Why I hate Microsoft

"A personal, lengthy, but highly articulate outburst"


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4. World domination

"I am Billgatus of Borg. Resistance is futile."
Microsoft has been compared to the Borg Collective more than once. Indeed, you don't have to be a hard-core Star Trek fan to notice the similarity between Microsoft and the Borg. Microsoft's marketing methods have always shown a certain hunger for power, but lately an undisguised megalomania has set in.
"WE ARE MICROSOFT. LOWER YOUR FIREWALLS AND SURRENDER. WE WILL ADD YOUR TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE."

It's long been known that to oppose Microsoft means certain death (commercially speaking of course). Microsoft's marketing division just tramples the corpse of anyone who thinks he can shift it left or right. Developments at Microsoft are directed only at extracting more and more money from the customer, and at continuing to do so in the future. The customers' needs are irrelevant.
Microsoft's preferred way of accomplishing this is sabotaging alternatives to Microsoft products and using any means available to eliminate competitors, instead of bringing real technological innovation.
Microsoft's sheer marketing power has grown to the point where it can hurt competitors even by merely threatening them. We see this curious effect throughout the entire software market: as soon as Microsoft targets a certain part of the market, something happens to the competing market leaders. They start to falter, their strategy becomes erratic, the quality of their products suffer. Novell and Netscape, to name a few good examples, have lost a good deal of their market share this way. Of course they have made mistakes. Of course they have ruined the potential of superior products with bungled marketing and disastrous commercial strategies. Of course Apple, IBM and all the others have done the same. Of course they only have themselves to blame for an inadequate reaction to a threat they should and could have expected. Of course the ability and the guts to deal with competitive pressure is a required part of doing business: if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. But even so their fairly typical behavior is a good illustration of the blind fear that Microsoft's business practices have managed to instill in would-be competitors, because everyone knows that Microsoft's use of FUD campaigns, corruption of standards, forced partner agreements, product bundling and other monopolist practices have become almost impossible to counter.
This fear is not without ground. Competitors who offer alternative and sometimes better technology are ruthlessly crushed, not because MS offers a better product but because Microsoft can manipulate the users and the software market to cut off anyone's oxygen supply without even making a dent in their profits, and still have their marketing division make enough noise to drown out all the other players in the market.

If you're a PC manufacturer, Microsoft's got you by the balls: if you want to pre-load an OEM version of Windows, then you will discontinue all products from Microsoft's competitors. If you won't sign a contract to bundle a pre-loaded version of Windows with all your shipped systems, you'll face a hefty increase in Windows license fees. In other words: either you sell a copy of Windows with all your shipped systems and nothing else, or you face retaliatory measures from Microsoft (i.e. you won't be able to offer a copy of Windows at a competitive price). The same has been done in the past when PC vendors were forced to bundle Windows 3.1 with new PCs in order to be allowed to ship MS-DOS.
(Note: the above may not apply in all countries and to all OEM manufacturers. Local policies vary, and smaller system integrators pay different prices and have different contracts with Microsoft than huge companies do. Your mileage may vary.)
If you're working in education, Microsoft wants to be your friend: for a few bucks per seat you'll get all the licenses you want. Since budgets in the educational sector are usually tight, a batch of almost free software is a godsend. Or is it? The small print prohibits running anything but Microsoft products on the systems that run under an educational license, including free Open Source alternatives (e.g. Star Office). They'd make it illegal to tell your students about non-MS products at all if they could find a way to pull that off. And in August 2002 Microsoft made a controversial donation of 2.3 million dollars (!) to the University of Waterloo, Canada, on the condition that the university would teach their students Microsoft's new C# programming language as a mandatory subject for students entering the university's Electrical and Computer Engineering programme. (With these things in mind it's rather ironic that as part of their settlement with the DoJ for anti-competitive practices in November 2001, Microsoft agreed to supply schools with software, hardware and services. What a great chance to control the curriculum and to expose the students to a Microsoft-only environment before they enter the work force!)
If you're a consumer, you'll find that it's nearly impossible to buy an A-brand PC without a bundled Windows license. On a propaganda webpage aimed squarely at OEM customers, Microsoft goes to considerable lengths to blacken the reputation of what it terms "Naked PCs". A Naked PC is a PC that you can (or rather, you can't) buy without an operating system. Try it, you'll find it's really quite difficult in any case, and Microsoft wants OEMs to make it even more difficult by refusing to sell you one. "Think of selling a house without a roof - selling your customers Naked PCs leaves them equally exposed", says Microsoft. "If you allow your customers to buy Naked PCs - placing them at risk of acquiring pirated operating systems elsewhere - you expose them to legal risks, viruses, and frustrating technical troubles." In other words the customer has to buy Windows, it's for his own good. In fact, it should be made illegal to buy a PC without Windows, because Microsoft continues with: "And even if your customer manages to illegally acquire and install operating systems elsewhere..." Apparently it's either inconceivable or immoral to consider alternatives for Windows, and installing an Open Source OS such as Linux is a crime.
In May 2001, Microsoft took this idiocy even further. Several local hardware integrators in the US were offered rewards for reporting their customers who buy PCs without a Windows user license. Yes, I'm serious. If you buy a PC and you plan to run Linux or FreeBSD on it, you become a suspect and Microsoft puts a price on your head.
And there's no way out of this nonsense. In cases where large customers build their own PCs in order to avoid putting too much money in Microsoft's pocket, they can't use their volume license programs as the basis for installing Windows. Those volume programs only allow upgrades of systems that have been purchased with original Windows licenses. They can't even save some money and build their own computers or buy them from a local whitebox shop without also tacking on a Windows license. By contract the OEMs are required to report any customer that requests 'naked PCs' and it often triggers a software contract audit by Microsoft, sometimes followed by seven figure surprise bills.
And Microsoft will enforce the conditions in their license agreements with a heavy hand, if need be. Or rather, they use the BSA (Business Software Alliance) as their enforcer. The BSA is a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing profisions for large business software manufacturers. Steve Ball, CEO of the famous guitar string manufacturing company Ernie Ball, said in an interview:

