Microsoft is doing their best. Is it good enough?

[Peter L. Peres]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2003, Duncan MacGregor wrote:

> Microsoft is doing their best.
>
> The issue is not whether their products are good enough for them, but whether
> they are good enough for us.

The general issue is that they act as a monopoly so they have commoditized
hw and sw to the point where they *are* the hw and the sw and *dictate
prices*. Incidentally they destroyed several dozen highly inventive high
quality hw makers in the process and have made far east produced
cheapest-of-the-cheap crapola so called hardware (don't squeeze the mouse
too hard and don't shine your halogen desk lamp on it and don't use your
cell phone near it - guess why I write this ?). Also a computer is no
longer an 'investment' and the piles of dead computers started being so
huge they cause environmental problems. After market no longer exists.
Repair consists of swapping cards (if any), then upgrading.

Have you noticed the price jump for boxed XP vs. boxed W98 ?  Such price
jumps are only possible for a monopoly. No such price hikes appeared with
ANY other OS maker, including Linux. They did this by using monopoly
techniques. Notice how they dropped support for W98 as soon as possible.
When is the drop for XP sheduled ? What will your software run on in 5
years (if it will run) ? Do you plan a very short carreer (like, under 5
years in computing) ? Otherwise, I fully agree with you, they did what was
best for them. So do sharks you know. Fill the tummy with whatever is
swimming in their waters and keep growing, and shine that fin whenever
they can.

And people who make appliances should keep doing that, and stay out of
'general purpose computing' which is what the PC was designed for. Sony
Playstation was designed to run games, the Xbox competes with it, Tivo is
a fancy VCR (never mind what OS it's running), and the PC is an afordable
workstation for the masses. Not a game console.

Not an appliance. A general purpose computing low-cost workstation. Such
that my neighbor can do word processing and I can run a compiler and the
other guy some statistics software from a thrid party. NOT such that we
all run the programming language flavor the borg decided is 'in' this
week. Nor do I wish to see the trend to need to upgrade every 2 years at
most continue. I have stuff I've made 10 years ago that still works under
Linux. The dos versions/windows versions ? haha. History. I'd have to
spend $1500 a year on licenses just to be able to maintain a decent
toolchain set for M$ upgrade-or-die ware.

Peter
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