"...One OS to bring them all, and in the darkness bind
them..."
Although an apology to J.R.R. Tolkien is probably in order here, the
similarities between the Rings of Power and the various Microsoft products are
striking. They will subtly try to take control of you, and every time you give
in to the temptation to use one, the Dark Lord's power increases.
And in this respect Microsoft's control over document formats and standards
for data exchange are most certainly the One Ring of Power.
When it comes to supporting of the global standards used in today's
IT market, Microsoft's record has never been good. They have always been
extremely sloppy in following the standards' specifications, they have
attempted to appropriate the standards for HTML, Java, E-mail and more,
and they have tried to push proprietary standards that are only supported
by Microsoft applications. Fortunately, the Internet community has resisted
most of these attempts so far, although the 'Global XML Web Services
Architecture' (announced by Bill Gates in October 2001) doesn't bode
well.
In the hardware market, especially where peripherals are concerned,
compatibility is also deliberately being limited. Far too often the label
'Designed for Windows' means 'incompatible with anything else'. We've seen
modems and printers that had no standard interface or hardware API but a
proprietary Windows driver instead, and we'll see more of it. For example,
before Windows XP was released Microsoft tried (but fortunately failed) to
persuade PC manufacturers to discontinue the PCI bus and to support USB
devices only. Older versions of Windows, as well as Linux and other Open
Source products have limited or no USB support.
But it's the application market where things are most serious. Microsoft's
huge market penetration has flooded the world with documents in all kinds of
proprietary formats. According to calculations by Gartner, switching from
MS Office to the OpenSource alternative OpenOffice or StarOffice alone will
cost, on average, $1200 per user, mainly for document and macro conversion,
learning a new user interface and lost productivity during the migration.
The stranglehold that MS has on the IT market is a major problem for
those who work in a multi-vendor environment. Microsoft applications always
produce documents in a Microsoft-proprietary format, and they never run on
anything but the Wintel platform. (OK, Microsoft ported Internet Explorer to
Solaris and the Mac during their marketing war against Netscape, and they
resurrected MacOffice as part of their anti-DoJ strategy with a few
half-hearted versions for the Mac that are full of compatibility issues. But
that's about it.) The net result of this is that when someone sends you a
PowerPoint 2000 document and you don't have Windows, you have to switch
operating systems in order to view it.
(You may fail to see how ridiculous this really is. After all, it's only
reasonable to expect office personnel to run Windows with MS-Office,
isn't it? Well... Think about it. Things have deteriorated to a point
where many people actually look at it this way.)
Here's what Forrester Research said about Microsoft and standards:
Why Microsoft "Standards" Do Not Help
They:This is hardly in the best interest of IT.
- Work only for Windows (thus leaving out all other systems that do not run Windows and are unlikely to do so in the future)
- Increase Support Demands (since techies still must load, update and maintain proprietary code on every computer)
- Restrict Creativity (since Bill Gates' troops are defining the generic software layer, MS can tailor the interface to match its own technology biases -- and shut out competing ideas
Apart from the obvious inability to process documents from a Microsoft
application in a non-Microsoft environment, there's also the limited
inter-operability with Microsoft products that makes life in a multi-vendor
environment difficult. Microsoft's deliberate use of proprietary
standards, proprietary extensions to global standards, and their own incorrect
implementations of global standards, often makes it extremely complicated to
use Microsoft products in anything but a Microsoft-only environment.
Some of Microsoft's standardization efforts are relatively harmless and merely
irritating. The Joliet CD-ROM format extensions, for example, are annoying
but not really a problem. In the initial Joliet specifications Microsoft
claimed that Joliet was needed in order to enhance the interchangeability of
CD-ROM based data, since the bare ISO-9660 specs were too restrictive. Granted,
ISO-9660 is far from luxurious, but MacOS and Unixen already had extensions
to ISO-9660 that worked quite well and that could have been adopted right
away. For a long time Windows was the only platform that could handle
Joliet CD-ROM's. Joliet support doesn't even extend to the boot disks that come
with Windows 9x/ME: since these are DOS-based they can only handle ISO-9660.
That means that even Windows' own installation software cannot read Joliet
CD-ROM's. In order to make their own installer work, Microsoft still has
to ship Windows 9x/ME on ISO-9660 CD-ROM's. How's that for Joliet's enhanced
data interchangeability?
