Newsgroups: alt.destroy.microsoft Subject: From Love to Hate: 15 Years of Microsoft Products From: Daniel L. Brandt Date: 5 Jan 1998 07:05:09 GMT From Love to Hate: Fifteen Years of Microsoft Products by Daniel Brandt I bought my first computer in 1982, a machine with built-in BASIC that could fit in an overcoat pocket. The batteries last a couple of years, and the programs I've written for it are still quite useful. Today you can't buy anything like it. You might find something about the same size and weight, but it would have icon-like menus pointing to various canned applications, many of questionable utility. It would use about 100 times the memory I have in order to do this, and needs to run much faster just to get anything done at all. Battery life suffers accordingly. While it's true that most consumers aren't programmers, this is one example of what has happened in microcomputing. Most BASICs in the early 1980s were licensed by Microsoft, and probably written by Bill Gates himself. This was fine for amateur programmers, which early computer users had to be. At least Bill's BASIC had "garbage collection" -- a type of internal memory management that automatically handles the messy chores that languages often require. And it took minimal effort to get the same BASIC programs working on different platforms, or to convert from one flavor of BASIC to another. This "garbage collection" made it easier to do "NameBase," a database I began developing in 1982. One of the subroutines still used today was written on that pocket computer, while I was teaching myself BASIC. But I needed floppy disk drives and print-outs, so within a few months I bought a CP/M machine, which came bundled with Microsoft BASIC. Nine months later, NameBase had grown sufficiently so that Bill's "garbage collection" took too long. At that point I purchased the Microsoft BASIC compiler for CP/M ($300). It solved my problem for two additional years of development under CP/M, by collecting garbage so fast that I barely noticed it. I had nothing but praise for Microsoft. The IBM-compatible PC largely replaced CP/M during those years, and by 1986-1987, Microsoft was enhancing their BASIC. QuickBASIC for MS-DOS appeared, and even a version for Macintosh was produced (it has never been updated, and won't work on today's Macs). Although a compiler for Microsoft's BASIC was already available from IBM, QuickBASIC did its own compilation. It was also a bargain compared to IBM's price. I retired my CP/M machine, which by then I had hacked to support five extra floppy drives, and started using an XT running MS-DOS 2.1. That left only two major problems: the 20-meg hard disks common in those days cost $400 and kept crashing, and Microsoft began spitting out numerous upgrades to QuickBASIC. Each upgrade had new capabilities and commands, many of which were useful, but each also had some bugs that weren't in previous versions. The upgrade prices seemed reasonable at the time, so I went through QuickBASIC 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, and 4.5 in about eighteen months. In 1990 I coughed up $300 for Professional BASIC 7.0, which was nearly the last non-Windows BASIC produced by Microsoft. Then in 1991, it became clear that Microsoft had to do something to survive. This was the time of DR DOS (a replacement for MS-DOS with some add-ons that Microsoft should have thought of long ago), WordPerfect for DOS (perhaps the best word processor ever produced), and Lotus 123 for DOS. In other words, the office applications that put microcomputing on the map were happily running on top of DOS, and none of them came from Microsoft. This DOS could be MS-DOS, DR DOS, IBM's PC-DOS, or any other DOS that came along. MS-DOS itself wasn't a big deal; in fact, a number of little companies produced programs that hid DOS applications under a menu, or did DOS functions through a better interface, or managed memory or hard disks better than DOS itself. Who needed Microsoft? The current version of MS-DOS was then 3.3, and it was stable. Once you had it or a close cousin on your hard drive, there was no need for Microsoft. They have never been innovative with their software, with the possible exception of the garbage collector in BASIC. But they had one advantage: through licensing agreements, they monopolized the bundling of MS-DOS with new PC hardware. That's all there's to it -- the beginning and the end of the story. In fact, those who have any experience with CP/M and Unix have long known where MS-DOS comes from. In college they called it plagiarism and flunked you for it. First Microsoft outmaneuvered IBM with the fine print in their agreement. Then they won the "look and feel" lawsuit filed by Apple. Their strategy was becoming obvious: leverage the Microsoft bundling monopoly to shift from MS-DOS to Windows. This alone would zap the Macs, and then they could gradually expand Windows by bundling major applications with it. After all, there are only a few things you can do on a personal computer: word processing, databases, spreadsheets, accounting, games, and now the Internet. Merely move Windows into each of these areas, and edge out the competition (if you can't beat them, buy them). Since anything Microsoft produced could be bundled with most of the new hardware being sold, they had sufficient instant market share to eclipse any competitor. When an upstart like Netscape makes headway with something new, just clone the upstart's product, bundle it, and drive them out of existence. It matters little if you have to give it away -- if you grab for position now, you can grab for big money later. This is a strategy of raw power that's disguised as "giving the users the integration and ease of use that they want." It works, but not because users want it. I'm certain they don't want bloated, buggy releases that include dozens of bells and whistles they will never use, only to become obsolete within a year. It works for one reason only: those exclusive bundling agreements that Microsoft finagled with