Re: My Migrations
- From: Richard <riplin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 13:04:07 -0700 (PDT)
On Oct 2, 6:33 pm, "Pete Dashwood"
<dashw...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The problem with 'converting all to one product' is that then it does
not need to improve at all. eg IE won the browser wars with IE6. Not
because it was a good product but because it was on every machine sold
and was good enough. If Firefox hadn't come along there would have
been no IE7 oe IE8. If Firefox wasn't GPL MS would have simply bought
the company and buried it.
[Pete]
That is entirely speculative. You have no idea what they might or might not
have done.
I based it on how MS had actually behaved in other areas.
I agree with your dispute. MS has crap marketing. They owe their
dominance to contractual superiority: to 'per box pricing' and
'loyalty discounts'. For example: if Dell/Gateway etc offer a
particular model with "Windows, Linux, or BeOS" they lose a million
dollar discount which is only given if _all_ machines of one model are
Windows.
[Pete]
Well, Gee, if they were serious about waving the banner for freedom of
choice, wouldn't they just forsake that million dollars and let the public
vote with its feet, rushing to embrace the other choices and making them
several million in place of the million they "lost"?
No? Perhaps they are not as unhappy with MS as you are. Perhaps the general
public actually WANT MS/Intel boxes...
The general public 'want' internet and email, skype, facebook and
twitter. When they walk into a shop to buy this there is only Windows
and sometimes Apple. They hardly know its a computer, let alone what
MS is.
[Pete]
It's called "business". If you can't stand the heat, don't go in the
kitchen. If someone has a truly superior product it is quite amazing how it
actually gets out to the market place.
Exactly, DR-DOS was a superior product, it got to 15% market share. MS
applied illegal 'per box pricing' on its OEMs (see court records) to
all but eliminate it from the market. MS paid over $100 million in
settlement when their successors sued them for anti-competitive
practices.
It isn't that MS is 'business' it is _illegal_ business, as found by
courts.
In this day and age viral marketing
alone can defeat the ploy you describe. If several million people are
twittering and blogging about a great new product (and they can be within a
week or two of its availability) you can bet that the people who wrote it
will not came out badly financially.
Certainly Firefox, Thunderbird, Linux, work as you say.
The only reason that MS made .NET (actually for years MS never knew
what .NET was supposed to be, it was a brand looking for a product)
was because Java was becoming successful and MS couldn't take control
of it. They couldn't buy Sun, they couldn't make their version take
over (they tried), so as a last resort they bought in Anders to build
something under the .NET brand.
[Pete]
Again biased opinion. Where are the facts? Anders has shown no sign of
leaving the "Evil Empire" and there are no chains around his ankle. Neither
was he dragged there kicking and screaming from Borland. (Actually, if I
were him I probably would leave about now because he certainly has all
thecash he's ever going to need. I would have thought he'd be off doing his
own thing... Ah, forgot... He IS doing his own thing and has unlimited
resources to do it with.
I have no beef with Anders, nor the product. However you seem to claim
that it has 'magically solved the world's problems' when it does
little more than other products have done. Perhaps it is just the
first thing you noticed after Cobol.
Of course this has made Java improve too.
This is why it should _NOT_ be all one proprietary product, there
would be no reason to improve, ever.
[Pete]
A good point. We can agree on that. In the same way that war promotes
technology, so competition promotes improvement. I am not arguing against
competition; I am saying that a monopoly (although the strict definition of
th word precludes competition) does not, in practice, as far as MS is
concerned, preclude competition. Neither should it do so.
The only competition not precluded by MS is that which it cannot buy
or bury.
'Pressure groups' ? MS has a business model that relies on
continually increasing revenue to keep the share price up. This allows
it to dilute the stock and pay its employees partly in share options.
This means that it saves cash (printing shares is 'free') and yet can
reduce its tax bill by counting the shares as payments.
[Pete]
Pretty cool, eh? :-)
Cool enough that it is common practice in the US and now they need joe
sixpack to give them $1000 billion to prop it up.
[Pete] Users don't want DRM because everybody copies stuff illegally.
That is the propaganda put out by the music industry. In fact the real
reason is that the publishers are taking too much profit and charging
too high a price for a CD.
People copy their CDs so they can play them in the car, at home, on
their MP3, without breaking the original. Certainly many do copy for
friends, many do sell them down the market.
That's
partly why the music industry has died and is reduced to putting out
electronic noise that can be generated on computers which don't require
royalties, and then persuading us that this is "music"... :-)
There's another reason why people won't pay for music, it's crap.
[Pete] There is no sign of that happening at the moment, which kind of makes
your argument... speculative.
The reason that Vista took so long was that they were writing a .NET
based version of Windows to replace XP. This would run using the CLR
and would only require a new CLR to use a different CPU, such as the
Cell used in XBox 360.