"I became an open-source guy because we're a privately owned company, a family business that's been around for 30 years, making products and being a good member of society. We've never been sued, never had any problems paying our bills. And one day I got a call that there were armed marshals at my door talking about software license compliance. [...] They basically shut us down. We were out of compliance I figure by about 8 percent (out of 72 desktops). [...]
How did this happen? We pass our old computers down. The guys in engineering need a new PC, so they get one and we pass theirs on to somebody doing clerical work. Well, if you don't wipe the hard drive on that PC, that's a violation. Even if they can tell a piece of software isn't being used, it's still a violation if it's on that hard drive."

If you're a competing software developer, things are even worse. A Microsoft version of the software that keeps you in business could be integrated with the next release of Windows, or given away for free as a separate product. Microsoft has used this and other tactics (such as deliberate vaporware announcements) many times in the past to smother innovation and break innovative developers.
If you're too big to be eliminated like that, Microsoft still controls whether or not your software will be compatible with future releases of Microsoft products. Remember MS-Word on OS/2 and weep. And of course Windows XP wouldn't run the then-current versions of RealPlayer and Quicktime but of course it did come with an integrated MS Media player. (Incidentally, when I subjected a brand-new Compaq Deskpro (running NT Workstation) to the Windows 2000 Upgrade Compatibility Check, guess what happened: all installed Novell products were found to be incompatible with Windows 2000. Surprise, surprise... Well, my dustbin is Windows 2000 Ready.)
And if all else fails, there's always brute force. The blind fear that Microsoft's legal department has managed to instill in some independent developers (especially the smaller companies) is nicely illustrated by what happened to Ghisler & co, a small Swiss developer. Ghisler's primary product, a file manager that is essentially a Windows version of previous DOS-based file manager such as Norton Commander, is especially popular among power users and administrators. Ghisler had shipped Windows Commander for no less than nine years, when a letter from Microsoft claimed ownership of the word 'Windows' in the product name 'Windows commander' and requested that the name be changed. Ghisler not only immediately complied to that "request" to avoid legal repercussions, but also put Microsoft trademark notices on the homepage of their website, released a bulletin that avoided the word 'Microsoft' entirely but only referred to "the owner of the trademark 'Windows'", and even requested their users not to make negative comments in their forums. Such is the reputation of Microsoft's lawyers.
By now the field is littered with the carcasses of software companies that held a share of the market that Microsoft decided they wanted. For example, does anyone remember an upstart company called Argonaut? They were one of the few small companies that made excellent 3D rendering software in the early nineties, years before the technology became widely available on the PC. We had to wait all those years before it became available, because Microsoft bought Rendermorphic, one of their competitors, and started to give away their software licenses for free. This killed off all developments at Argonaut and the other small 3D developers of those days in short order, and it meant the end of another piece of innovation.
Selling vaporware is one of Microsoft's favorite tactics to sabotage their competitors. The idea is simple: announce a revolutionary, new product or technology that will make your competitors' products obsolete right away, and everyone becomes reluctant to invest in those competing products. By the time you eventually release something (that may or may not resemble whatever you announced) the competition will be gone, or at least on the way out. And if truth be told, Microsoft has this technique down to a fine art. Few others are as good at it as Redmond's marketeers.
A good example of their masterful control of vaporware selling is the new .Net initiative. .Net is going to be the future of computing, if we are to believe Microsoft. And it's hard not to believe them, because they are already advertising ".Net Connected Software" as if it were a currently shipped product instead of a concept that hasn't even gotten around yet to laying down a set of final specifications. Currently the only thing being shipped is a few old products with a .Net label on the box and a bunch of development toolkits to tie down developers. Visual Studio.Net is a very good example: it binds developers tightly to whatever .Net is eventually going to be, and allows them to participate in the hype as well. And it works: in an attempt to capitalize on the latest hysteria, third parties are falling over themselves to jump on the .Net bandwagon. It has rapidly become fashionable to discuss it or to declare commitment to it. The press especially pays a lot of lip service to .Net, and all major book and magazine publishers are in a hurry to flood the market with .Net publications. Whole series of books about .Net are being released, regardless the fact that .Net hasn't materialized yet and even the exact specifications do not yet exist! What's even worse is that 90% of the people do not even realize that in order to make true their promises about .Net, Microsoft will have to rewrite their entire software code set (both Windows and Office) from scratch. It's taken them ten years (and then some) to get where they are now with that software. Frankly I can't see how Microsoft can ever deliver what they promise with .Net, even if every device in the world is going to be turned into a Microsoft device (which .Net needs in order to deliver). So eventually every major Microsoft products will be released under the .Net label, but that will almost certainly involve a lot of smoke and mirrors to disguise the truth: apart from a few changes, nothing revolutionary will have happened. It'll be the Emperor's new clothes all over again.

