On Jul 8, 10:31 am, Thundercleets wrote:
> On Jun 10, 2:32 pm, "Erich Kohl" wrote:

> > A lot of people complain about Microsoft's voracious appetite (greed?)
> > and monopoly position in the computer industry.

It's not just talk either. Remember that Microsoft has been
investigated and/or prosecuted and/or sued for numerous criminal
activities and most of these have resulted in preliminary judgements
against Microsoft that led Microsoft to offer preemptory settlements.
Criminal acts committed by Microsoft and ruled by judges to be
criminal acts inlude fraud, extortion, sabotage, blackmail,
embezzlement, theft, and obstruction of justice.

Microsoft's top executives avoid criminal prosecution by writing
carefully worded settlements which, in effect, grant immunity
Microsoft and it's executives and employees in exchange for minor
concessions and what appear to be generous settlements. Microsoft
pays an average of $2 BILLION per YEAR in settlements and another $2
BILLION per YEAR in LEGAL FEES in it's defense.

Microsoft has figure out a way to make criminal activity profitable
and avoid the usual criminal prosecutions an the same time. In other
words, at Microsoft CRIME DOES PAY.

> > But then it occurred to me -- how many unique operating systems can the
> > industry support?

Go to the grocery store. How many brands of soap to you see? Include
all forms of soap from bar soap to dishwashing liquid to clothes
washing detergent to shampoos and facial cleansers.

Now imagine walking into the "Microsoft store" where you see, at most
4 different types of lye soap made from pig fat and lye. It smells
horrible, and makes your skin break out in hives, and your clothes
disintigrate after 10-12 washings, but since it's the only stuff you
can get, and it's "thrown in" with each clothing purchase, each
haircut, and you employer gives you a bottle of the stuff along with
your paycheck, you really don't get a chance to use anything else.
Furthermore, the other soap makers are locked out of the market, and
can't get any publicity for their soap. They advertize in specialty
magazines to people whose alergies to Microsoft soap is so severe that
they are willing to order it and have it shipped to them, and they
even mix it themselves, mixing a concentrate with water or alcohol or
lotion, depending on what type of soap is needed.

The people who use this soap not only don't get allergies, their
clothes last longer, and their hair doesn't fall out so quickly, and
they don't have dandruff, and they actually smell nice for several
hours. They try to tell their friends about the soap, but they are
seen as crackpots because everybody knows that Microsoft soap is
"Free" and they get more of it than they really need.

What these people don't realize is that 20% of their paycheck,
including 40% of what they spend on clothes, is going to Microsoft to
pay for their "Free" soap. Microsoft has the clothing makers
convinced that if they don't include the soap, nobody will buy the
clothes. They also threaten employers by threatening to cut off their
supply of soap, telling them that without the Microsoft soap all of
their employees will get sick and die.

Sounds absurd doesn't it? When you use the word Soap instead of
software, and clothes instead of PCs, it just seems ridiculous that
anybody would fall for a scam like that, or pay so much, or let it get
so out of control. Yet, that's what Microsoft did for almost 30
years, increasing our dependency on their products, expanding their
control, and eventually forcing us to take products we didn't want or
need, while killing off all of the competitors through criminally
anticompetitive tactics including fraud, extortion, blackmail,
sabotage, embezzlement, theft, and obstruction of justice.

Had Procter and Gamble been able to pull that off, there wouldn't be
colgate polmolive, or any of the other competitors in the market, and
a grocery store might only have 1 isle of soap that smelled horrible,
ruined your clothes, was toxic, and made your hair fall out.

[snip]

> It is M$ monopoly and wholesale code and IP theft that burns most
> about M$ success.

Keep in mind that Microsoft has obtained monopoly in a wide variety of
markets, including not just the Operatign System, but nearly every
other type of application, from text editors and word processors to
web browsers and databases. Most of their stuff his horrible,
incompatible with everything else, and forces companies to spend
$TRILLIONS world-wide on wasted time and effort to support the
proprietary Microsoft infrastructure. The costs include everything
from malware and identity theft to manual copy/paste of documents into
useful forms to lost documents that take forever to find, or can't be
found, to ineffective collaboration, where a simple request can take
weeks to get approved because it has to be written as a Word document,
complete with way too much information, when often, a simple text
request made via instant messaging or e-mail would provide very
specific responses and/or requests for more information.

> One of the main reasons M$ hates CopyLeft is that they can't rape
> small start-ups and coders as easily as they did before.

OSS can't be controlled, it can't be bought, it can't be stolen, and
it can't be stopped. That creates a problem for Microsoft. Worse,
many of Microsoft's former partners, now competitors locked out of the
market and dependent on some huge parent company for survival (Lotus,
WordPerfect, Borland,...) are resorting to Open Source as a way to get
back into the market.

Microsoft tries to lock them out, but since end-users can install it
themselves, and there is little or no funding approval required, OSS
is spreading very quickly. It sees that, according to a few surveys,
FF now installed on more PCs than IE. Open Office is now running on
more PCs than Microsoft Office.

And yet, Microsoft is still able to extort $40 billion/year from OEMs,
Corporations, and institutions for their "shovelware", including
Windows, Office, and IE. Again, it seems that Microsoft's strategy is
to starve out the competition, locking them out of the corporate and
institutional budget. 600 million end users might install OO because
they can do more in less time, but Microsoft still gets it's $40
billion/year.

> As an OS, on it's own merits Windows, in all forms, sucks.
> M$ has never been known as being a "tight" code house so it's no
> surprise.

Actually, it has been Microsoft's strategy to burn as much RAM and
hard drive and CPU as possible, because it's supposed to help force
people into buying new computers. The irony is that Windows 98
running on a 400 Mhz Pentium II was faster than Vista running on a
dual-core 8 billion instruction per second Duo..

> You can chalk-up M$ success to vendor lock-in, market intimidation and
> graft.

Microsoft's good fortune was fundamentally part of their unique
understanding of copyright law just months after it was revised in
1977 (law drafted in 1976 and put into effect in 1977). Bill's father
understood the law, and encouraged Bill to license rather than sell
the software, and even helped Bill write most of the early Microsoft
licenses. Microsoft had made several million dollars licensing BASIC
in ROM. IBM didn't find out until it was almost too late, that
Microsoft wanted to grant IBM a nonexclusive license rather than just
charge a big huge lump sum. It was the timing of Microsoft's proposal
that caught them by surprise. Rather than asking for licenses up
front, the way another vendor did, Microsof let IBM play along until
it was too late, and then gave their price.


> Early in 1995, the BBS was still king. Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL—these
> were the powerhouses. Most of computer-buying America knew little, if
> anything, about the Internet.
>
> Bill Gates even stated flatly at a press conference that the Internet
> was a passing fad and unimportant.
>
> Certified Mail: July 2002
> July 2002, MCP Magazine Readers