They failed to get this to work and abandoned it replacing it with a
2003 based system built in 18 months which they released as Vista.
Originally the indications were that 'Windows 7' would be that CLR
based system revived, but the failure of Vista to gain any traction
probably means that this will be 'Mojave', a fixed Vista.
If they were to do this in the XBox market,
I'd say they have a perfect right to. Why shouldn't a player in the gaming
market lock you in to their platform? Everybody else does it. It really has
nothing to do with PC sales.
They _are_ doing that in the XBox market, that is what XBox is. If
they rejigged a new XBox to run a normal Windows then it would be a
XPC and would be to do with PC Sales.
No. It is not _because_ they are big or even a monopoly, it is _how_
they got to be a monopoly.
[Pete] And you have shown that most of what you believe is speculative,
based on your personal bias and not on facts.
Actually they are facts. You can check court records to see that MS
was found guilty of illegal 'per box pricing', that they settled
against the successors of DR-DOS for anti-trust violations, and many
others. Including they never paid Spyglass for writing IE for them.
Persoanlly, I odn't really
care how they got to where they are. I'm just glad they are there. If they
weren't I'd still be paying a fortune to cobble away in COBOL and take all
the aggravation and poor product support, with an archaic IDE that makes
development like wading through molasses.
You may have stuck it out with that crap well beyond better stuff
being available, but just because you stepped from the 70s into .NET
doesn't mean that there was nothing in between.
You may have found that XP SP3 is the first OS that you are happy
with, but some of us found other stuff decades ago and find that XP
and .NET are just another thing in the mix and don't change the world
(not for us, maybe it did for you).
[Pete] I don't read histories about companies; I talk and listen to people
and I form my own conclusions.
You don't know the history yet you say my reporting of it is just
unfounded bias ??
Nevertheless, I enjoy C# and for me it is "satisfactorily" cross platform..
Have you tried running your stuff on Mono ?
For one thing it is not quite .NET 2 yet, another is that it is GTK+
based and not WinForms. It omits many things that are Windows only.
It is possible to write a cross platform application but only by using
the common subset of stuff.
[Pete]
So I see MS is not your only prejudice... :-)
Quite right. I am also biased against American Imperialism.
If they join or support a standards body it is because they are "seeking
to
manipulate it".
They paid ECMA to write and fast-track OOXML, they paid their partners
to pack the meetings, they _did_ manipulate the ISO process. This is
documented, it really happened.
[Pete]
Pity someone didn't do that for COBOL...
Did you want the Cobol standard to be set by someone with the most
money regardless of the quality. Read the commentary about OOXML
(which MS have not implemented and probably never will).
[Pete]
That's your opinion. There are thousands of kids around the world who have
benefitted from their charitable contributions, and millions of programmers
who got into programming because MS made it possible for them with free
compilers and IDEs.
MS give away free Windows and software to schools and then claim the
retail price as a donation against tax. Given the cost is negligible
then they actually make money from this. It is of course tied to
obligations from the schools, such as they will never run Linux.
'Free', I think not.
Perhaps you could comment on the charitable contributions made by the Open
Source Foundation? Ok, that's a cheap shot; we all know how tight their
budgets are and I wouldn't diminish the work they do, most of it by very
dedicated and enthusiastic people. But my point is that they don't have the
wherewithal to make this kind of contribution. MS do it,
Bill Gates has
personally given away billions of dollars, and you say they have no
integrity. They don't HAVE to do this.
Bill Gates has large share holdings in drug companies. The Melissa
Gates foundation gives away millions of, say, AIDS drugs, made by the
company he has shares in. This donation is tied to the countries drug
purchasing policy, as in "we will give you X million drugs (high
retail, trivial production cost) if your purchasing policy eliminates
cheap copies of our expensive drugs.
The foundation then claims tax writeoffs at the highest level while
the shares rise in value.
They are not just giving it away.
[Pete]
Fascinating. Your insight into history and the motivations of MS is
certainly imaginative. Even if you were right, and there is not a shred of
evidence other than your own biased cynicism, that was then, and this is
now.
I was taking notice in the 80s and 90s. You obviously were not.
MS today is a different company than it was when they first produced IE.
IE was written by Spyglass based on Mosaic. The contract stated that
Spyglass would be paid $5.00 for every copy _sold_. MS then gave it
away for free and didn't pay anything to Spyglass. When it was
included with Win98 it was obviously 'sold' as part of Win98 except
that the box stated 'includes a free copy of IE'.
You can read the actual history of this in the court records.
[Pete]
<snipped remaining fanciful rant>
[Pete]
Like I said, I wouldn't know...
I think that sums up your attitude nicely.
You know little and think that this is 'made up'.
.
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