From: Secret Squirrel <anon@squirrel.owl.de>
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 17:58:49 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Coercive Monopolism vs Wimpyness
Message-ID: <713df006e49f70c246e313026b68041a@squirrel>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>And, since Windows OS is so pitifully lousy, why do people continue to buy
>it, even without the computer attached;  why do they continue to upgrade,
>even if it's so slow and bloated?   Don't they realize Unix is better?
>Don't they realize they're just making Billg richer?

I use Linux primarily. People still buy Winblows for the same reasons I
bought Winblows 95.

Want to play a game from the store? Windows 95.

Want to install a new image in your Flash RAM on your motherboard? DOS
(Windows 95).

Want to have vendor-produced drivers? Windows 95.

Want to parse MS Turd documents? Windows 95 and MS Office.

Want to use a Windows-specific bullshit class registration system at your
university? Windows 95.

Want to run that program your mother sends you and wants you to run? She
uses Windows 95 because it was preinstalled on her machine, so you must use
Windows 95 too.

Some kind of bizarre hardware which the manufactuers won't release specs
for? (The AWE32 is a good example. Eventually somebody got pissed and
reverse engineered it.) Windows 95.

Happened to buy a printer? It won't say "Yes! It works with Ghostscript!" In
fact it won't say anything about hardware compatability. It'll just say
"Windows drivers included" along with a list of a bunch of software that I
don't want and don't need. So if it happens that the printer is
nonstandard...Windows 95.

Have a bunch of people in the office who don't care about platform
compatability and pass around Windows-specific document types or programs?
Windows 95.

Have a bunch of people in the office who, simply because Windows and
sometimes MacOS are taught as "computer education" in many universities and
public schools can't use anything else? Windows 95.

Have to use a university computer lab? The machines are probably running
Windows 95. So you wind up with an incentive to use Windows 95 elsewhere.
So...again, Windows 95.

Want to have a working copy of PGP 5.0 while everybody else has started
sending out DH-encrypted/signed messages and rolled DH keys? Windows 95.
(Yeah, yeah. The source was released in book form.)

This goes on and on and on. Sure there are counter arguments for these but
it gets real touchy real quick. Ever try to pressure a game company into
releasing Linux versions? Ever try to pressure an applications company to
release Linux versions? 

Explanation and analysis:

Microsoft spends millions on marketting. Linux, BSD, et al. simply don't
have a massive marketting machine. The PC rags and TV shows like CNet are
supported by Windows applications, Windows games, Microsoft, and
platform-specific web sites. 

Microsoft has no qualms about outright lying in its marketting material.
Look at the messages which display during Windows 95 installation for a good
example. "What you want to do, and more, is now possible." Yeah. What if I
want to have a decent telnet client? What if I want to have tons of free
software? They don't qualify the statement, yet the Microsoft lackies think
that Microsoft would never lie and it must be true.

The Windows interface is "point and drool." This has the effect of
attracting every lazy person possible. I say "lazy" because it's basically
no work to remember "rm" rather than "left click and drag to the recycle
bin." These people don't know how *anything* works on even the most basic
level. The Linux/BSD/whatever developers aren't going to make an interface
like that because they're competent, aren't trying to make money, don't want
to cripple their platform with it, and they don't necessarily want to
attract these people. Generally speaking, as "da web" has proven, if it
takes no brains to use something people with no brain will be attracted to
it in great numbers.

Microsoft, their friends, and some of their enemies did everything they
possibly could to break the web. HTML was designed as a relatively simple,
platform independant method of storing information. The idea was that you
could go throw in an image, but it was supposed to *augment* the message,
not *be* the message. And regardless of what you did the page was supposed
to be viewable from a text terminal. 

Netscape started by adding non-standard extensions to HTML, in effect
encouraging people to make Netscape-specific web pages. Netscape Gold and
other "web page designers" encourage people to release platform-specific web
pages -- they *should* throw an error if somebody puts in an unnamed link.
Then of course we had stuff like server-side image maps. And we have pages
with frames which are impossible to correctly display in a text mode, and
which bitch and moan and suggest you download Microsoft Internet Explorer or
Netscape Navigator/Communicator to read it. And I've seen pages which are
nothing but graphics files -- but hey, they're okay because they display
correctly in MSIE or Netscape.

Microsoft continues its little jihad by perverting Java, which is supposed
to be another platform-independant language, into a Windows-specific
language. While they were at it both Microsoft and Netscape decided to start
slinging HTML and nonstandard MIME types all over email and news postings.

When you buy a prebuilt computer in most cases you don't have a choice. You
have to get Windows 95, MSIE, and whatever other crap they decide to pile
on. Normally this wouldn't be a problem and you would just go to another
vendor but just about every single vendor is like this. 

When you buy hardware you pay for all sorts of Windows software. So now you
have all kinds of (bad) Windows software, so there's another reason to
use Windows. Microsoft knows this. For example, when you buy a scanner you
get Windows software for it, absolutely no design specs, no compatability
list, and in many cases they flat-out *won't* release design specs. 

When you call for technical support many (most?) places tell you to do
something like this: "Okay. Go click on the 'My Computer' icon--" "Uh, I run
Linux." "Uh, we don't support that." (Hint: It was a *hardware* problem,
*not* a software problem, but go boot up into Windows just so we know it was
broken. Oh, and you better have the latest version because that's all we
support.)

Many vendors only release drivers for whatever the latest and greatest
version of Winblows is going to be. Windows 3.1 drivers are starting to get
scarce. DOS drivers are basically nonexistant. Say, for instance, you
purchase or receive Windows NT Workstation 4.0. You then go out and buy an
AWE64. Creative Labs has stated that they aren't releasing a decent AWE64
driver for NT 4.0, but instead are targetting it at NT 5.0.

Compare this with the UNIX world where, for the most part, things are
platform independant and people like platform compatability. Most of the
time I can run something on Linux which I can run on BSD which I can run on
SunOS, etc.