From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 04:27:46 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Why I Support Microsoft
In-Reply-To: <v0310280db0c2f8195048@[207.167.93.63]>
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Tim May <tcmay@got.net> writes:

> (Caveat: I used Microsoft Basic on Intel MDS systems (8080-based), circa
> 1977-78, bought a PC in the early 80s, bought "Microsoft Word" Version 1.00
> when most people were buying Samna Word, Wordstar, and other such vanished
> products, and even bought the execrable, terrible, crufty, horrible
> "Windows 1.0" when it first came out, circa 1984. And for my Macintosh, I
> bought Microsoft Word 1.05 and used it for many years in various versions.
> I currently use no Microsoft products on a daily basis.)

I remember MS Word 1.0 for MS DOS.  It was the first crude WYSYWYG on the CGA:
it displayed primitive boldface and italics on screen, unlike most other
word processors of that era that mostly used markup languages.

I used Windows .9beta quite heavily and even wrote some primitive GUI hacks
using the SDK. One of them was a front-end to a DES encoder/decoder. It has 3
areas for entering a key: as text, as hex, and as binary; updating one area
immediately updated the other 2. That was circa 83 or even 82. Of course all
the APIs are different under newer windows. Anybody cares to see it?

Of course, Windows 1.x and 2.x were a miserable failure in the marketplace
because the requisite hardware wasn't there yet. So was VisiOn, but Windows had
bill gates support. 3.0 was moderately successful; 3.1 was actually profitable.
Microsoft lost a lot of bets before this product line finally took off.
Microsoft spent a lots of money on the "Bob" project which was a complete
failure.

I also got OS/2 1.0 from Microsoft in 1988, together with the Microsoft/Ahton
Tate SQL server (based on Sybases's). SYBS stupidly sold their pricey
product to microsoft, figuring the micro market would never be of use to SYBS.

Microsoft then decided to pull the rug from under its OS/2 users, so I
switched to IBM OS/2.

> The appearance of Ralph Nader, Jamie Love, and executives of Netscape (who
> are miffed that _their_ attempted monopoly is being threatened by MS!), in
> the (ironic) "Microsoft Bash," along with opportunistic actions by various
> states' attorney generals, and with judges imposing million dollar a day
> fines.....
>
> Well, it's all a familiar pattern. I hate to say it, but read parts of
> "Atlas Shrugged" to see this piling on, this "taking down the successful a
> few notches" behavior.

I hate to admit it, but I agree with Timmy on this one.

> Attila T. Hun is, for some reason, bashing MS a lot. I'll use one of his
> posts to make some specific points:

If Hitler gasses Goebbels, would you object?

> At 10:15 AM -0700 12/21/97, Attila T. Hun wrote:
>
> >> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge Friday told Microsoft
> >> Corp.  he easily uninstalled the company's Web browser
> >> without breaking Windows 95 and ordered company officials to
> >> explain why they could not do the same.  "Windows 95
> >> functioned flawlessly" with Internet Explorer uninstalled,
> >> U.S.  District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson told Microsoft.
> >>
> >    mistake #1: dont piss off a federal judge --let alone
> >    try to show that he is ignorant.

If IE does include some important bug fixes for the OS (like MS Office does),
then Microsoft ought to make these patches available as OS patches and not
bundle them with other products. "Ought to" doesn't mean it's illegal for them
to only bundle...

> PC makers like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, etc., are in fact perfectly free to
> bundle Netscape Navigator (or whatever the Do Everything version is called)
> with their systems. Microsoft is then perfectly free, in a free society, to
> say "Fine, then don't put Windows on your machines."

Ah, but they'd rather sell their hardware with a bunch of pre-installed
software, and charge the poor consumer for it. If you buy an IBM Thinkpad, they
refuse to sell it without Windows 95 preinstalled, and America Online software
(probably charged for it), and a bunch of Lotus software (123, some
wordprocess, etc); even if the first thing you intend to do is to reformat the
hard disk and instal Linux.

In an ideal world, MSFT would be free to refuse to sell its OS to hardware
makers because they're owned by gooks; to demand that the hardware makers pay
MSFT a licence fee for every piece of hardware they sell, whether or not they
included Win95 with it; and to insist that the hardware makers include a big
disclaimer saying they don't support Netscape products as a condition for
getting an MSFT licence. But we're not living in a free country.

> Customers can then make their choices. Or can buy Windows in the nearest
> software store. The way it used to be done.

They refuse to sell "bare hardware" because they get part of the profit on
selling it with the software pre-installed: typically not just the OS, but a
bunch of useless apps that most users never use.

