Microsoft Hatred FAQ
(originally posted to a Mac OS X mailing list “macosx-talk@omnigroup.com”)
US Judges are not morons. They find Microsoft guilty, so it must be true.
So did the German population thought Jews are morons by heritage, to the point that Jews should be exterminated from earth. Apparently, the entire German population cannot be morons, they must be right.
Judge for yourself, is a principle i abide by. And when you judge, it is better to put some effort into it.
How much you invest in this endearvor depends on how important the issue is to you. If you are like most people, for which the issue of Microsoft have remote effect on your personal well-being, then you can go out and buy a case of beer on one hand and pizza on the other, and rap with your online confabulation buddies about how evil is MS. If you are a author writing a book on this, then obviously its different because your reputation and ultimately daily bread depend on what you put down. If you are a MS competitor such as Apple or Sun, then obviously you will see to it with as much money as you can cough out that MS is guilty by all measures and gets put out of business. If you are a government employee such as a judge, of course it is your interest to please your boss, with your best accessment of the air.
When i judge things, i like to imagine things being serious, as if my wife is a wager, my daughter is at stake, that any small factual error or mis-judgement or misleading perspective will cause unimaginable things to happen. Then, my opinions become better ones.
Microsoft's Operating System is used over 90% of PCs. If that's not monopoly, i don't know what is.
Now suppose there is a very ethical company E, whose products have the best performance/price ratio, and making all the competitors looking so majorly stupid and ultimately won over 90% of the market as decided by consumers. Is E now a monopoly? Apparently, beer drinkers and pizza eaters need to study a bit on the word monopoly, from the perspectives of language to history to law. If they have some extra time, they can sharpen views from philosophy and logic contexts as well.
What about all the people in the corporate environments who are forced to use MS products and aren't allowed the option/choice to use Mac/Linux/UNIX?
Kick your boss's ass, or, choose to work for a company who has decisions that you liked.
What about MS buying out all competitors?
Microsoft offered me $1 grand for saying good things about them. They didn't put a gunpoint on my head. I CHOOSE to take the bribe. Likewise, sold companies can and have decided what's best for them.
Microsoft forced computer makers to not install competitor's applications or OSes.
It is free country. Don't like MS this or that? FAAK MS and talk to the Solaris or BeOS or AIX or HP-UX or Apple or OS/2 or Amiga or NeXT or the BSDs and Linuxes with their free yet phantasmagorically easy-to-use and network-spamming X-Windows. Bad business prospects? Then grab the opportunity and become a entrepreneur and market your own kick-ass OS. Too difficult? Let's sue Microsoft!
Microsoft distributed their Internet Explorer web browser free, using their “monopoly” power to put Netscape out of business.
Entirely inane coding monkeys listen: It takes huge investment to give away a quality software free. Netscape can give away Operating Systems free to put MS out of business too. Nobody is stopping Sun Microsystems from giving Java free, or BeOS a browser free, or Apple to bundle QuickTime deeply with their OS free.
Not to mention that Netscape is worse than IE in just about every version till they become the Open Source mozilla shit and eventually bought out by AOL and still shit.
- Netscape struggles, announced open browser source code in , industry shock.
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html(local copy: netscape_os_ann_1998.zip) - Netscape browser code released in . Mozilla FAQ.
http://mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html(local copy as of 1999) - 〔AOL buys Netscape for 4.2 billion At http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-218360.html (local copy: aol_buys_netscape_1998.zip)〕
- resignation and postmortem By Jamie Zawinski. @ http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
- Software Skin Cancer
- Netscape Crap
Microsoft implemented extra things to standard protocols in their OS so that other OS makers cannot be compatible with their OS while their OS can be compatible with all. They used this Embrace and Extend to lock out competitors.
My perspective is this: suppose you are now a company whose OS sits over 90% of computers (regardless how this come to be for the moment). Now, lots of “standard” protocols in the industry is a result of popularity (RFC = Really Faaking Common), and popularity resulted from being free, from the RFCs of the fantastically incompetent by the truely stupid unix tech morons. What can you do if you want to improve these protocols? If you go with totally different protocols, then the incompatibility with the rest 10% isn't your best interest. I would adopt existing protocols, and extend them with improvements. Being a commercial entity, i'm sorry that it is not my duty to release my improvments to my competitors. Any of you incompetent IBM/AIX/OS/2 or SGI/Irix or HP/HP-UX or Sun/Solaris or Apple/AU-X/Mac can do the same, not that they haven't.
