Honor where honor's due: Microsoft accomplishments are impressive. Gates
and Allen started with practically nothing in the early seventies, and today
Microsoft is perhaps the most commercially successful company in the world
with a net worth that runs into billions of dollars. Their methods may always
have been doubtful from both a moral and a legal point of view, but they did
turn inferior products into a commercial success, and a small startup company
into the biggest money-making machine in existence today. This requires
commercial genius, which Gates undeniably has, even though he never really
contributed much to technology or to life in general. Being a great salesman,
he has become perversely rich by selling bad, copycat products. Which only
goes to show that for every rule there's an exception; in this case the
computer industry's maxim that wealth is a function of creativity and
innovation. Commercial ingenuity will do as well, and Gates' marketing
strategies have been nothing less than brilliant.
Even though the company has done little more than disguise various ideas as
their own, it cannot be denied that Microsoft products have played an
important role in the maturing of the IT industry. Microsoft (in a symbiotic
relationship with chip manufacturer Intel and after IBM who allowed competing
hardware manufacturers to clone the IBM PC design) has been one of the
factors that made computer technology available to the masses.
But these accomplishments should be seen in their proper perspective.
Microsoft has been credited with being a stimulator of technological
development, and has even been called "the jet engine of the new
economy". The truth is, however, that corporate ICT investments and
efforts have rarely triggered technological development, but at best followed
up on it. Nuclear research (that eventually led to a better understanding of
semiconductor materials and microchip development) and computer research
initially took place as part of the war effort during the 1940's. The first
computer (ENIAC) was developed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering
of Pennsylvania, on a defense budget. The cold war and America's urge to
outclass the Soviet Union in achievements such as space travel triggered the
founding of ARPA, which developed much technology, including communications
technology and ARPAnet. ARPAnet eventually matured and grew as other research
institutes began to use it, and ultimately became Internet. Moore's law
has been in operation for decades; hardware integration increased and hardware
prices have dropped accordingly. The first cellphones weighed over 20 pounds,
the first GPS receivers filled a desktop. Today we can buy such devices for a
song; they fit into a shirt pocket and perform much better than those early
dinosaurs. Bill Gates claims that Microsoft helps keep prices down, saying
that modern computing power is "the equivalent of getting a 747 for the
price of a pizza". The nonsense of this statement is proven by the fact
that similar evolution and price drops have occurred with technology that
Microsoft has nothing to do with. The reduced price of computing power is
merely a reflection of achievements in the fields of micro-electronics and
physics, and of the simple economics of increased mass production.
Microsoft has ridden the wake (but rarely the crest) of these and other
developments that stimulated technological innovation. They have followed
the trend and capitalized on it, but they haven't driven it noticeably. They
have contributed to making new computer technology available to the masses,
and they created the foundation for today's IT market by turning available
technology into commercially viable products, with great success. But as
is so often the case, the initiator has long since become an impediment
to further progress.
We owe Microsoft our gratitude for two (and only two) accomplishments.
Before Microsoft came along, a computer owner could obtain software only from
the manufacturer of that particular computer. If IBM had had it their way
with PC-DOS, this would still have been the case. Microsoft changed that,
first by selling BASIC interpreters to various competing manufacturers of home
computers, later by doing the same with MS-DOS. Their marketing stragegy was
instrumental in changing a vertical market (where users buy all their products
from one supplier) to a horizontal market (where many different suppliers
sell components that go into the final end product). Both PC manufacturers
and software manufacturers owe their existence in the PC market
largely to that single fact. Also, by implementing an entry-level user
interface in Windows, they made the PC accessible to the novice user.
These are Good Things, and Microsoft deserves due credit for it. But these
accomplishments were mainly a by-product of Microsoft's marketing strategy.
Their beneficial effects pale next to the damage that Microsoft has done.
In today's Microsoft-dominated market, customers aren't served. They are being
used. Microsoft manipulates the market, with the customers as pawns
in their marketing strategies. The needs and wishes of the customers
themselves are completely ignored, unless responding to those needs would help
Microsoft in their rise to complete market domination. And all the while,
Microsoft's marketeers paint this company as the best thing that's ever
happened to us.
Microsoft replaced our dependency on different hardware manufacturers by an
even stronger dependency on one software company (Microsoft) and one platform
(Intel), and the pretty colors of a friendly-looking user interface only hide
the very badly designed technology with which they've saturated the market.
After changing a restrictive vertical computer market into a less restrictive
horizontal one, Microsoft now moves back into a vertical market where all
software products in an otherwise horizontal market are again available from
(or with the consent of) a single supplier. Microsoft has expanded the market
for PC software, but also set the standard for that market: notorious
unreliability, sloppy code, and marketing interests that impede the
introduction of new ideas. The software market is the only market where
products are still accompanied by licence agreements that state, often in a few
thousand words that are extremely hard to read, that by using the product
you indemnify the vendor against any claims, losses, or problems it may cause,
even if the vendor knew about the problem before it sold the product. In some
cases you even agree to let Microsoft remotely modify your software and you
can't hold it liable if something breaks as a result. Can you see the an
automobile manufacturer demanding that you sign a waiver before they'll let
you drive one of their cars, in case the brakes don't work? Of course not.
Yet this is considered a normal standard of conduct in the software market,
and while Microsoft is not solely responsible for it, they have contributed
greatly to the blind acceptance of this deterioration of quality standards.