Likewise try to buy a scanner without a bundled useless Windows software that's
"supposed" to go with a scanner; or a color printer without bundled
finger-painting software for Windows; or a modem without bundled
"communications software" (which almost always includes a Netscape browser).
You can't avoid paying for the media and the license to this useless shit.

> Yielding to pressure from the court, MS is now allowing PC makers to also
> include Netscape Navigator. Well, none have yet elected to do so...quite
> probably because Netscape is _charging_ for this, and MS is not.

They would if the consumers demanded it. Of course the consumers can get
netscape for free if they want it. Lots of folks use their computers for more
productive work than interenet browsing and don't want any browser at all.

> (To Ralph Nader, and perhaps even to Attila, that MS is _giving_ away its
> browser, free for the download and free to the PC vendors, is itself a
> crime.)

Sure - unfair competition. :-) They'll go after GNU and linux too, given
time. Remember how Ziff-Davis publications refused to acknowledge the
exietence of free software or sharewre (and mostly still do)? Remember the talk
about licencing software developers?

> >    this is my one big fear: the DOJ will accept a plea
> >    bargain like they did last time and it will be back
> >    to business as usual for M$ --and they will be back in
> >    court within a year having gained even more horizontal
> >    and vertical control of the entire communications
> >    and information industries --and claiming again that
> >    they are misunderstood --and complying with the order,
> >    etc.
>
> Customers are voting with their pocketbooks. They like the MS offerings
> more than they like the competing offerings...of which there are still many.

Microsoft has gone through many failures before they finally came up with
products that consumers preferred. Microsoft benefited from very stupid
mistakes made by IBM and Sybase and Digital Research at various times, but
they've made pelnty of stupid mistakes of their own. Right now they're being
rewarded for trying many product only some of which sold well.

> (Macintosh, Unix in several flavors (incl Linux), and loyal followings for
> older OSes. Sun and Oracle and others are pushing for Java-based systems to
> obsolete the MS products. This is a major struggle which analyses about
> Microsoft's "domination" seem to ignore.)

Java's dead. However no one is preventing Atilla from writing e.g. a word
processor superior to MS Word and letting it compete in the marketplace.

> >    there is only one solution to organizations like M$
> >    which are operated without ethics: treat them to the
> >    pleasures of not only the antitrust laws but the
> >    exquisite delights of RICO.
>
> I cannot understand how Attila can so enthusiastically support this. His
> "exquisite delights" even recalls Torquemada and the Inquistion. A suitable
> term for what is being to MS, in my view.

I have mixed feelings about this... MS is a turd of the same shitpile
as DOJ, Ralph Nader, and Nescape. If one of them fucks another one of
them in the ass, as opposed to fucking an innocent bystander, we can gloat.

> >    M$ is a cancer; it has fully metasticized and is gorging
> >    itself at the banquet of the vanquished.
>
> Ralph Nader would probably be interested in hiring ATH as a speech writer.

Given free competition, MSFT would go wither away and die under its own weight.
Look at the stupidity they've unleashed in Windows 98:

* yet another user interface (while people are still retraining from 3.1 to
W95/NT4)

* No support for NTFS, but yet another wasteful file system (FAT32) [This is
really something. It's hard to fine a disk drive under 2GB these days and the
FAT filesystem is extremely inefficient on it. Instead of supporting NT's NTFS
(fairly fast and efficient; similar to OS/2 HPFS in many respects :-), MSFT
introduces yet another filesystem, that's actually slower than the 16-bot FAT
and wastes more disk storage in unsused clusters than any I've ever seen)

> >    anyway, just think where M$ would be with Royce today!
> >    Gate$ and Ballmer might be down at the local MCC for a
> >    few free 3 hots and a cot, all expenses paid, "enjoying"
> >    a well earned vacation from screwing all of us.
>
> I take it that ATH means that because something like 20 or 30 million
> Americans chose to buy Windows 95 (and thus gain the benefits we Macintosh
> users have had for many years :-}) that this means "we" were screwed?

In a sense, yes - if everyone freely chooses to use Windows 95 and not, say,
OS/2, and as the result the companies that developed software for OS/2 go
bankrupt (as most of them indeed did :-), and then there's no application
software for OS/2, then OS/2 users like myself are indeed screwed.

And it is Microsoft's fault for offering a more popular product; or perhaps
IBM's fault for fucking up OS/2.

