notice applying to this website. - 1 - Why I hate Microsoft by F.W. van Wensveen Abstract Microsoft controls the current PC software market and has a de facto monopoly on the desktop. This monopoly has not been achieved and is not being maintained by offering the user community better products than Microsoft's competitors can offer. On the contrary, Microsoft has earned a reputation for selling unreliable products, thrown together from third-party technology, full of bugs and security holes, and in need of constant maintenance and repair. Windows is a technically inferior operating system with a seriously flawed architecture, a weak security model and sloppy code, while other Microsoft applications are equally kludgy. New Microsoft products are essentially re-wrapped bits of old technology which offer no essential improvements over previous or competing products, and with a Return On Investment between small and zero. In spite of this Microsoft boasts about about being innovative and customer- driven. Instead of making better software, Microsoft has focused on using brilliant but doubtful marketing tactics to force their products upon the user community in order to establish and maintain their monopoly. These methods include a tight integration of applications into the operating system, the bundling of applications with Windows to force competing application vendors out of the market, the mandatory bundling of Windows with new computer equipment, deliberate limitations in the compatibility of their own software with competing products, contracts that keep third parties from doing business with anyone but Microsoft, and retaliatory practices against non-cooperating vendors. In addition to this, third-party developers are induced, through cheap or free development programs and the sabotaging of alternatives, to develop applications based upon proprietary methods of interfacing with the operating system. This results in third-party applications that are virtually non-portable, which in turn locks both developers and users into the MS-Windows platform. These methods only serve to further inflate Microsoft's already obscene profit margins, at the price of the interests of the user community, the IT market and the field of computer technology as a whole. - 2 - Why I hate Microsoft by F.W. van Wensveen 1. From the people who brought you EDLIN "640k should be enough for anyone." -- Attr. to Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO, 1981 In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who were students at Harvard University at the time, adapted BASIC to run on the popular Altair 8800 computer and sold it to the Altair's manufacturer, MITS. Although BASIC had been developed by Kemeny and Kurtz in 1963, the Altair BASIC interpreter was the first "high language" program to run on the type of computer that would later become known as the microcomputer or home computer. While the BASIC programming language itself was already in the public domain by then, there was no interpreter that could run it on the first microcomputers, and the small microprocessor systems typically developed by hobbyists and researchers were still being programmed in machine code and often operated via switches. Thus Gates and Allen could be said to have created an original product. One might even call it a true innovation. It would be one of their last. Gates and Allen, Developing BASIC on borrowed time ca. 1968 Gates and Allen initially met at Lakeside School (an exclusive private school for rich boys) where Gates became an adept at BASIC on a General Electric Mark II computer. Shortly thereafter they got access to a PDP-10 run by a private company in Seattle. The company offered free time to the Lakeside school kids to see if they could crash the system. Gates proved to be particularly good at doing so. When the free time ran out, Gates and Allen figured out how to continue using the PDP-10 by logging on as the system operator. About a year later the company that owned the PDP-10 went bankrupt. This left Gates and Allen without a source of unpaid computing resources. Therefore Allen went over to the University of Washington and began using a Xerox computer by pretending to be a graduate student. Gates soon followed, and this went on until they were caught and removed from the campus. They continued to break into university and privately owned computer systems until about 1975. By that time Gates was a student at Harvard University, and HP had been selling the 9830 calculator (an expensive system for scientific and industrial math applications) for three years. The 9830 had a BASIC interpreter, which opened up a whole new range of applications outside the field of mathematical calculation. Whether or not Gates and Allen had actually seen a 9830 before they coded up their BASIC interpreter for the Altair (with the help of Monte Davidoff, who wrote the floating point arithmetic routines) is not known, but it is quite possible. In any case, the BASIC that Gates sold to MITS had been developed and tested on a PDP-10 computer owned by Harvard, using an 8080-emulation program that Allen had adapted from earlier code. In fact, by the time Gates contacted MITS to announce their product, it had never seen an actual 8080 CPU. The demonstration that Allen put up for MITS in New Mexico was the first time the product actually ran on the system it was intended for. Gates sold it by announcing a product that didn't exist, developing it on the model of the best version available elsewhere, not testing it very seriously, demonstrating an edition that didn't fully work, and finally releasing the product in rather buggy form after a lengthy delay. From then on this modus operandi became Microsoft's trademark. The controversy begins After Gates sold the 8800 BASIC interpreter to MITS he left Harvard University, and went into business for himself with Allen as a partner. Allen was also an MITS employee at the time, which made his position somewhat questionable. Gates' departure from Harvard appears to be somewhat controversial. Some say he dropped out, others say he was expelled for stealing computer time. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that Gates did most of the work on his BASIC version in a Harvard computer lab without having been authorized to use the computing resources for the project. The legal aspects are murky, as Harvard did not have a written policy regarding the use of their DARPA- funded PDP-10 computer. So perhaps Gates did not exactly steal unauthorized computer capacity (a limited and valuable commodity in those days) to develop his first commercially successful product. Yet he has never offered a different explanation. He did however send his now-infamous "Open Letter To Hobbyists" to every major computer publication in February 1976, in which he decried the copying of commerical software (especially Altair BASIC) by home computer hobbyists as simple theft. He also claimed to have spent $40,000 in computer time developing BASIC, but neglected to mention where that computer time came from and whose money it was that he spent.

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