Of course, the universe of unix idiots and Apple fops cannot see that. The unix idiots cannot see that their fantastically stupid protocols are fantastically stupid in the first place. The Apple fanatics are simply chronically fanatical.
Microsoft product is notorious for their lack of security.
In my very sound opinion, if Microsoft's OS's security flaws is measured at one, then the unixes are measured at one myriad. If unixes suddenly switch popularity with Windows, then the world's computers will collapse uncontrollably by all sorts of viruses and attacks. This can be seen for technical person who knows unix history well:
- The Unix Pestilence (For example, ftpd/proftpd, inetd/xinetd, sendmail/qmail, X-Windows, telnet, passwd, login, rsh, rlogin.)
- “Buffer Overflow” Security Problems (2001) by Henry Baker.
- UNIX Philosophy, Fast Food the UNIX way
- Early editions of the Jargon File.
- The Rise of “Worse is Better” By Richard P Gabriel. At dreamsongs.com
and plenty other pre-90s documents to get a sense of just how fantastically insecure unix was and is. Unix today is not just technically slacking in the “security” department, but the unix ways created far more unmanageable security risks that's another topic to discuss.
The unix crime, is not just being utmost technically sloppy. Its entire system and “philosophy” created a entire generation of incompetent programers and thinking and programing languages, with damage that is a few magnitude times beyond all computer viruses and attacks damages in history combined. See also: Responsible Software Licensing .
Microsoft products are simply poor quality.
Perhaps this in general is true pre-1997. I think the vast majority of MS products today have better performance/price ratio than competitors. This includes their operating system, their input devices (mouse and keyboard), their X-Box gaming console, their software game titles, their software architectures and languages (.NET, C#), their technologies (few i know: SMB), and many of their software applications (suite of Office, which consistently ranked top since early 90s).
For example: Tom's hardware review on x-box, esp in comparison with Sony Playstation 2. (): ❮http://www4.tomshardware.com/consumer/02q1/020204/index.html❯
the leading role of MS Office products can be seen in MacUser and MacWorld magazine reviews through out early 90s.
BeOS was once to be bundled with PC, but MS meddled with it and basically at the end faaked Be up.
BeOS is a fantastically faaking useless OS. No DVD player, No Java, No QuickTime, No games, no Mathematica, no nothing. For all practical purposes, faaking useless in a different way than every donkey unixes. Not to mention the evil Apple computer, refused to pass the QuickTime technology, and tried to prevent BeOS from running on Apple hardware by refusing to release their PPC hardware spec. Be founder Jean-Louis Gassee wrote a article about it. Who's faaking whom?
X inc tried to do W, but MS threatened to depart.
Dear X inc., try to find a bigger cock for your needs. If you cannot find any, too bad! Suck it up to the big brother and hold on to what you can get! If you have the smarts, milk him dry! Free country, free to choose partnership. Ladies, previous night's indiscretion does not become rape the morning after.
I'm not a beer bucket or pizza hole, but i want to do research over the web. Is there any free stuff on the web i can grab? I'm a Open Source advocate, i demand free things.
- 〔Frequently Asked Questions on the Microsoft Antitrust Case By The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism. At
http://www.moraldefense.com/Campaigns/Microsoft/Antitrust_FAQ/default.htm(local copy antitrust_faq.txt )〕 - [The Business Community's Suicidal Impulse By Milton Friedman. At
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v21n2/friedman.html(local copy antitrust_Milton_Friedman.txt )〕 - 〔Antitrust's Greatest Hits: The foolish precedents behind the Microsoft case By David B Kopel, Joseph Bast. At
http://reason.com/0111/fe.dk.antitrusts.shtml(local copy Antitrusts_Greatest_Hits.txt )〕
I'm thinking of putting my wife and daughter on the table. What do you suggest to begin with?
Basic Economics By Thomas Sowell. 〔see Reading Notes on Basic Economics〕