> >    Other than the usual ills of a monopoly, what really
> >    irks anyone with a modicum of intelligence is that Gate$
> >    intends to migrate the entire package for the benefit of
> >    the couch potatoes; Gate$ intends to dictate not only
> >    what we use to view his trash, but that only his trash
> >    is splashed.
>
> Why not pick on Intel? Intel is, if anything, even more of a "monopoly"
> than MS is. While customers have some reasonable choices in OSes
> (Windows/NT, Unix, Linux, Macintosh, AmigaOS, Inferno, Java-based
> developments, etc.), the fact is that all of the surviving OSes are being
> ported to the Intel platform (pace recent announcements by Sun that Solaris
> will be on  Merced at its rollout in 1999, and earlier announcements by
> H-P, DEC, and IBM along the same lines).

Although I always buy Intel CPUs (afraid of compatability problems), there are
now plenty of clones from AMD, Cyrix, and IBM. Back in 8088 days I avoided
using Intel and insisted on the NEC clone. Intel's architecture is very
popular, but it's not necessary running on intel-made chips, or (more
relevantly) chips whose sales give Intel revenues.

> But neither MS nor Intel are "monopolies." They are just the People's
> Choice. Which always tends to cluster...the big really do get bigger. For
> awhile, at least, until the paradigm shifts and the big can't adapt quickly
> enough.

The way Microsoft seems to be unable to adapt to large hard disks :-)

> >> After the hearing Friday, Christine Varney, a former Federal
> >> Trade Commissioner now representing Netscape, was jubilant.
> >> "I think the judge has understood the seriousness of the
> >> issue," she said.
> >>
> >    she had every reason to be jubilant --so far. even if
> >    the judge did not fully understand the technological
> >    bullshit M$ was trying to slide on by, the judge fully
> >    understands that M$ was trying to blind pitch him --and
> >    insulting him to boot.
>
> Of _course_ she's jubilant! Netscape wants its "rightfully-earned monopoly"
> back! Has anyone forgotten that in 1995 it was looking like Netscape would
> be on 95% of all desktops, Windows, Mac, and Unix, and that it was turning
> into the Big Bad Monopoly? Are memories really that short?
>
> Netscape has been using its legal manouvers to attempt to stop Microsoft
> from horning in on _its_ monopoly.
>
> (I hate using the term "monopoly," but if critics of MS are going to use
> it, hey, when in Rome....)

I should also mention that Netscape was engaging in pretty nasty (although
legal) behavior by "enhancing" its browser to support non-standard HTML
extensions; some assholes uses these extensions on their web sites and then
theycould only be browser properly with a Netscape browser.

> >> Microsoft stock closed at $128.69, down $2.19 on NASDAQ,
> >> where it was among the most active issues.
>
> >    yes, down almost 20 points since their fiasco with the
> >    DOJ started. before it's over, I hope to see M$ listed
> >    with the junk bonds and issues --in the penny stocks.
> >
>
> Yep, sort of the way Netscape stock went from its IPO price of around $25
> (in today's shares) to $80 when it looked like Netscape Navigator and
> related products were going to be the Next Big Monopoly....and then
> plummeted down to the $30-40 range as it appeared this was not the way
> things were going to turn out....
>
> Netscape stock is currently at $27 3/4, just about where it began trading
> in '95.

I haven't look at NSCP's reports at all, but I presume most of their revenues
comes from their server sales, not the browser licenses?

> Perhaps the graphics chip companies facing extinction as Intel puts massive
> graphics capabilities into new chips can sue on antitrust grounds and get a
> "special master" to dictate to Intel what features it may put into chips?

it's funny that you mention this: I was just talking to someone who mentioned
that Lockheed-Martin is threatening INTC with anti-trust if Intel puts graphics
features in its chipsets that would hurt the sales some Lockheed-Martin
subsidiary. I suppose S3, Dimond multimedia, et al will b happy to join.

> (Certainly the long-departed Weitek might have survived a few more years
> had Ralph Nader turned his unsafe at any speed attention to the floating
> point processing market and gotten an injunction against Intel putting
> onboard floating point instructions into the 486.)

Hmm - having used Weitek chips a lot (alongside Intel 386's) I doubt very much
that Intel's integrating the floating point unit into the 486 contributed much
to its demise. I personally quit using Weiteks when I discovered that their
double precision operations were about 10 times slower than single precision,
and in fact slower than ab Intel 80387 co-processor!

> I cannot understand how any Cypherpunk can be advocating interference in
> the market the way Attila and a few others are doing.
>
> Making jokes about Bill Gates is one thing, just harmless fun. But
> advocating the Men with Guns (TM) seize control of the products he offers
> to uncoerced customers is simply wrong.

best scenario: men with guns die from AIDS
second best: men with guns shoot each other
worst: men with guns shoot innocent bystanders
MSFT is no innocent bystander.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps