Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Xah Lee]

Microsoft Hatred, FAQ

Xah Lee, 20020518

Question: U.S. Judges are not morons, and quite a few others are
not morons. They find MS guilty, so it must be true.

Answer: so did the German population thought Jews are morons by
heritage, to the point that Jews should be exterminated from earth.
Apparently, the entire German population cannot be morons, they must be
right.

Judge for yourself, is a principle i abide by. And when you judge, it
is better to put some effort into it.

How much you invest in this endearvor depends on how important the
issue is to you. If you are like most people, for which the issue of
Microsoft have remote effect on your personal well-being, then you can
go out and buy a case of beer on one hand and pizza on the other, and
rap with your online confabulation buddies about how evil is MS. If you
are an author writing a book on this, then obviously its different
because your reputation and ultimately daily bread depend on what you
put down. If you are a MS competitor such as Apple or Sun, then
obviously you will see to it with as much money as you can cough out
that MS is guilty by all measures and gets put out of business. If you
are a government employee such as a judge, of course it is your
interest to please your boss, with your best accessment of the air.

When i judge things, i like to imagine things being serious, as if my
wife is a wager, my daughter is at stake, that any small factual error
or mis-judgement or misleading perspective will cause unimaginable
things to happen. Then, my opinions becomes better ones.

Q: Microsoft's Operating System is used over 90% of PCs. If that's
not monopoly, i don't know what is.

A: Now suppose there is a very ethical company E, whose products have
the best performance/price ratio, and making all the competitors
looking so majorly stupid and ultimately won over 90% of the market as
decided by consumers. Is E now a monopoly? Apparently, beer drinkers
and pizza eaters needs to study a bit on the word monopoly, from the
perspectives of language to history to law. If they have some extra
time, they can sharpen views from philosophy & logic contexts as well.

Q: What about all the people in the corporate environments who are
forced to use MS products and aren't allowed the option/choice to use
Mac/Linux/UNIX?

A: Kick your boss's ass, or, choose to work for a company who have
decisions that you liked.

Q: What about MS buying out all competitors?

A: Microsoft offered me $1 grand for saying good things about them.
They didn't put a gunpoint on my head. I CHOOSE to take the bribe.
Likewise, sold companies can and have decided what's best for them.
It's nothing like under gunpoint.

Q: Microsoft forced computer makers to not install competitor's
applications or OSes.

A: It is free country. Don't like MS this or that? Fuck MS and talk to
the Solaris or BeOS or AIX or HP-UX or Apple or OS/2 or Amiga or NeXT
or the Linuxes with their free yet fantastically easy-to-use and
network-spamming X-Windows. Bad business prospects? Then grab the
opportunity and become an entrepreneur and market your own beats-all
OS. Too difficult? Let's sue Microsoft!

Q: Microsoft distributed their Internet Explorer web browser free,
using their “monopoly� power to put Netscape out of business.

A: entirely inane coding monkeys listen: It takes huge investment to
give away a quality software free. Netscape can give away Operating
Systems free to put MS out of business too. Nobody is stopping Sun
Microsystem from giving Java free, or BeOS a browser free, or Apple to
bundle QuickTime deeply with their OS free.

Not to mention that Netscape is worse than IE in just about every
version till they become the OpenSource mozilla shit and eventually
bought out by AOL and still shit.

• Netscape struggles, announced open browser source code in 1998-01,
industry shock
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html

• Netscape browser code released in 1998-03. Mozilla FAQ.
http://mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html

• AOL buys Netscape in 1998-11 for 4.2 billion.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-218360.html?legacy=cnet

• Jamie Zawinski, resignation and postmortem, 1999-04
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

• suck.com, Greg Knauss & Terry Colon, 2000-04, Netscape 6 mockery
http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/04/10/
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_...s_netscape.zip

• Xah Lee, Netscape Crap
http://xahlee.org/Writ_dir/macos-talk/58.txt

Q: Microsoft implemented extra things to standard protocols in
their OS so that other OS makers cannot be compatible with their OS
while their OS can be compatible with all. They used this Embrace &
Extend to lock out competitors.

A: My perspective is this: suppose you are now a company who's OS sits
over 90% of computers (regardless how this come to be for the moment).
Now, lots of “standard� protocols in the industry is a result of
popularity (RFC = Really Fucking Common), and popularity resulted from
being free, from the RFCs of the fantastically incompetent by the
truely stupid unix tech morons. What can you do if you want to improve
these protocols? If you go with totally different protocols, then the
incompatibility with the rest 10% isn't your best interest. I would
adopt existing protocols, and extend them with improvements. Being a
commercial entity, i'm sorry that it is not my duty to release my
improvments to my competitors. Any of you incompetent IBM/AIX/OS/2 or
SGI/Irix or HP/HP-UX or Sun/Solaris or Apple/AU-X/Mac can do the same,
not that they haven't.

Of course, the universe of moronic unixers and Apple fanatics cannot
see that. The unix idiots cannot see that their fantastically stupid
protocols are fantastically stupid in the first place. The Apple
fanatics are simply chronically fanatic.

Q: Microsoft product is notorious for their lack of security.

A: In my very sound opinion, if Microsoft's OS's security flaws is
measured at one, then the unixes are measured at one myriad. If unixes
suddenly switch popularity with Windows, then the world's computers
will collapse uncontrollably by all sorts of viruses and attacks. This
can be seen for technical person who knows unix history well:

• http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/freebooks.html (e.g.
ftpd/proftpd, inetd/xinetd, sendmail/qmail, X-Windows, telnet, passwd,
login, rsh, rlogin.)