Another annoying example is the use of MS-TNEF file attachments in E-mail. This
is Microsoft's idea of using 'Rich Text' in E-mail messages, so that extensive
formatting (different fonts, headers, italics, etc.) becomes possible. If you
tell MS-Word to E-mail a document, this is what you get. Unfortunately, if
the recipient of such a document happens not to use Outlook to read E-mail,
his or her PC doesn't recognize the MS-TNEF format, and trying to use MS-Word
to read it won't work either. In other words, if a Microsoft application
uses 'Rich Text' to send a nicely formatted E-mail message, the recipient of
that message is forced to use Outlook (and therefore Windows) to read it.
Outlook also sends messages that contain all kinds of embedded bells and
whistles, MIME-attached business cards, message text in HTML format, embedded
VBS, et cetera ad nauseam. This nonsense will be attractively displayed if
the message recipient also uses Outlook (i.e. Windows) but is only so much
garbage when viewed with any other RFC-compliant message editor.
A side-effect of Microsoft's indiscriminate use of non-standards and their
sloppy implementation of standards they happen to support, is that third-party
developers are under increasing pressure to support Microsoft's deviations.
If software is confused by the way Outlook or Exchange treat message headers,
customers who use Outlook tend to demand that all products must handle mail
from Outlook correctly, reasoning that since Outlook is the most widely used
client today, all the world must be expected to support its quirks.
While these deliberate impediments to information exchange are extremely
annoying, they're not all that bad in comparison to other issues. Microsoft
violates a number of 'best practices' that aren't really standards but that
nevertheless ensure interoperability. For example, it's common practice not
to use whitespace in filenames, since many operating systems use whitespace
for command parsing and not all file systems can handle it. But Windows uses
filenames that contain whitespace by default, which leads to problems when
Windows systems send or share files through non-Microsoft networking
technology. For example, using FTP on a Unix file system that also acts as an
SMB share for Windows clients often causes problems at the Unix end.
There are also deviations from the official, stricter standards. The sloppy
implementation of the SMTP protocol in the Microsoft Exhange mail server,
for example, can affect the flow of E-mail in other parts of the Internet
and in non-Microsoft E-mail servers. Microsoft's Directory Services products
tout being LDAP and ODBC compliant, but if you want an X.500 directory or
a sync engine (other than MS DirSync) to talk to it, you'll need custom
meta agents.
These issues are more than just annoying; they are serious hurdles in a
multi-vendor environment (such as the Internet) and mean a possible disruption
to the interoperability of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft systems.
Then there are the really nasty deviations from global standards that
Microsoft has deliberately introduced to sabotage interoperability and freedom
of choice. Take HTML and Java for example. The Frontpage web editor, the IIS
webserver and the various backend E-commerce products all generate proprietary
extensions to HTML and scripting languages that only Internet Explorer on
Windows will handle correctly, and renders all other web browsers and
platforms unusable. The same goes for Java support: Microsoft Java does not
follow the Java specifications. Again this means that applets in this
particular dialect can only be executed by Microsoft's own Java engine on
Windows. Yet Microsoft used the Java label for products that were incompatible
with the Java standard. This caused Sun to file suit. Microsoft then dropped
the global Java standard entirely and now only supports their own Java
dialect. The net result of this whole procedure is that Microsoft web server
products and development tools generate code that needs Windows, Internet
Explorer and the Microsoft Java engine at the user end in order to work
properly.
So the use of a simple consumer-level HTML editor like Frontpage can be the
start of complete vendor-dependence. Frontpage is mainly intended for
consumer use, and at the professional end of the scale we have IIS, ASP,
scripting and other dynamic technologies, and the backend and development tools
to create them. The World Wide Web becomes flooded with non-compliant HTML and
JavaScript code that generates error messages, or that works incorrectly or not
at all, with Netscape Navigator or other non-Microsoft browsers. Only with
Internet Explorer on Windows these websites can be displayed correctly. Recent
versions of Frontpage, IIS and the assorted E-commerce solutions increasingly
use this proprietary scripting code for menus and navigation. This makes
correct support of these dialects (read: the use of IE on Windows) essential
to the usability of a website.
And this is not a transient problem, because competing browser manufacturers
can never keep up. Shortly after Microsoft releases an updated version of
Frontpage, IIS or other backend or development tools, older browsers will
begin to show more and more error messages, and users will be urged to upgrade
to the latest version of Internet Explorer. Some Microsoft web server products
even use Active-X. That means that if you access a website that uses Active-X
(another Microsoft 'standard'), the server sends commands to your browser
which then makes system calls directly into your Windows operating system
code. These websites can only be fully and correctly accessed and displayed
by clients running MS-Windows. Non-Wintel systems (e.g. workstations running
Unix) are excluded from those web-based services.