But vendors and competitors are not the only target for Microsoft's forced-sale policies. Many companies here in Holland have received threatening letters from Microsoft (and Microsoft lawyers) with thinly veiled accusations of software piracy. Apparently Microsoft assumes that large companies should have at least a certain number of Windows and Office licenses, and at least as many Office licenses as they have Windows licenses. Large companies with a smaller number of licenses than Microsoft thought they should have were ordered to present complete and accurate information about their number of servers, PCs and software licenses. Failure to comply with this order in full would result in audits and legal procedures. Apparently Microsoft considers it unthinkable that PCs can be used for purposes other than running Windows or Office.
A few months later Microsoft hired a law firm to target an even broader selection of small businesses, who were more or less ordered to submit a complete and comprehensive list of all Microsoft products in their possession. Again there was the thinly veiled threat that failure to comply with this order would have "legal consequences".
What other type of company but an utterly ruthless monopolist would have the arrogance to threaten and intimidate their own customers like this?

Microsoft Products are sold not on their technical merits, but by brute force and sheer marketing violence. IT Managers become convinced that they have to switch to Microsoft products because everyone is using Windows and it must therefore be a good thing. (The same thing could be said about pot, with as little validity. But you can't Just Say No to Windows.) Or perhaps they read in their investment magazine that Microsoft Is The Future. That's the way Microsoft peddles their products: through high-level selling. Large account managers directly approach the top managers of the companies they wish to target. During lunch meetings they spin a glorious tale about how switching to Windows would have "strategic advantages" for the whole company. They make sure to use terms like "target threshold" repeatedly. They cite success stories, they mention Fortune 500 companies, they emphasize the importance of strategic decisions on executive levels. They mention in passing that Windows has removed the need for computer techies to make informed decisions about computing, so corporate managers are now qualified to select operating systems as part of their corporate strategy planning. And if the technical staff happens to disagree about the wisdom of switching to Windows, well, that's only because the techies feel that their turf is being threatened by the introduction of an operation system that removes the need for skilled personnel and they lack insight into strategic matters.
And of course these marketroids never even mention such unimportant details as the need for more and bigger servers than other products would require, or the fact that uptime and availability are only a fraction of that of competing products. Oh no. They also gloss over what the people in the field think about what goes on under the hood of Microsoft products (after all, techies have never been realists) and they blissfully ignore the numerous implementation problems (excuse me, I mean 'issues') that come with each new version of any Microsoft product you care to mention. Instead they emphasize that all large companies are "switching to Windows", so it has to be a Good Thing. They promise that Windows Server 2003 will speed up the business and save millions of dollars per year, but of course they forget to mention that they're comparing it to Windows NT 4.0 Server which was released in 1996. And if that doesn't do the job, they cinch the deal with an offer that the customer can't refuse, such as a 50% discount on software licenses, and if it's about a choice between a Windows environment and Open Source software, they'll even happily give away licenses for free. Not that those licenses are so overpriced that they'd still make a profit at half the price or less, oh no, of course not, the offer should be seen as a quantity discount for an especially valued customer.
No, I'm not making this up. I've seen it happen in large companies all around me. This is how the game is being played. For example, the following response from a Britsh corporate user (who wishes to remain anonymous) illustrates this fairly well:

We decided to use FreeBSD, Apache, mySQL+PostgreSQL, Perl+PHP [as Open Source alternatives to Microsoft products]. The company I am working with is a pure-Microsoft company, i.e. they only used to use Microsoft software, and they even didn't know anything about Open Source. [...]
When the local Microsoft rep "heard" about it (someone inside the company tipped them off), they asked to meet my team(!) and discuss the reasons for our Open Source use.
In fact, it was a meeting of 2 1/2 hours with 3 Microsoft sales/consulting reps trying to persuade us not to use Open Source (mainly they talked about Linux until we told them that we don't use Linux and that we don't understand what they are talking about :-) because "it is inherently insecure, unreliable" and, what was their biggest argument, "there is nobody in this country who could give you any support for Open Source", etc.
Also, they wanted(!) (actually they required) us to tell them the reasons why we are using Open Source instead of the already introduced and long-time proven Microsoft Software in this company. Then I started explaining [...] and when we came to the point of 'Licensing Costs', they offered us to give the Windows server licences for free.
I am not kidding. When I told them that I'd need at least ten licenses and at $400/each, this would be too much for me for the beginning, they offered to give us the license for free - and not only for now, but also for the future when we kept working on Microsoft.
Of course, they knew that if we implement successful projects based on Open Source in the New Media Group, this might extend to other areas, too, e.g. data servers (we are in fact planning to create a print archive fully based on Open Source now that the technicians in the company see that Open Source can be successfully implemented).

Commercial violence is not the way to introduce new software standards. If software retail stores open at midnight so that people can rush off with a new Windows '95 package the very minute it is released, it's obvious that OS implementation is no longer based on common sense or rational decisions, but merely on a stampeding software market that has been hyped into hysteria. It's obvious that something here is very, very wrong.
I'm not into conspiracy theories, but still I think it's interesting to note how Microsoft has progressed from an upstart software company to a party that attempts to control not only the market but even public opinion.

Educating the masses was an important step in Microsoft's strategy. It had long been common knowledge that "computers were difficult to use". Indeed, a system like Unix or DOS has never been known for its user-friendliness, with commands like 'ls', 'rm' (Unix), 'REN' or 'DRIVPARM' (DOS). The steep learning curve ensured that users would eventually be fairly computer-literate (which was good) but also that few would succeed in or even start the time-consuming, difficult and expensive learning process (which was definitely bad).
The Graphic User Interface (GUI) in MS-Windows put an end to all that. It offered an attractive, accessible and friendly-looking interface, designed so that it wouldn't scare the novice user. This has made the PC available to the masses, and Microsoft deserves due credit for that, even though GUI's aren't and have never been Microsoft technology.
But in their attempts to shield the poor novice user from confusing or intimidating glimpses at the underlying technology that might frighten them, Microsoft has actually oversimplified the interface. Users simply drag and drop, unable to determine the difference between local 'folders' and those on network servers. They don't know that a local 'folder' is not the same as a server mapping, and they're unaware that 'My Documents' is in fact a subdirectory that may reside on a local disk or on a network server. In fact, usually they have no idea what a subdirectory is. So they simply right-click a document (which is represented by an icon) to 'send it' to a 'mail recipient' without knowing that they are in fact pumping an uncompressed 12 megabyte BMP file through an E-mail server and an Internet link.
At least the pre-Windows user interfaces eventually stimulated the user to gain some insight in what he or she was doing, and what the results of seemingly innocent actions could be. Nowadays even the computer-literate have trouble understanding what goes on behind the facade of the Windows GUI. Users are actually being conditioned to associate daily tasks with Window GUI elements. By the time they have managed to change your preference settings so that Windows displays filename extensions and they can see what kind of file they're dealing with instead of just seeing 'documents', they're no longer average users.
Apart from all that, expecting a systems or network administrator or an experienced user to work with the user interface that comes with Microsoft products is a bad joke at best. Imagine an operating system that won't let you tell it what you want, but lets you point at a picture instead and then does for you what it thinks best. I can imagine a three-year-old preferring it that way, but not a mature ICT professional. Of course GUI-based system administration has its advantages, at least from a certain perspective, i.e. a Windows-using ICT manager's perspective. Large-scale, properly set up Windows networks with a ton of hardware and GUI management tools all over the shop needn't cost a lot in terms of machine minders, whereas a Unix or Open Source based network without these tools will need the requisite number of skilled geeks to mumble incantations over shell prompts. But this is comparing apples and pears: the geeks will serve you better than the deskilled machine minders will when something goes badly wrong (which it will). The GUI has put on a lot of weight in recent years, but in the end it serves more to restrict than to enhance, limiting the users' understanding of, and control over, their computers and software. The GUI removes all transparency from the system, so that power users and sysadmins no longer have access to the underlying processes. (And as an additional bonus it hides the mess that is the actual code underneath.)
Contrary to popular belief, a GUI is not ergonomic. For example it requires users to take their hands off the keyboard and their eyes off the screen in order to operate the mouse during word processing, and graphic fonts and black-on-white text cause more eye strain than the old text-based equipment used to do. Neither is a GUI conducive to productivity; although the learning curve is steeper, after some training many users can perform most operations faster through keyboard commands than with a mouse.
Another headache for sysadmins is that GUI operations are essentially impossible to script, so that with large numbers of servers it is impractical to use the GUI to carry out installation tasks or regular maintenance tasks. Desktop users face the same problem: in the early nineties it was possible to produce large amounts of personalized correspondence using nothing but Word Perfect macros, a simple database and a few batch files. In Windows most of these jobs have to be done by hand, over and over again. In short, Microsoft tried to create products that even a fool could use, but they ended up with something that only a fool would want to use. Still the public in general has been, and is being, conditioned to regard using Microsoft products as a sole option.
But then again, Microsoft's regard for their user community is best illustrated by the useful tips in MS Word, my favorite of which is "Don't run with scissors". And of course there's the 'log-on help' in Windows 2000 Professional: an explanation on how to press the Ctrl, Alt and Delete keys, complete with a graphic animation of those keys being indicated and depressed. The animated question mark ("Any time you need help, click me with the mouse or press the F1 key. I'll be right here if you need me!") in the Windows XP Professional installer is even more annoying and bears an uncanny resemblance to the animated help in MS Office. These 'professional versions' target the 'professional' user, who is apparently assumed to be unable to handle complex operations such as accepting defaults in an install program or even logging on without animated graphics as a guideline. :-(
Of course, technophiles have always been exasperated by the 'ignorance' of non-techies. But these days we're dealing with a generation of users that can't even understand the need to know the basics. All they have to do is double-click on a document, and things start to happen. Of course as soon as the document's file extension (which is hidden by default in the first place) isn't properly associated with an application, the average user is immediately lost. Users have never been invited to learn. They've been told that they no longer need to know about the basics of driving, so they just expect their cars to take them wherever they want to go today.
As a result of all this, average users don't even realize that computers and Windows aren't a necessary combination, or that there is a distinction between operating systems and the applications that run on it. They've been taught to think of Windows as something that comes with your PC, or even as something that is part of your PC. They have been told that Windows XP is a multimedia environment. The idea that Windows XP is an operating system that could, but not necessarily should, run multimedia applications is completely beyond them. The thought that Windows is one of the many operating systems that could be installed on a computer, is just as alien to most of them.
To them "all the world is a PC running Windows". The rot has now spread so far that this also goes for many software developers. Web designers automatically assume that their web sites will be viewed on a PC, and if you're lucky they'll write code that runs on both Netscape and Microsoft browsers. (As if those were the only ones around.) Application developers usually aren't much better either. They write software for Windows, period. Even they just don't know any better. Even in Windows itself you can see that portions of the code have been created by junior programmers who have never known a more robust environment.
Nor is this surprising. Most IT students only encounter Windows these days. Most of them have never seen a text-mode interface, they don't know that there are other OS's than Windows out there or how they work, and their understanding of what lies beneath the Windows GUI is rudimentary at best. They've never seen robust software, let alone learned how to write any. Still these students are supposed to become tomorrow's IT workers.
Quality standards have steadily dropped. The average user routinely endures buggy software, computer crashes and loss of data. Think about it: To have several computer crashes or forced reboots a week is considered acceptable and even normal!
(If you don't understand why it isn't normal and should not be accepted, chances are you've never used anything but a PC with Windows.)