hardware manufacturers. All this is driven by the fact that ever since Microsoft started, hardware has doubled in speed and storage capacity about every two years. At the same time, the price for a new system has decreased -- my CP/M computer cost the same in 1983 as my XT did in 1986, while my 486 cost less, and so would a new computer. For serious users, it makes little sense to use the same machine for five years; in less time than this, a faster machine pays for itself by increasing productivity. Sensational improvements in hardware are behind Microsoft's success, not innovations in software. This curious fact may someday change for one reason or another, but that's the way it's been for the last 15 years. When you buy a new machine, you aren't asked whether you prefer DR DOS or MS-DOS 6.22, or Windows 3.1 rather than Windows 95. You get what Microsoft wants you to get, even if earlier packages would be more efficient for your computing requirements. When I decided to upgrade from a 286 to a 486 computer in 1994, I did it because I needed the speed, but also because if I delayed much longer, my new machine would be bundled with the much-hyped Windows 95. I already knew that Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS were better for me. Based on the stories I've heard about problems with early Windows 95, that was a smart move. If I were to buy a new machine today, I'd reformat the disk and install all of my old software. I first felt that trouble was brewing in 1993, when Microsoft's development tools for MS-DOS became extinct. I believe I bought one of the last Microsoft C compilers for MS-DOS that summer ($300). I'm glad I did: soon all that Microsoft offered was Visual This and Visual That -- pig packages that required better hardware than mine just to install. I'm even happier that I took the time to learn the C programming language in 1993. Two years later, when Microsoft finally realized that the Internet existed, Unix was already running almost every server out there. Unix is multiuser, which is necessary for servers, and it was built with the C language. While it's text-based and command-line driven like MS-DOS (as opposed to the graphical interface of Windows), Unix is infinitely more powerful and also faster than MS-DOS, and uses a fraction of the system resources required by today's bloated versions of Windows. It's the same story as my 1982 pocket computer, writ large. In 1993, a public-domain version of Unix became available that can be installed on your hard disk without erasing MS-DOS or Windows. This free version of Unix (called Linux), along with free web server software (Apache), are still widely used on the Internet today. Many experts consider them superior in performance to Microsoft's Windows NT server software, which Microsoft has been developing for years in an attempt to come up with a "Unix killer." Nevertheless, corporations are going with Microsoft, perhaps because NT is priced lower than commercial Unix, and the promise of "consolidation" under Windows appears attractive to buzzword-hungry bosses. No network manager at any corporation would dare suggest using Linux; he'd be laughed out of his job. (In the corporate world, anything that's free is also something that legal and accounting departments can't handle. By definition these departments cannot possibly be worthless, so therefore the item that's free must be worthless.) Now that I have my Linux, my MS-DOS 6.22, and my Windows 3.1 (when there's no way to avoid Windows altogether), and old applications such as dBase 3+ (which existed until Microsoft purchased FoxPro, a dBase clone), Clipper, Lotus 123, WordPerfect 5.1, and BASIC and C compilers for MS-DOS, and the free C compiler for Linux, I'm feeling quite lucky. But I don't feel lucky when I scan the "Help Wanted" ads for a job. My skills are utterly obsolete for the job market in microcomputing. Those who might once have hired me, have been furiously converting to Windows for everything. To become marketable again, I'd have to send Microsoft more money. I'm looking at a brochure that they recently sent me. For mere hundreds of dollars I can get a "Visual Studio 97" suite of development tools, including Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual FoxPro, and more. Of course I'd need a new computer with tons of memory and a huge hard drive, and I'd have to spend many months learning one or two of these systems. At that point I could put it on my resume, and the number of programming "Help Wanted" ads I could answer would increase about 20 times. But what if I learn the wrong package, and it's obsolete by the time I'm ready to send out my revised resume? And even if I'm eventually able to earn a paycheck by writing programs using one of these development systems, doesn't that make me part of the problem? Can I, in good conscience, support Microsoft's monopoly? Hell no, I won't play ball with Bill this time. I'm also not willing to spend big bucks getting Microsoft-certified in network administration or whatever, only to have the certification soon become worthless. (Sometimes college also turns out to be useless, but no one ever expects you to delist your degree due to obsolescence.) Between Microsoft and those prospective employers that buy into everything Microsoft does, I'm getting mad. Fortunately, I've had more electronic hardware jobs than software jobs, so I'm hoping that I can stick to hardware for the paycheck, and save my antiquated software skills for things that matter more to me. Fifteen years ago I felt that I owed something to Bill Gates, and I was grateful. I still feel that he's a major influence in my life. But now I have an intense dislike for his methods, and I just wish he'd stop doing it to me. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Public Information Research, Inc., PO Box 680635, San Antonio TX 78268 Tel:210-509-3160 Fax:210-509-3161 Nonprofit publisher of NameBase http://www.pir.org/ dbrandt@crl.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------