Also, in 2003 Microsoft participated in the Web Services workgroup of the W3C
(the World Wide Web Consortium, a committee that maintains and guards the
global web standards that we all use) with hopes of getting some Microsoft
proprietary technology ratified as a global standard. Since the W3C was
unwilling to do this (read: to promote technology to be used on a royalty
basis) the Microsoft representatives picked up their marbles and left, stating
that the purposes of the W3C did not match those of Microsoft. Shortly
thereafter Microsoft said that no major new versions of Internet Explorer
as a separate product are to be expected,, and announced that future major
releases of IE will be an integrated part of future (post-XP) Windows versions.
Given the dependencies they've created, this means that in order to access
information on a global network, we'll need to buy the latest version of
Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft's contempt for HTML and related global standards is nicely illustrated by the way Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6 alter HTML code before presenting it to the user. For example, a web page header might contain a directive that an ISO (i.e. platform-independent) character set be used, with the following command:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html charset=ISO-8859-1">
But after downloading and saving the web page source code with Internet Explorer 5.5 or later, this line looks quite different:
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
IE's default behavior is to quietly modify the content of third-party web
pages. This default can be changed by doing something in the View->Encoding
menu that many users will find obscure and few will bother with, but that's
not the point. The point is that without such tweaking a user will never
see the original directive! And since many web developers reuse code or
at least look at it (many of us built their first web page by modifying
existing code found on the web) this platform-specific nonsense will
propagate. Granted, it's a small detail, but it's another typical step in
spreading the notion that "all the world is a Windows PC".
And then there's of course the principle of the whole thing. If Microsoft
will insert code into IE to modify a character set declaration (that the
author of the web page supposedly put in there for good reason) this proves
that they're not above using their products to manipulate the information that
eventually reaches the end user.
In fact this is a form of censorship, intended to manipulate the general
perception on what practice is customary and what's not. Microsoft has become
the IT market's demagogue, not by controlling the media, but by taking control
of global protocol standards. Proprietary standards and products are presented
so that they appear to have been a general standard all along. And where
that's not possible or convenient, Microsoft encourages the notion that
global standards are Microsoft's inventions. For example, look in the Windows
9x/ME control panel for the TCP/IP protocol. You'll find it listed under
'Microsoft protocols', along with NetBEUI. How's that again? (TCP/IP is
a global standard that's older than the Microsoft Corporation.)
Microsoft not only seizes global standards but also attempts to rewrite
history -- a practice not uncommon among those who want to control
public opinion.
With the release of Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft finally seems to be
responding to criticism from the Internet community. In what looks like an
attempt to play by the rules, IE6 can be made to be less forgiving about
HTML and CSS errors that earlier versions of IE would take in stride. However
this is not IE6's default behavior, it needs to be enforced with the right
document type declaration in the webpage. It's also fairly significant that
MS had to put an entire second rendering engine in IE6 to accomplish this,
which should tell you a lot about the rendering engine in previous versions
of IE. And then there's the disturbing fact that the Windows and Macintosh
builds of Internet Explorer are based on different rendering engines and
therefore react differently to the same HTML or CSS. Also some new bugs
are only present in the new second rendering engine, so ironically enough
the only workaround for these bugs is to write HTML code that deviates from
the standards enough to throw IE into 'quirk mode' so that the older,
non-standard rendering engine is used.
Still the improvements in IE6 might be a good sign. On the other hand,
Microsoft has also submitted proposals to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
for ratification as a global standard. At first sight this seems to be a Good
Thing, until you read the small print in the submissions: Microsoft reserves
the right to charge royalties for use of their technology even after it's
been ratified by the W3C as a global Internet standard. In other words,
they're now trying to stick an 'independent standard' label on their own
protocols and formats, and still charge for their use as proprietary
technology. This will effectively enable them to charge royalties on Internet
traffic that uses a globally standardized protocol proposed by Microsoft. Will
they get away with this? Only time will tell.
In the meantime Microsoft continues to flood the market with products that
use proprietary technology rather than support global standards. We've got
DNS on all platforms and NIS on Unix -- Microsoft creates WINS.
We've got NDS on Novell NetWare, SUN Solaris, (Free)BSD or Linux, supported by
major peripheral vendors -- Microsoft comes up with Active
Directory, only available on recent versions of Windows. We have printers and
modems that will work with any system -- Microsoft comes up with
an API specification that enables hardware manufacturers to build slightly
cheaper devices but requires a proprietary interface in the form of a Windows
driver. And the list goes on and on.