Today most computer users know computer technology only through Microsoft products. They no longer learn about computing; the Windows user interface discourages anything beyond point-and-click actions. Like toddlers they point at small pictures and they think they are knowledgeable about computers, while the marketroids wax lyrical about how easy and exciting it is, as long as we all keep buying more and more of the same junk.
that is the basis on which many IT managers choose the platforms for their future investments! That and the comforting knowledge that "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft."
God help us.

I used the word 'megalomania' above. You'll understand why if you take a good look at Microsoft's plans for the future. Controlling the PC market is not enough for Microsoft. In the near future we can expect to see them move into different markets.
They're well on their way to flooding the market for handhelds with Windows CE. They're trying to get Windows on the road by embedding it in automotive electronics. They've briefly courted TV networking. They're spinning up their marketing machine to take over the cellphone software market, starting with Ballmer's claim that 25% of all multimedia cellphones will run Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 operating system within three to five years.
One of the biggest new initiatives is Windows Media Center. This is a special pre-installed version of Windows XP (dubbed Windows XP Media Center Edition) that was planned to be sold by the end of 2002 but didn't quite make the deadline. Windows Media Center won't be sold separately but comes with Multimedia Entertainment Systems (read: PCs with a TV tuner and a remote control). This version incorporates entertainment features like DVD-playing, recording TV programmes, and an application to manage and view digital photos. It comes with a simplified user interface that can be read from across the room. None of this is very innovative, but Media Center PC is likely to be just the opening salvo in Microsoft's bid to control home entertainment in the same way it already dominates home computing. In five years, a personal computer (or something essentially like one but with a more purpose-specific design) could be the center of many families' entertainment centers, and Microsoft will attempt to exercise control over it just like they do with the PC market. At WinHEC 2003 Gates presented further plans to integrate your TV, stereo, VCR, phone etc. (devices that switch on immediately and then just work) into the Windows PC (the device that doesn't).
Microsoft has also begun to sell their own gaming hardware with the release of the Xbox gaming console. The reason that Microsoft is getting into games is not readily apparent. Their remark that they wanted to save the world from Playstation domination is of course not to be taken seriously. Essentially their reasons are fairly simple. PCs and hardware have gotten faster and more powerful all the time, but the only applications that really tax those resources are games (and lately, but to a much lesser degree, digital video). Gamers tend to keep their hardware (and the supporting operating systems) up to date, and therefore games are a powerful contribution to the update frenzy that Microsoft thrives on. But game consoles have always been a competitor to the PC, and therefore a threat to Windows. Microsoft has always tried to exterminate all competition with fire and sword, but in order to do that they needed to enter the market for game consoles themselves. Furthermore, Microsoft will attempt to control the gaming community through online services, on which many Xbox features will become heavily dependent in the future. This fits in with Microsoft's plans to tie their customers down into internet-based subscription services to protect revenues. Hence the Microsoft Xbox, which Microsoft introduced in the US on a 500 million dollar PR budget. Half a billion US dollars to introduce a gaming computer -- what will they think of next?

But the most important new business for Microsoft is web services. Microsoft is really getting into web content with MSN, their Passport services and other, related projects. Windows XP comes loaded with features designed to lure the user into buying music online (from Microsoft), have digital photos printed at the click of a mouse (through a Microsoft online service), to browse MSN (which boosts Microsofts advertising revenues) and to shop online (using Microsoft's passport and payment services in the process).
With these first steps, Microsoft has begun a gradual but deliberate change. Microsoft the software monopolist is about to become Microsoft the web services monopolist. Also note that MSN does not make any profit. Instead Microsoft needs to spend in the order of half a billion US$ each year (!) to keep it operational. Obviously this investment contributes to inflated profits elsewhere.
After more than a decade of having milked Windows for all it was worth, it's becoming increasingly obvious that Windows revenues won't last forever. The answer is both simple and complex: Microsoft needs to find a new way of ensuring revenues in future years. Since Microsoft Windows and server products are an excellent means of tying the user community to proprietary protocols and services, it stands to reason to use it to leverage the user community into a new dependency.
Enter Microsoft's new .Net ("dot-net") strategy.

The idea is simple. Start partnerships with large information and service providers on the Internet. Then set up a bunch of web services, and bundle clients that use those web services with Windows, so that the user will get it 'for free'. Gradually discontinue support for the service in software. Start with trivial things like software activation and registration, user authentication and software maintenance, and then move on to things like payment services, address books and appointment schedulers, and finally to web-based applications. Initially offer the new services for free or for a low entry fee, and when user dependency is at a sufficiently high level, start charging serious subscription fees. And there you are.
And this future has already begun. The first implementations of this new strategy are already visible in Windows XP.