And if you don't like Ford trucks, you can buy a Jeep instead. PC users
generally do not have that option.
Microsoft has spun out of control, and rules the field of computer
technology and the IT market with an iron fist. Whatever Microsoft's next whim
may be, IT customers must follow it, in spite of forced upgrades,
replacements of existing software and hardware, huge costs of ownership and
ever-increasing overhead.
Customers in today's IT market no longer have a truly free choice about the
products they want to deploy. It has become all but impossible to run an
office without using Microsoft products. There are so many MS-proprietary
document formats and protocols being used these days that Microsoft products
have become the only game in town. Alternatives are no longer a real
option, because the companies that used to offer them have either been
assimilated or eliminated, and the remaining few are ailing after years of
struggling to cope with proprietary standards designed for incompatibility
with non-MS products.
And nothing will change. The old saying that "Sony will make more
compact things, Apple will make more beautiful things, Microsoft will make
more money" will hold true as it has done in the past decades.
Microsoft is driven by sales targets, not by quality targets. No matter
how bad their products are, as long as they continue to sell them nobody will
get fired. An sell them they will, by force if necessary.
Microsoft has grown beyond control. Even the DoJ has been unable to come
up with effective measures against the company. This demonstrates that
Microsoft is now effectively above and beyond the law. Microsoft
won't be unhorsed by competition either, because there's virtually no
competition left. They'll just go on as planned, tightening their grip on the
IT market and the user community, continuing to increase our dependency on
their sloppy products, and forcing us to buy useless new releases every other
year or so.
Computer hardware is more powerful than ever, but software efficiency and
reliability have steadily dropped. PC programmers no longer know any serious
quality standards for software development, users still don't do their work
any faster or any more efficiently, and therapists are now treating something
they call 'Technology Related Anger'.
And we're stuck with all this. That's the whole point. Some readers have taken
this paper as an advocacy for Linux, MacOS or other products. While those would
indeed be better alternatives from a technical point of view, I'm not blind
to the fact that for most of us these are not viable alternatives: in order to
make our living, we're expected --even forced-- to be compatible with the one
brand of products that has been deliberately made incompatible with almost
everything else.
That's the whole point: we're stuck with it. Even if Microsoft would cease to
exist today, the PC software market would need years to recover from the huge
impediment to innovation that Microsoft has become. For years and years
Microsoft has stunted the true growth of computer technology under the guise of
innovation. In the early years the PC and LAN market was driven by innovation
that resulted directly in enhanced productivity. Simple products like DOS and
DOS-based applications, even with all their limitations and drawbacks,
achieved dramatic boosts in productivity. End users could streamline their
business processes with batch files, macros and other forms of scripting, and
applications were mostly limited to features that made sense. In those days
the investments in automation usually paid off directly in the form of
enhanced productivity. But as Windows began to dominate the market this
tendency changed, and was ultimaty replaced by exploding costs without any
further increase in productivity. Nowadays most desktop tasks actually take
longer than they used to ten years ago. Most office applications such as Word
and Excel lack features that users would like to have (such as simple macro's
and scripting, control over markup codes and freely interchangeable documents)
but eat up a lot of production time while users try to find their way through
the maze of added bells and whistles and an inconsistent and unergonomic
user interface. Windows is designed to be operated manually; the use of
scripting and macro-based jobs is no longer possible.
What we really need is an OS built around a robust kernel (the Unix approach
comes to mind) but with the focus on user-friendliness that has been one of
the deciding factors in Windows' popularity, and open API's and toolkits
that application developers might use to create products with a uniform
look and feel to the user interface. This could be done with the technology
available today. There are a lot of players in the software market
who would be eminently capable of such an effort. But nobody in his right
mind would invest in such a project, because commercial success requires
displacing Microsoft from over 95% of the world's personal computers.
The inertia of the market alone guarantees that such a transition will take
at least five and maybe as much as ten years, and that's not counting
Microsoft's sabotaging such efforts.
Recently more and more readers of this paper point out that this ideal OS
already exists in the form of Apple's OSX 10.2. And they do have a
point: OSX consists of a FreeBSD kernel with a user-friendly GUI on top of
it. Unfortunately OSX is still too hardware-dependent --it runs exclusively
on Apple hardware-- and Apple is unable to change this. Not for technical
reasons; porting OSX should be fairly trivial. The problem is that Apple
cannot survive without their hardware sales. OSX on other platforms such as
the PC could very well ruin Apple's hardware sales figures and mean the end
of the company, even though OSX is likely to perform much better on Apple
hardware than on PC hardware. (Apple's hardware architecture is less burdened
with legacy issues and performs better in general.) Then there's the fact that
Apple is financially fairly dependent of Microsoft and of course the Mac
version of MS Office is their only toehold on the general corporate desktop.
The bottom line is that Apple cannot afford to challenge Microsoft, so OSX is
not going to replace Windows anytime soon.
A set of well-designed, robust, stable and user-friendly software for office
environments running on inexpensive hardware such as the PC would be a true
innovation. But Microsoft clearly isn't up to that job, and thanks to
Microsoft's marketing strategy, we can't expect it from anyone else either,
at least not in the foreseeable future.
That is why I hate Microsoft. Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question. And the answer is "No".
Mr. Gates, Mr. Ballmer, I've upped my standards... so up yours.
Thus endeth the diatribe.
Comments? E-mail me!