Newsgroups: alt.destroy.microsoft Subject: NYTimes Speculations on Gates Conspiracy Date: 31 Mar 1996 02:03:33 GMT excerpts... Making Microsoft Safe for Capitalism by James Glick, Pipeline founder, NYT tech columnist NYT Magazine 11/5/96 -- If the software giant has its way, it will soon be in a position to collect a charge from every airline ticket you buy, every credit card purchase you make, every fax you send, every picture you download, every Web site you visit. -- "Before he installed Windows 95 John Dodge (PC week senior executive editor) connected to the Internet using software from a Microsoft competitor, Compuserve...Not anymore -- Windows 95 silently disabled a keu piece of his setup and made it too difficult for him to reinstall it." "Life is short and even software professionals learn to take the path of least resistance -- in this case, the path leading to Microsoft. [Dodge] has become a regular user of the new Microsoft Network, though he has trouble with its Internet features." "Microsoft's strategic monopolies...are in a peculiarly subtle and abstract commodity: the standards and architectures that control the design of modern software." "Microsoft had become the world's richest sotware company, though it had no leading product in any important category but operating systems. Today nearly half of the world's total P.C. software revenue now goes directly to Microsoft." "Even longtime insiders are just beginning to understand the nature of that power: how Microsoft acquired it, preserves it and exercises it." " 'The question of what to do about Microsoft is going to be a central public issue for the next 20 years.' says Mitchell Kapor [founder and former C.E.O of Lotus]. 'Policy makers don't understand the real character of Microsoft yet -- the sheer will-to-power that Microsoft has." "It believes that you will buy all [software] on line, and it intends to deliver them. With its new Microsoft Network, providing both an on-line service and Internet access, it is focusing on electronic financial-transaction processing -- which is to say all electronic commerce...which is to say, at least in some visions of the future, pretty much *all* commerce." "Its profit margins are staggering by the standards of manufacturing companies." "Gates and Ballmer both occasionally joked about their goal of world domination. Now they are more careful. Microsoft's people are taught to avoid using the word 'dominate' in public discussion of the comapny's role in any part of the software business; the preferred word is 'lead'. " "It has become an article of faith that no credible threat exists to its monopoly in operating systems for personal computers or its rising dominance in all P.C. software." "Microsoft knows it has clout, and it uses what it has to pressure small competitors, trade-show operators, journalists, retailers and everyone else." "Microsoft wears the personality of its leader like a wet suit: Gates mindset might be described as a blend of ruthless competitiveness and planned paranoia. He chooses to be scared; he wants his company to be scared...he goads his employee with fear of failure." "Microsoft lives according to a 'thin' ethics as Kapor sees it: 'Anything that is not a direct lie or clearly illegal is O.K. and should be done if it advances Microsoft's tribal cause. This licenses the worst sorts of manipulations, lies, tortured self-justification and so on." "Microsoft stumbles, but less often than its competitors; and when its copetitors make mistakes, Microsoft has historically managed to take advantage...it has failed so far to overcome some rivals, but it has never lost an important franchise once gained." " 'Microsoft was founded based on my vision of a personal computer on every desk and in every home'...the unabridged version of that famous Gates motto is "a computer on every desk and in every home, all running Microsoft software." "Microsoft is rapidly accumulating best-selling entries in every reference category: general desk reference; movie guides; music guides; cooking and wine guides. Most of these were licensed or bought outright." "Not only is the new Microsoft network software automatically set up for every Windows 95 user; its icons - "MSN" and "The Internet" - are an astonishingly persistent feature of the 'desktop' that stares at you from your screen." " 'Does anyone know how to get rid of the Internet Explorer icon so that I can put my Netscape Navigator icon into its place?' asks a Windows 95 user on the Micosoft Network. That's what Steve Case [American Online President] wants to know...'The operating system for 85 percent of all personal computers is about to become an exclusionary marketing distribution tool.' " " 'Windows 95 includes a process that disables your Internet account,' says David Pool [Compuserve executive] 'And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the inappropriate things Microsoft does from a networking standpoint. It's a clear extrapolation of their operating system monopoly into the network application market.' " " 'This guy makes me laugh' says Brad Silverberg [head of Micosoft personal operatings sytem division]. 