Microsoft already controls the kind of software we buy and use. The next step into the future is to seize control of the work that we do and the way that we do it.
Microsoft.Net is an implementation of the ASP concept. The idea is that Microsoft will host our Office applications for us, and we'll access them using only a (thin) client system. Microsoft promises huge reductions in TCO, mainly because server and application administration will be outsourced.
Of course Microsoft claims that ASP (Application Service Providing) and the .Net concept are innovative, but don't be fooled. Basically it's a step back to the decades-old mainframe-with-terminals approach, and all you need to become an ASP today is a Unix server, a bunch of applications and some graphic terminals. Granted, the X-protocol is rather ugly, and unsuited for anything but LAN's, but the implementation of a more elegant and efficient client/server protocol layer (e.g. ICA) is rather trivial. Other aspects of the .Net Framework (such as the much-touted "Zero Impact Install" merely involve the abandoning of some of Windows' more spectacular flaws and going back to design principles that date back to DOS' predecessors.
Notwithstanding the fact that .Net is retro-technology, at first sight it might not seem such a bad idea. After all, we won't have to bother with local software maintenance, and we'll only be charged for the actual use of services and not for software licenses. This should simplify things no end.
Right?

Think about it. The whole idea is that Microsoft will take the application software that we now run locally, and host it for us on their own Windows-based servers. First of all this raises questions about reliability: will Microsoft technology be up to a job that is mission-critical for a large part of the planet? The prospects aren't good: in July 2001, some 30 million users had problems with the MSN Messenger instant messaging service, caused by a malfunctioning disk controller on a buddy list database server and which took Microsoft over a week to fix.
Secondly, Microsoft will take the application software that we now buy, and rent it out to us on a subscription or per-use basis. Yes, we'll save money on one-time licenses and on local administration. How very decent of Microsoft - after they inflated the costs of licensing and ownership themselves. But will we actually save money in the long run? We'll have to buy and run local client software from Microsoft. You can say what you want about Microsoft products, but Lean & Mean is not the way to describe any of them, they'll need serious hardware and bugs and implementation problems are common. On top of that, .Net will only shift the workload (and cost center) from local server and application administration to internetworking and network administration, simply replacing one problem with another.
Of course we'll be forced to buy the client software from Microsoft (most likely bundled with an advanced PC) since adherence to open standards is something not even the most naive optimist has reason to expect. Microsoft.Net is going to be a closed system. Microsoft will control it, and therefore control the operational costs. Instead of having to pay a rather steep (but one-time) license fee, we'll now regularly pay a subscription fee, to be set by Microsoft. After all, Microsoft's office application division is facing a revenue problem, as more and more users refuse to upgrade to yet another version of MS-Office for the sake of a few trivial improvements. And we'll keep paying, because once we've switched from locally administered software to the ASP model, we'll be committed to it. (Trust me: a back-out from Microsoft.Net will be costly.) But we won't have any choice: the .Net platform will be gradually incorporated in all new versions of major Microsoft products. So each time we're forced to buy another upgrade in order to maintain compatibility with the rest of the world, a piece of the .Net framework comes with it, so eventually the whole scheme will be forced upon us. Microsoft has announced that the extensions to implement the .Net Framework in existing OS products will be free. Right. Where have we heard this before? Microsoft has given away products for free in the past: web browsers and media players come to mind. Each and every time they gave away free software their ultimate purpose was to kill off a competing product that might have offered a viable alternative to the user. And now the .Net Framework extensions will be free? Sure...
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

Financial ties aren't the only kind of control that Microsoft will have under the .Net initiative. Microsoft also controls how we do our daily work. Currently we may choose to purchase software for a one-time license fee and decide not to upgrade it. We may choose not to follow dubious concepts or empty hypes. We may choose to wait, or to skip products or versions. Under the .Net concept, Microsoft won't allow us the freedom to do that. Microsoft controls our software, period.
Take the auto-update features in the client software, for example. Our client software will automatically be updated whenever Microsoft wants it to, installing new drivers, patches-du-jour and additions, and of course uninstalling everything that has to go in the process.
Auto-update has enormous possibilities:

All of this will be completely automatic. We won't have to worry about it... which means that we won't have any control over it. Essentially, the auto-update feature is a trojan horse. And the beauty of it is that we won't have to wait until .Net really takes off; in Windows 2000 and XP the first incarnation of the auto-update feature is already hard at work. And sure enough, the above concerns have already been proved not to be entirely unjustified. In June 2002 Microsoft injected a critical security patch for Windows Media Player into the auto-update channels. The patch itself was harmless enough (though of course it destroyed RealPlayer's association with audio CD's) but during the automatic installation process the user was quietly required to agree to a brandnew clause in the software license agreement. This clause gives Microsoft the right to "provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer [and] may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer." Whenever this happens, Microsoft promises to make a "reasonable effort" to post notices on a website somewhere. It's clear from the wording that MS has absolutely no intention of bringing this behavior to our attention. Instead, Microsoft just assumes the right to surreptitiously install code of its choosing on your computer. You will not be warned; you will not be offered an opportunity examine the download or refuse it. MS will simply connect remotely and install what it will, or install it secretly when you contact them. This means MS will have administrator privileges on your personal computer. What they feed you may be infected with viruses; it may break your applications, corrupt data files, destroy weeks or months or even years of work, but you'll have no recourse if it does. By downloading this WMP critical security patch, which you must do to operate WMP safely, you'll agree to give Microsoft deed and title to your personal property and to leave Microsoft immune from legal retaliation if they damage your machine. If they break your machine, their responsibility ends with "Sorry".
To illustrate that this was more than incidental, a few weeks later Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for Windows 2000 with a similar clause in the license agreement, that essentially gives Microsoft the right to go into your systems, gather whatever information they think they need, including an inventory of what software you're running, and "disclose this information to others, but not in a form that personally identifies you". Similar things are going on with recent updates of Internet Explorer, during the installation of which you grant Microsoft permission to collect information about OS version numbers and product identification numbers, IE version number, version numbers of other software, and Plug-and-Play ID numbers of hardware devices.
All these updates are to a great extent exercises in fixing bugs in something you have already bought, and are an outrageous imposition for Microsoft to seize more rights for itself as a condition of those fixes being applied.