Microsoft doesn't mess with standards for nothing. Microsoft's interests
go way beyond controlling the application market.
A good example is the "Browser War". Microsoft ignored the Internet
completely until Netscape made sudden and huge profits, whereupon Microsoft
decided they wanted that market share for themselves. Being the biggest fish
in the pond, they just took what they wanted, by bundling their own Internet
Explorer with Windows. This killed off the innovative Netscape in short order.
A takeover by AOL didn't save Netscape Navigator, and in 2003 Microsoft bought
off the whole conflict for a mere $750 million; big money to most of us but
chump change for Microsoft. Less than a week later Microsoft announced the
discontinuation of IE for the Mac.
This browser war was not just a battle between two competing application
developers (Microsoft vs. Netscape) for the biggest market share. It went
much further than that: it was a conflict
between two philosophies, between vendor-dependence and vendor-independence.
On one side we had Microsoft, pushing a product that was (and is) tightly
bound to the Windows platform, and on the other side there was Netscape,
promoting a product that was (and is) available for many different
environments. Microsoft intended (and largely succeeded) by adding MS-specific
features to Internet Explorer, Java, scripting and HTML, to commit the
Internet community to the Windows platform. They've also used product bundling
and other doubtful and illegal methods, and finally succeeded in forcing
Netscape out of the browser market. As a result, more and more Internet
services now expect the user to run IE and Windows on their Internet client
systems. If you access E-commerce websites based on Microsoft IIS and
backend products with anything else but Internet Explorer, you can expect
rendering and scripting problems.
This has led to an interesting side effect: intimidated by the many browser
dependencies in Microsoft-related web page code, web designers have taken to
displaying an error message instead of a web site whenever their products are
accessed with anything but Internet Explorer. Competing browser manufacturers
soon reacted to that with masquerading: browsers like Opera just tell the
server that they're another Internet Explorer. Of course this has boosted
the statistics to the point where 95% of the world is said to use IE, which
is exactly what Microsoft wants everyone to hear. More advanced browser
detection however shows that the real figure is closer to 60%.
It's also interesting to note that the User Interface in Windows XP is based
on a mix of XML and proprietary HTML-derivatives, that can be understood only
by portions of Microsoft's own Internet Explorer application code. This
ensures the need for a fully integrated version of IE that cannot be removed
or replaced by a standards-compliant browser without losing important UI
functions (such as online help pages). Support for the platform-independent
Java programming language on the other hand has been dropped entirely from
Windows XP, which leaves only Microsoft's own scripting and language support.
Microsoft claimed that this was done in response to legal actions from Sun,
but in truth the legal agreements allow them to ship Java with their products
for several years to come -- provided they follow the Java standard. Rather
than doing this, Redmond's marketeers decided to remove Java from Windows XP
entirely. Even Microsoft hasn't been able to explain how this benefits the
user community. First they attempted to corrupt Java by creating their own
incompatible variety, but Sun filed suit and won. Under the conditions of
that legal settlement, Microsoft was forbidden to ship their own incompatible
product and call it Java, but they were allowed to support 'pure' Java. In an
open letter to their customers, Microsoft claimed that "Sun resorted to
litigation to stop Microsoft from shipping a high performance Java virtual
machine that took optimal advantage of Windows" and that "Sun's
idea of choice is that you can have any language you want, as long as it is
Sun's version of Java under Sun's control." So now Microsoft tries to
kill of Java (and platform independence) by removing Java support from
Windows. After accusing Sun of restrictive policies, they now allow their own
customers to use only Microsoft's version of Java under Microsoft's control.
Of course the latter is available on Windows only, while Sun's Java may be
implemented on any platform by any developer, provided that the Java standard
is followed and compatibility issues are respected.
These are all examples of how Microsoft attempts to limit the users' freedom
of choice rather than compete by making better software that respects global
standards and that can interact and coexist with third-party products in a
multivendor environment. While most other major software developers contribute
to Open Source Software and thereby create new markets, Microsoft continues
to slander OSS. Open Standards are commercially unacceptable for Microsoft.
Open Standards and cross-platform technology bring people together. Microsoft
on the other hand imposes deliberate barriers between them; artificial walls
that only exist to create an artificial need for Gates and Windows.