'Windows 95 does not 'disable' anything. It just happens that some companies' applications cease functioning -- they use nonstandard components and need special configuration. Those companies violated Microsoft's published guidelines." "[Silverberg] asserts, if Microsoft chose to keep such specifications private, to give a competitive advantage to its many software departments, that would be the company's privelege...it does own the operating system, after all." ___ "It is conventional at Microsoft to say that success comes from making good products. Microsot does devote extraordinary resources to improving its technologies. It has effectively stressed 'usability' and crisp design...But at least to date, the quality of its products has been incidental to Microsoft's triumphs over its competitors." "Even Windows 95 shows more awkwardness and instability than the personal operating systems that have long been available from Apple, I.B.M. and Next." "Many users will still struggle with obscure techniques for allocating memory to their old DOS programs, or find that they regularly crash the entire system." " 'In many ways this is an edifice built of baling wire, chewing gum and a prayer,' wrote Stephen Manes in assessing Windows 95 for the New York Times." "It is conventional in the industry to say that Microsoft cannot make great products. It has no spark of genius; it does not know how to innovate; it lets bugs live forever; it eradicates all traces of personality from its sotware." "This view misses the point. Microsft knows that the technologically perfect product is rarely the same as the winning product [ah-hem]. Time and time again its strategy has been to enter a market fast with an inferior product to establish a foothold, create a standard and create market share." "Apple had the benefit of a closed battlefield; it could design its software for a limited set of hardware that it controlled. That was a huge advantage for developers, but ultimately a fatal disadvantage in the marketplace." "IBM created in OS/2 an operating system clearly superior to Windows 3.1 in most important respects. Yet it failed to persuade the hundreds of manufacturers of P.C. hardware and the thousands of independent software developers to fall in line with compatible products." "Windows 95, despite its '32-bit' fanfare, contains so much vestigal 16-bit code that it makes Intel's new Pentium pro processor look bad." __ "Microsoft's launch of Windows 95 will live in history as a pinnacle of public-relations showmanship in a public-relations driven year. When thousands of onlookers and journalists gathered under the big top on the Microsoft campus or watched nearby on giant screens, the subliminal message was, We can buy anything: Jay Leno (emcee and vaudville partner for Gates), The Times of London (an entire day's run of a once-great newspaper), the Empire State Building (colored lights usually reserved for national holidays)...[all for] an upgade." "Millions of high-end users have bought the upgrade...millions of corporate customers have chosen to delay the inevitable headache, particularly when most existing hardware lacks the speed and memory to run it well. It doesn't matter. In the long run virtually every desktop computer will run Windows 95 and its successors. New computers shipping now have Windows 95 preinstalled by default. Applications developers have either stopped developing for DOS and Windows 3.1 or soon will." "Windows has long since stretched the definition of operating system past the breaking point. The original DOS was little more than a thin (and clumsy) layer of hooks that applications could use for reading and writing data to memory, screen and disks. Windows 95 not only provides a rich environment for controlling many programs at once; it also offers built in, a word processor, communications software, a fax program, an assortment of games, screensavers, a telephone dialer, a paint program, backup software and a host of housekeeping utilities and, of course, Internet software." "So the operating system has become, from the consumer's point of view, a useful package of software." --- "And when Microsoft asks to license your [new] technology, you may not always find it easy to say no. One company that tried was Stac Electronics, which had developed sotware compression software effectively expanding disk capacity. Microsoft wanted to build Stac's technology into the operating system and negotiated using its scorched-earth style, demanding a worldwide license for a one-time flat payment and threatening to move ahead with or without Stac's license." "Stac refused, Microsoft acted on its threat and unlike most small companies that brush up against Microsoft, Stac sued. A jury, finding that Microsoft had stolen Stac's property, awarded $120 million for patent infringement." --- " The age of mass production could not begin until the world agreed on standards for the dimensions of nuts and bolts...standard-development acts as a catalyst in economic development; the Internet itself emerged when open and free (government, international and