Re: (fwd) Hurray for InfoWorld - Win95 L

[RUUA11A@xxxxxxxx (MR RICHARD J WILLIAMS)]

Harmon:

        On Thursday, 30 Mar 95, you wrote:


   There are very good reasons for the animosity towards MS.
First of all, you have to understand the basic hacker ethic of
trying to make a better world through the use of computers (read
Steven Levy's book
"Hackers") and particularly by trying to make all computer
hardware and software work well together to decrease the
frustration of, especially, novice users. Microsoft, however,
unlike almost all other computer companies, most definitely does
not subscribe to this ethic.

        I may not understand the basic "hacker" ethic,
        but as a former functional designer of mainframe
        computer systems, I dealt with enough
hacker/designer
        types to know that their idea of a better world
        through the use of computers was oftentimes quite
        a bit different from the ideas of the people who
        actually had to use the systems. Frequently when
        they (the hacker/designers) tried to make the
        hardware and software work well together it was
        at the expense of the folks who ultimately had to
        sit down at a terminal and actually use the stuff
        they designed. Decreasing the frustration levels
        of users was many times secondary to making the
        design of the product easy on the designer.

        Based on that experience, I believe that
        MS may not be (probably isn't) much different
        than the majority of other software designers,
        big and small alike.

  Microsoft, having control of the DOS operating system, chose
instead to put hidden code into DOS, and into windoz, that only
they knew the secrets of, so that their software would run better
than the software of competitors who didn't know about the hidden
code. Most just thought it was bugs in their own software.
Because of this sort of thing, MS has been having problems with
the U.S. Justice Dept. for anti-trust violations.

        I don't know enough about the anti-trust laws
        to comment on this, but then neither do the
        baseball owners and look at the shape they're in.

  This is also why companies like Novell, Lotus, and Sun detest
MS to the point of spending significant amounts of money just to
provide alternatives, like DR-DOS, and the public domain windows
APIs that Sun is writing.

        Is it detesting MS, or just an effort to provide
        a better product and by so doing get a bigger
        share of the market? And does it really matter,
        especially if those companies do manage to produce
        a better product than MS? The consumer benefits,
        and that's pretty much what the free market
        economy is all about.

  Furthermore, MS has used bullying tactics to smaller
companies and has actually stolen software from small companies,
assuming, and rightly so, that the smaller companies wouldn't
have the money to take them on in court. They got away with it a
number of times, although the company that wrote Stacker nailed
them for it in court.
Almost bankrupted them (Stacker) but they made their point.
  Even worse, MS has started putting code into DOS and windoz
to make it actually trash other software, like OS/2. This is
fact, not rumour. IBM had to make changes in OS/2 just to
overcome these bugs. Some people would call these things
unethical. I call them outrageous, disgusting, and criminal.
There are many of us who boycott all MS products.

        I can't condone MS's behavior, but it's
        certainly not uncommon in American business
        history. If you decided to boycott every company
        who ever did something unethical, outrageous,
        disgusting, and criminal, you'd be living in a
        log cabin in the woods and walking to work...and
        probably doing your work with a pencil and paper,
        since "Big Blue" itself isn't without taint in
        this area either.

  The point here is to influence TTG, to attempt to disuade them
from developing for win95 and develop for OS/2 instead. MS has a
history of smooth-talking small companys like TTG into developing
for windoz, then making them fail, and thereby getting rid of
competition.

        As anyone who is familiar with Dr. Deming's work
        can tell you (and I'm sure Bill Gates is),
        competition is actually something which helps
        produce a better product/service. And as big
        and successful as MS is, why would they waste
        their time and effort making small companies
        fail? Also, I believe that Mr. Frank has
        already explained why TTG can't arbitrarily
        stop developing for Windows.

  But also just because OS/2 is a very, very superior product.
There is simply no comparison between OS/2 and windoz, and as you
can see from the Infoworld article, win90never (WinEver?) is
seriously flawed. But so many companies are being conned into
developing for it. A lot of people think that win95 is just one
big MS scam to get rid of a lot of competition.
After all these little companies spend all their resources
developing for chicago/win95 which keeps being delayed, delayed,
delayed, and then finally dropped altogether --- while MS,
knowing what they are doing, develops there stuff for their new
system they aren't telling the masses about.
Could be!

        That's true, it could be; even paranoiacs
        have enemies.

  Quite frankly, I don't think XyWrite will be around much
longer, and that saddens me, because I've loved it for years. But
TTG is not the company that XyQuest was, and that's why Notabene
jumped ship.


        Well, I haven't agreed with much else you've
        said, so why start now? I think XyWrite will
        be around for quite some time yet, even if--
        as someone suggested recently--it's only being
        used by dedicated XyWriters like ourselves,
        knowing that no upgrades/enhancements are on
        the horizon, but sticking with it anyway because
        it is the best product.

                .......DW

        You can't always get what you want, but if you try
        sometimes you just might find, you get what you need.