In November 1998 an internal memo leaked out of Microsoft which clearly
stated that Open Source software not only performs and scales much better than
Microsoft Products (it discussed especially the quality and availability of
Linux), but also proposed that Microsoft attack these superior products by
"de-commoditizing protocols". In other words, when faced with a
superior competitor, Microsoft's preferred approach is to corrupt global
standards and to introduce proprietary protocols that bind the user to the
Microsoft environment.
Don't believe me, see for yourself. Read the Halloween documents that have
been made available by The
Open Source Foundation. (Microsoft has acknowledged the authenticity of
these documents.) It's very interesting reading.
A good example of this policy in action (apart from the HTML and Java
deviations described above) is Microsoft's attempt to appropriate the Kerberos
protocol. Kerberos is an authentication protocol developed by MIT, distributed
as Open Source software. Microsoft added an "innovative improvement"
to Kerberos, by misusing a reserved field to specify whether or not an
NT machine was allowed to authenticate another Kerberos system, rendering this
corrupted version of Kerberos incompatible with Open Source versions in the
process. (The misuse of a reserved field, or any field for that matter, is of
course a gross violation of protocol standards.) Then Microsoft went on to
state that they had "created" an "improved version of
Kerberos", called the result their own intellectual property, and
threatened to sue anyone who would dare to put it in their software,
including Kerberos' inventor MIT. Only the global uproar that followed
caused Microsoft to reconsider this nonsense.
With the above and other standards deviations in mind, it's rather ironic
to read what Microsoft wrote on a web page that opposed the Open Source
initiative: "The next generation Internet can only come into existence if
we have standards that everyone adheres to." (From the white paper
"Shared Source" by Michel van der Bel, General Manager Microsoft
Netherlands.) Apparently we can only have a workable Internet if Microsoft
exclusively dictates proprietary standards, and everone obediently follows
them. Is this a developer license agreement which I see before me?
This is where Tolkien and the Rings of Power come to mind. Use any of the above products or technology, and you're automatically committed to Windows. Use Windows, and Microsoft applications and protocols will automatically come with it, and more will follow. Slowly but surely, and often unnoticed, you are bound to Microsoft.
Appropriating standards for data exchange is only part of the job.
Application developers are bound to Microsoft just as much as the user
community is. Only in this case development standards, methods and programming
environments play the crucial role.
Microsoft has always taken good care of application software developers. They
learned a lot about the care and feeding of developers when they were working
on Windows 3.0 and few third party developers were willing to adapt their
application code to the new platform. This was not surprising: Microsoft's
strategy was rather muddy at the time, IBM was preparing lawsuits against MS
because the new Windows code was full of technology that IBM felt MS had
stolen, and few third parties felt there was any percentage in partnerships.
The initial Windows specifications weren't too clear, and what its future
would bring was anyone's guess. So nobody knew what kind of a life cycle a
partnership and the products resulting therefrom would have. All that
was clear to application developers, in 1989, was that 90% of their
existing DOS application code would have to be rewritten entirely. This meant
that developing applications for Windows meant a huge investment with doubtful
returns. As a result there were almost no native third-party Windows
applications when Windows 3.0 was released. Initially all that kept Windows
alive was its backward compatibility with DOS.
Microsoft learned from all this, and Gates inspired trust by stating
Microsoft's total commitment to Windows (and, it must be said, by putting his
money where his mouth was). From then on, application development preceded
each new release of Windows instead of following it. Long before the first
beta version of Windows '95 became available, developers had been working with
freely available SDK's and other development tools in order to have their
new application code ready by the time Windows '95 hit the market. Long
before Windows '95 had reached beta stage, developers would get all the
inside information they needed about the operating system, API's would be
readily available, pre-release versions of Windows could be used for testing,
and all development tools could be obtained for a song.
Unsurprisingly, the wealth of cheap tools and information attracted many
developers to the Windows environment to create new applications. Of course
those applications became tightly bound to the Microsoft platform, because of
Window's closed architecture and API's; Windows code is even less portable
than DOS code was. But by the time that realization took hold, most developers
had already made a huge investment in development costs and efforts, which
they were reluctant to write off.
Unfortunately most people don't pay too much attention to software development
tools. While the world argues, debates and even sues over Microsoft's
dominance over applications and operating systems, the software we use every
day is created by developers. And Microsoft quietly controls the developers'
hearts, minds and digital tool chests. This is the most insidious way to
stamp out competition. As time goes by, it becomes more and more difficult
for developers to make a competing product or to support competing
technology.
Because of the stranglehold that MS has on the IT market, the majority of
both users and developers don't even realize that not all the world is
a PC. Users rarely see anything but Microsoft applications and
documents in some Microsoft format, and yesterday's users have become today's
developers.