The automated software control character of .Net have other effects as well. Auto-update will also do away with most of the distribution channel, which will not only give Microsoft even more direct control over the end user, but also inflate revenues as an added bonus. And then there are the monthly fees for regular trivial updates that we otherwise might have decided to skip, but that we now have to accept as a matter of course.
(As an interesting side note, the Computer Incident Advisory Capability office (CIAC) has issued an official warning against Windows XP and Office XP. (CIAC bulletin M-005c.) CIAC officials were displeased with the error reporting feature in these products. After a crash, Windows and Office XP send information (i.e. memory dumps) to Microsoft so that developers may do a 'post-mortem' on the data to see what went wrong. These memory snapshots are likely to contain (possibly sensitive) user data, e.g. the document or spreadsheet that the user was working on at the time. Microsoft's promise that any "accidentally" received sensitive data would not be used in any way did not impress the CIAC.)
But the most worrisome aspect of the whole Microsoft.Net idea is not only our complete and utter day-to-day dependence on Microsoft for earning our daily wages and how we'll be forced to keep paying whatever subscription fees Microsoft chooses to charge us. It's also that Microsoft will be able to control and monitor our daily work. Microsoft controls our applications, Microsoft controls which services and software products will be available to us, Microsoft will know about it each and every time we start an application (i.e. request a service from Microsoft.Net) and if Microsoft wants to monitor each and every keystroke in said applications or even look into our own corporate data, I'm sure they'd have no problem doing so. If Microsoft isn't interested in our corporate data, I'm sure someone will be. And that someone will be very happy with the appalling lack of security in any Microsoft product so far.

This is how Microsoft proposes to seize full control of what we do and how we do it. We'll be fully dependent on a proprietary Microsoft ASP network on a day-to-day basis, we'll continuously be charged through the nose to keep whatever functionality we have (provided Microsoft does not decide to discontinue it), they'll be able to raise subscription fees at their whim and get away with it. But best of all: Microsoft will control what we'll be able to do and force us to open up completely about our daily business. Microsoft will be able to look over our shoulder all day long, and they'll be able to cut off our oxygen supply whenever they choose to.
Scary? Try 'Orwellian'...

But wait -- it gets better. One of .Net's many features is a simpler authentication system that will effectively enable us to log in to the whole planet with one single password. Personal information, passwords, a virtual identity, credit card information and many other types of data will be bundled in one system (codename Hailstorm). The first step in this plan is called Microsoft Passport and is already operational. Microsoft Passport will allow us to log on to all affiliated websites (including E-commerce sites) with one and the same password. Apart from the huge security weakness such a single-point authentication implies, the terms of use leave little to the imagination: you have the right to use the service, period. Microsoft reserves all other rights, including the right to use the information you provide as they see fit, the right to change conditions without notice, and the right "to exploit any proprietary rights" that you may hold. It's interesting to note that they use the word 'feedback' for all user-supplied information (which includes each and every click of your mouse). This legally gives them the right to monitor and track everything you do on the web. In their Passport privacy statement they state a commitment (in less than legally airtight terms) to provide secure user interfaces and transmissions for your data, but little more. In fact, they explicitly state that they will "disclose Personal Information if required to do so by law or in the good-faith belief that such action is necessary...". In return, they continue to state that "If Microsoft becomes aware of ongoing site-specific consumer concerns or problems with Passport participating sites, we will take these issues seriously..." Well, that should protect our privacy and legal rights...

In November 2001, the inevitable happened: Microsoft's Passport wallet system was cracked, and credit card information became available for unauthorized access. Microsoft .Net product manager spokesman Adam Sohn said there was no evidence that data security was compromised, but the fact that Microsoft took the Passport wallet service offline until the security holes had been patched up is a fair indication that things just might be a little bit more serious. Sohn also stated that Windows XP users were not affected because of XP's "improved security". What he in fact meant was that cross-site scripting is a little harder to do with XP, and his statement illustrates Microsoft's ideas about security models rather well.
And it gets better - or worse, depending on your point of view. Less than a month after the security breach, Microsoft changed their policy about sharing your personal Passport information.
If you want to use Hotmail, you have to sign up for a Passport, and in so doing you're added to the Passport database. Microsoft Messenger requires a Passport, too. Windows XP nags mercilessly, offering all sorts of goodies to get you to divulge your name, address, age, phone number, and the like, as an incentive.
And all users who signed up for Hotmail (or anything else that uses Passport) before December 2001 may be in for a big surprise. It seems that Microsoft quietly changed the rules, and unilaterally decided to pass along personal information to other companies that use Passport on their Web sites. This personal information includes the user's email address, birthday, country and zip code, gender and occupation.
They did this by the simple expedient of adding check boxes to the users' personal options to indicate whether or not data may be shared, and checking those boxes by default. See for yourself: go into Hotmail. Click Options (to the right of the tab that says 'Address Book'). Click Personal Profile (in the upper left corner). Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and see whether the boxes marked 'Share my e-mail address' and 'Share my other registration information' have been checked. Those checkboxes didn't exist in October 2001.
When did Microsoft implement this new policy? It's hard to say. Details should be in the MS privacy statement -- somewhere. The MSNMAIL privacy statement consists of over 500 lines of dense legalese, the second to last being: "Updated December 2001".
Go figure.

