>
> On Thu, Nov 05, 1998 at 06:53:23PM -0800, Javilk wrote:
> > MS is not acting as a good corporate citizen. It needs to be
> > dismembered, or worse. I vote for the corporate death penalty.
>
> Woo-hoo! Hopefully the DoJ will inflict just that.
The Clinton thing seems to suggest that America no longer cares about
legalities, etc. I find this rather startling, as law, values, etc. are
what built this country, and kept many baronial types from stealing
everyone totally blind.
> But you know, I think they're already in deep trouble.
>
> Their entire business model is predicated on their ability to grow
> faster than their competition. And now they have competition that
> they can't keep up with, can't squeeze out of the market, can't buy,
> can't litigate against, can't intimidate -- the millions of developers
> cranking out freeware.
That is questionable. There are only so many geeks out there, and
they grow older. I am reminded of the glory days of the S-100 bus. It
lasted till all the geeks had their own S-100 machines. Then the market
folded, and other markets opened.
THE KEY is how easy the real deep geeks make it for semi-geeks and
just people with ideas to implement things. MS has done a very good job of
keeping semi-geeks from creating applications, thus restricting general
competition.
Remember, Digital Research included an assembler in their operating
system. That assembler bootstrapped the development of other tools. MS did
not include any development tools. They didn't want competition.
We are doing some of this on the web too... keeping the non-cognosi
out, that is. My original browser had nothing like HTML code -- for a
URL, you typed the actual name with a visible two character prefix. For
headers, etc, you had the text intruding into the left margin. And unless
explicitly locked, files were user modifiable. (Though the copy would be
saved on your drive.) It was plain, simple, CLEAR to anyone how to use it,
how to make things with it. A secretary set up an entire reservation
system in an evening using this kind of typed link methodology. No
programming required. You reserved a cabin, you linked it to the reserved
list. You canceled it, you unlinked it. It was just papers and lists,
that is all, but it was user comprehensible.
In contrast, this web requires HTML codes, and prevents people from
modifying anything. Hence, it is not growing as fast as it could have.
Is this web better than the other web? It just depends. (Hey, I didn't
have graphics! This web looks better!)
> Add to that the growing snowball of end-user applications available
> on freeware platforms...Sun...Apple (they're ba-ack)...
Up to a point.
> They have problems. And what's bad for Microsoft is good for the
> entire computing industry, so I couldn't be more delighted. The
> sooner we dispose of them, the sooner we can get around to making
> some of the progress that they've prevented for the last 15 years.
>
> I wonder how the DoJ would feel if we set up a cheering section
> at the trial.
I doubt they would approve. However, I suppose we could e-mail our
horror stories to them, CC'ing various newspapers... But we DO have to
tell the truth and the whole truth.
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