Tim May (who has me killfiled) writes:
> Furthermore, Netscape and Sun picked this war when they announced,
> respectively, that their plan was to have "the browser as OS" and
> "Java as OS." Recall that Andreesen and Clark and such were touting
> Netscape Navigator as the "Microsoft killer," as the environment in
> which word processors and spreadsheets and such would live. Didn't
> quite happen this way, did it?
Opportunities to destroy Microsoft abounded, but the people who had them
screwed them up. Not Microsoft's problem.
I don't like Microsoft. But then, I don't dislike it enough to spend a
lot of time writing better code. Path of least resistance. I don't run
Microsoft software when there is an alternative, and when I do run it, it
sort of works well enough at a cheap enough cost that I get whatever I'm
trying to do done.
> Microsoft can hardly be faulted for fighting back. In fact, they did
> with their integration of the browser into the OS what Netscape was
> _talking_ about doing but never did.
Some companies have killer computer science. Some companies have killer
marketing. Perfect code is not a product. Neither are lovely papers you
can get published in peer-reviewed journals.
Microsoft does enough things well in the right combination to make money,
and to compete effectively. Other companies may do certain things, like
expressing their code in the smallest number of machine instructions, or
using the very latest singing and dancing algorithms, very well. If this
is their only claim to excellence, they will probably go out of business.
Back in my youth, I used to cringe at, and rewrite, many things I saw in
commercial operating systems. The vendors never cared, never added my
suggestions, and the fact that some of the things they did were horrible
and inefficient affected their bottom line not one iota. I've seen techs
write ten pages of hand-tuned assembler counting every register for a
single site having performance problems, knowing that it will never make
it into the released product, will never leave that site, and will be
thrown in the garbage at the next upgrade.
The big picture involves only the bottom line, and when you globally
optimize your business plan, it generally doesn't include making any part
of your product perfect, just good enough.
Or as the VP of R&D at Boeing once said, "This isn't Boeing University."
> Netscape kept on bloating up their browser to the point where 4 and
> 4.5 were 12+ megabytes of crashing cruft. Like many others, I
> switched to Explorer a year or two ago. I like it a lot.
Netscape is a classic example of how not to manage a big software
project, and how open-sourcing the resulting mess will not get your ass
out of a sling. Sucks to be them.
Linux, of course, is the canonical example of how to do such things right.
> You also have no appreciation of the concept of "initiation of
> force." The break up of Microsoft is initiation of force. Period.
This is correct. The Government wants Microsoft's code.
Oddly enough, there was a case a number of years back, when the Coca-Cola
company refused to produce the formula for Coke under court order while
fighting a case. The government backed down, and didn't jail the board of
directors indefinitely, or fine them into non-existence.
Perhaps Microsoft should just try saying "No," and see whether the
government is really willing to succede American software dominance to
Calcutta Windows and Bejing Office.
--
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