And this is only the beginning. ZDnet's David Coursey, a self-admitted "non-MS hater", writes:

[.Net] will start simply and helpfully as online services learn to interact with your desktop computer. It will become easier to log on: A single password will give you access to many more services, and you will only enter it once. You'll ask to be notified of events that are important to you--and the notification will just appear on your desktop, or perhaps on a cell phone or pager. The system will know where you are and how to reach you.
That's how .Net will start: It will link things together that have never been linked before and it will seem like magic. Or maybe not. Most of what .Net wants to do can already be done, but not as flexibly and certainly not on an anything-to-anything basis across multiple vendors or systems.
THINK OF IT AS GOD'S ADDRESS BOOK. To accomplish this ultimate linkage, Microsoft will create, perhaps with partners, a giant database to collect, manage, and dispense information from what amounts to God's address book: Everything you might want to know about everyone will be in there.
Which is to say Microsoft wants to have all your personal information, like calendars, contact lists, E-mail inbox, credit card information, banking data, and so forth, in this giant database, so that .Net applications can use the information to do your bidding. You won't reveal it all at once, of course, but as you ask .Net to do more for you, more will be revealed.

Imagine: God's own database... with your private E-mail address, your private cellphone number, your bank account and credit card numbers, your financial administration, who your doctor is, what prescription medication he gave you...
This should be good. A database that knows where you live and what you recently purchased, whether or not you have been treated for venereal diseases in the past, possible rejections from your health insurance company because of genetic defects in your family, where telemarketeers can reach you or send unsolicited E-mail, and of course your social security number, occupation, income... You name it, it's in there, maintained by Microsoft and "protected" from the eyes of the ungodly by the ridiculous kind of security schemes that Microsoft has become rightly notorious for. (Such as the leak discovered in April 2003, that allowed password changes with just a user name and no password. Microsoft responded by disabling password changes... in May.) And then there's the government's demands for backdoor access into such a database.
Forget Orwell, forget 1984 -- this is much better.

In April 2002 the entire Hailstorm project was put on hold. This was not only in response to criticism concerning security and the ownership of privacy-sensitive data. The main reason for the holdup (and hopefully the eventual demise) of the concept was that Microsoft didn't manage to inspire enough trust in potential implementation partners. The intended adopters of Hailstorm feared that control over the accumulated data would enable Microsoft to interpose themselves between the partners and their customers. Initial negotiations with five interested companies had already taken place, but even those five potential early adopters didn't trust Microsoft enough to do business with them on such a scale. This should tell us a lot about Microsoft's reputation.

Another indication of where Microsoft is going with regard to privacy breaches is the spyware embedded in Windows Media Player 8. Computer Bytes Man Richard M. Smith explains:

"Each time a new DVD movie is played on a computer, the WMP[8] software contacts a Microsoft Web server to get title and chapter information for the DVD. When this contact is made, the Microsoft Web server is given an electronic fingerprint which identifies the DVD movie being watched and a cookie which uniquely identifies a particular WMP player. With these two pieces of information Microsoft can track what DVD movies are being watched on a particular computer. As of Feb. 14, 2002, the Microsoft privacy policy for WMP version 8 does not disclose [this]."

Since then we've seen a new version of Windows Media Player (version 9) which has even bigger backdoor options for Microsoft.

Where is all this going? Well... Microsoft has taken to putting some very odd language in some of their updates: things like requiring that you agree not to benchmark their software, or publish the results if you do. This should give us pause. And of course there's also the ridiculous clause in the Office XP EULA that prohibits you from running it on anything but Windows. Then, too, XP requires "activation," which gives Microsoft some information about what you're running, and is the first step toward letting them into your system as a "trusted" associate. Which itself wouldn't be a big problem if there weren't a lot of talk about Palladium chips being put onto motherboards. In fact, some hardwar manufacturers (e.g. IBM) have been quietly putting Palladium chips into their motherboards for some time now, and others are likely to follow soon.
The Palladium chip runs a system that when you boot up decides what software is trusted and legitimate and thus allowed to run, and what is forbidden. After its introduction, Palladium has been renamed into 'Next Generation Secure Computing Base'. That should help. NGSCB is expected to be released as part of Longhorn in 2005, but analysts don't expect any adequate security improvements before 2008. Whatever part of NGSCB is going to be materialize within the next few years is more likely to focus on digital rights management and extending control over the user's desktop than on security. The first thing Palladium (excuse me, NGSCB) will do is to enable software manufacturers to decide when their products will run and when not. It will allow them to bind software products to a single PC, which means that you'll have to get their permission to replace your hardware. It will allow them to make their software run only for a certain time, which will enable them to enforce regular payments for "subscription renewal". It will enable them to limit or prevent the making of backups. It will enable them to track versions of products on your system, link your internet access to your hardware identity and later to your own (their infamous Passport service comes to mind) and keep track of what data you download, use and distribute.
In short: control, control and more control. Apparently Microsoft's definition of 'secure' has more to do with protecting their own interests and extending their control over the user than with actual system security. Their current plans only extend that control further and further, under the guise of enhancing security, protecting third party copyrights and working for the common good.
Food for thought.

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Contents copyright © 2004 F.W. van Wensveen - all rights reserved.