industry consortia) standards were created to allow different types of computer networks to talk with one another." "Microsoft has a mail standards, called simply MAPI. It has a new telephone standard, for letting software interact with telephone equipment: TAPI. It is belateduly but feverishly working on a proprietary online multimedia document publishing standard codenamed Blackbird. Microsoft abhors industry-wide standards: its pattern, with increasing consistency, has been to refuse to cooperate with any standards procedure but its own." "Money on the internet will require standards. Visa International and Mastercard International managed to set aside their rivalry long enough this summer to announce that they were creating a joint standard for processing credit-card charges across the Internet...a few weeks ago, the alliance broke apart." "Mastercard, along with Netscape and IBM, charged that the standard, create dby Microsoft and published as an 'open' set of specifications, was actually proprietary, designed to give Microsoft a powerful advantage enabling it to take a slice of every transaction." "Microsoft responds that the specifications are freely available; its own Windows implementation of those specifications, however, is proprietary and available to those who wish to pay for a license, possibly on a per-transaction basis." "It has become a familiar scenario: Microsoft claims an architecture is public and open; its competitor say the crucial details are reserved for Microsoft alone." "The risk for everyone else is that the company that owns the standard can change it without warning, can give its own programmers special advantage and can freeze innovation elsewhere." --- "Not long ago, Word Perfect led the word processor market with a much-loved product and a toll-free customer support service; Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the spreadsheet market, and Borland International's Paradox led the PC database market." "For all three companies the fatal 'sea change' was the transition from DOS to Windows, particualrly Windows 3.0, the first widely popular version. Microsoft notes with considerable justice that its rivals made a strategic blunder in not releasing Windows versions of the software more quickly...but there was no question that Wordperfect, Lotus and Borland were late by choice-- in part because, caught up in the Catch-22 of the operating-system wars, they knew that their Windows versions would help Microsoft by cementing the establishment of Windows." "The final blow to the applications market came with the emergence of 'office suites' --packages of word processors, spreadsheets and data bases budled together: Again, Microsoft saw the opportunity first and made sure that its package was more tightly integrated than its competitors could be...Today, Microsoft says it 'leads' the market in office suites. Yes, indeed: its market share is estimated at 90 percent." --- "A comment by Bod Dole which Microsoft rushed into its legal briefs and new releases: 'A company develops a new product, a product consumers want. But now the Government is steps in and is in effect attempting to dictate the terms on which that product can be marketed and sold. Pinch me, but I thought we were still living in America' " "Microsoft lawyers encourage an ideological view of United States v. Microsoft, employing not just 'free-market capitalism' arguments but also a quaint form of red-baiting, assailing would be 'commissars of software' and insisting: 'such thinking should have disappeared with the Berlin Wall. Fortunately for American consumers, we do not have a centrally planned economy." --- "Designers of competing tool sets --Netscape and Sun -- see Microsoft's as attempts to gain control of another key choke point in the pathways of electronic commerce. So does an odd bit of lanugage in Microsoft's contracts with the computer makers who bundle Windows 95 with their hardware: a forced promise not to sue Microsoft or anyone else for patent infringement." "Is Windows an open standard? Yes -- when and only when that suits Microsoft. 'We could say, hey, we're not publishing any API's to our operating system,' Bellmer says. 'Or we could pick five guys and tell them what's in this operating system -- we're not going to tell other people.' " "There was a moment in history, just a few years ago, when any number of operating systems, real and imagined, could have emerged to run the world's personal computers. That moment is past." "The Microsoft architectures have established themselves so deeply in every segment of the computer business that they cannot be displaced, not even by Microsoft." --- "The Department of Justice does not need to break Microsoft apart. It need only require Microsoft to make its operating system, and the web of standards surrounding it, truly and permanently open --a far-reaching step in itself." " 'The company in some sense is a captive of its own history of voraciousness,' says a former Microsoft executive. 'It is a captive of sharholders who have come to expect nothing less than Microsoft-style profit margins and growth rates."