Lately, MS is trying to ram ADSI down developers' throats for creating new
directory service interfaces, and the poor schmucks don't even realize what's
going on. All they see is a toolkit that's easy to use and that comes with a
user interface like all the other MS development products. They get their
project done in half the time, and before they know it they've produced a
Microsoft "standard" interface that borders on the proprietary.
Then they're stuck with that non-portable code forever, or they'll lose their
investment.
As a result, companies are forced to implement technologically
challenged operating systems in order to do trivial things like exchanging
documents. Microsoft's utter disregard for any standard that they haven't
created themselves keeps getting in the way of real technological improvement.
This is not surprising, of course. After proprietary standards have gained a
solid foothold in the IT market, they'll provide Microsoft with more leverage
to push Windows and Windows applications, and the cycle repeats itself. For
example, Windows Media Player 7 and up did't run on Windows NT4, and soon most
of the content available on the World Wide Web will require Media Player 8 or
later in order to be accessed. Microsoft will make sure of that through
"strategic" partnerships and developer tools that crank out only the
latest file formats. This effectively forces customers to upgrade to the
latest version of Windows (and perhaps buy new and bigger PCs as well) in
order to continue their access to multimedia content. May 2003 saw Microsoft
introducing their own DVD
format, with movies only playable on Windows Media Player 9. Microsoft
also commented that "...the forthcoming Office 2003 productivity
software suite will enable users to designate who can open a document or
email message, and specify the terms of use - for example, whether they can
print, copy or forward the data. A rights management add-on for Internet
Explorer will extend these protections to Web content." Great. In other
words, you won't be able to do business with people using Microsoft's
rights management unless you're using Microsoft's rights management too.
And why did Microsoft bother with MSN and MSNBC for years and years, while
all these divisions did was add red ink to the books? I'll give you a hint:
after putting Media Player and their own brand of Digital Rights Management
into Windows, Microsoft has now begun to sell music and other content.
None of this is actually conducive to technological innovation.
Applications could run on any platform, and data formats could be
documented and freely usable. The Open Source community and much of the Unix
application market thrives on such platform independence. (And so does most of
the Internet.) And not only Open Source software is platform-independent. A
web browser like Netscape Navigator, for example, runs on all flavors of
Windows, OS/2, a dozen flavors of UNIX, and MacOS. The Opera browser is
available for several OS'es as well. DivX video tools exist on Windows, Unix,
Mac and more. And many other serious applications, from database servers and
clients to office suites, are available for multiple operating systems. These
applications are typically developed on a non-Windows platform (thereby
avoiding Windows' inherent portability issues) and then ported to Windows in
response to market demands.
I generally use about 20 different applications. At the office I may run them
on several systems, varying from desktop Unix workstations to the bigger
midrange systems (Solaris, AIX), the occasional Apple Macintosh, and even
Windows PCs. When I'm working at home or with customers, I run the same
applications on Linux, in DOS boxes or on Windows. None of these applications,
needless to say, were developed by Microsoft or Microsoft Partners, and few
were originally developed on the Windows platform. And of course most of them
can't handle documents in one of the many proprietary and barely documented
formats used by Microsoft applications.
Recently some attempts have been made to enable Microsoft applications
to run on other operating systems than Windows, with varying degrees of
success. However, there is a clause in the Office XP End-User License
Agreement, which stipulates that Office XP be used only on top of a Microsoft
operating system. Apparently, Microsoft is unwilling to rely on technical
impediments to interoperability only, and has decided to throw in legal
obstructions as well to limit the users' freedom of choice.
It's a simple strategy: divide and conquer. Prevent information exchange
through proprietary protocols and formats. Encourage or force users to use
your applications and bind them to your own protocols. Make them use software
that will only run on your own platform. Pollute existing global standards as
much as possible, and induce service providers to use proprietary protocol
extensions. Force your business partners to do the same. Do not provide new
opportunities for the user community by offering better technology, but
instead sabotage the interoperability of other products and standards, and
smother any progress and development of competing technology.
Then make the users believe that they they benefit from "these exciting
new innovations" and point out that adherence to existing standards would
impede progress. Control the tools used by the developers who create the
applications that we use every day, and make it more and more difficult for
them to follow a competitor's path. Bind users and developers to the Windows
platform, slowly but surely, one step at a time, until it's impossible for
them to escape.
That's how it's done... in the Land of Redmond, where the Shadows lie.
Comments? E-mail me!