• on the criminality of buffer overflow, by Henry Baker, 2001.
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_..._overflow.html

• Fast Food The UNIX Way:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_.../fastfood.html

• Jargon File: http://www.tuxedo.org/%7Eesr/jargon/

• The Rise of Worse is Better, by Richard P. Gabriel, 1991, at
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

and plenty other pre-90s documents to get a sense of just how
fantastically insecure unix was and is. Unix today is not just
technically slacking in the “security� department, but the unix
ways created far more unmanageable security risks that's another topic
to discuss.

The unix crime, is not just being utmost technically sloppy. Its entire
system and “philosophy†� created an entire generation of incompetent
programers and thinking and programing languages, with damage that is a
few magnitude times beyond all computer viruses and attacks damages in
history combined. See also:

• Responsible Software License:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/w...e_license.html

Q: Microsoft products are simply poor quality.

A: Perhaps this in general is true pre-1997. I think the vast majority
of MS products today have better performance/price ratio then
competitors. This includes their operating system, their input devices
(mouse & keyboard), their X-Box gaming console, their software game
titles, their software architectures and languages (.NET, C#), their
technologies (few i know: SMB), and many of their software applications
(suite of Office, which consistently ranked top since early 90s).

e.g. Tom's hardware review on x-box, esp in comparison with Sony
Playstation 2. (2002-02):
http://www4.tomshardware.com/consume...204/index.html

the leading role of MS Office products can be seen in MacUser &
MacWorld magazine reviews through out early 90s.

Q: BeOS was once to be bundled with PC, but MS meddled with it and
basically at the end fucked Be up.

A: BeOS is a fantastically fucking useless OS. No DVD player, No Java,
No QuickTime, No games, no Mathematica, no nothing. For all practical
purposes, fucking useless in a different way than every donkey unixes.
Not to mention the evil Apple computer, refused to pass the QuickTime
technology, and tried to prevent BeOS from running on Apple hardware by
refusing to release their PPC hardware spec. Be founder Jean-Louis
Gassee wrote an article about it. Who's fucking whom?

Q: X inc tried to do W, but MS threatened to depart.

A: Dear X inc., try to find a bigger dick for your needs. If you cannot
find any, too bad! Suck it up to the big brother and hold on to what
you can get! If you have the smarts, milk him dry! Free country, free
to choose partnership. Ladies, previous night's indiscretion is not
rape the morning after.

Q: I'm not a beer bucket or pizza hole, but i want to do research
over the web. Is there any free stuff on the web i can grab? I'm an
OpenSource advocate, i demand free things.

A: •
http://www.moraldefense.com/Campaign...AQ/default.htm
(The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism)

• http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_repo.../friedman.html (The
Business Community's Suicidal Impulse by Milton Friedman, 1999-03)
local copy

Q: I'm thinking of putting my wife and daughter on the table. What
do you suggest to begin with?

A: Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell:
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_di...economics.html

Q: Are you confident enough to bet your wifes and daughters for
what you say?

A: No. But I put my reputation in.
-------
This post is archived at:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/w...hatredfaq.html

Xah
xa*@xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:35:47 +0000, Not Bill Gates wrote:

Heck, I dunno. Like you, I don't even really care all that much.
You don't care that innovation in desktop software has been crippled by
the actions of the monopoly player Microsoft?

In 1988, there were something like ten or a dozen word processors
available to choose from, and they were competing on price and features
like crazy. That was then, now there is just MS Office. The most
innovative things Microsoft has added to Office in the last decade? Clippy
the paperclip. An XML wrapper to their binary file format. And the
incredible disappearing and reappearing menus.

You don't care that the cost of OS and office software has risen, rather
than fallen, because of the monopoly power of Microsoft?

You don't care that because of Microsoft's neglect, there are millions of
zombie PCs running their sub-standard OS across the world, sending
hundreds of millions of spam emails? I can tell you, even if you are lucky
enough to not be receiving spams, you are still paying for it in higher
ISP costs, because *they* certainly are receiving those spams and trying
to block them.

It must be nice to be so free of cares...

Maybe they were trying to protect themselves against all the market
momentum they'd created around 0S/2. They'd been big fans of it
right up until Windows 3.0 took off.

That would be a good guess, except that Microsoft's predatory and illegal
behaviour began long before OS/2 was even planned. It began in the mid
1970s, with MS DOS.

--
Steven.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 11:00:58 -0500, joe wrote:

In other words, I was recognizing that a lot of
people don't think what MS does is a crime, and until MS gets
convicted of a crime, it's a matter of opinion. I was trying to say
something else.

And again, they HAVE been convicted of crimes, plural, and not just in one
court, but in multiple, in the US, Japan, Europe, and in civil suits in
front of juries.

Apologists for Microsoft like David Schwartz seem to be taking a
three-prong argument:

"They haven't done the things you say, and even if they have, they aren't
illegal, and even if they are illegal, they shouldn't be."

The first two points are factually wrong, and the third is an opinion
based on the concept, as far as I can see, that Microsoft should be
allowed to do anything they like, even if those actions harm others.

--
Steven.

[John Wingate]

Steven D'Aprano <st***@removeth iscyber.com.au> wrote:

That would be a good guess, except that Microsoft's predatory and illegal
behaviour began long before OS/2 was even planned. It began in the mid
1970s, with MS DOS.

Nitpick: MS-DOS first appeared in 1981.

--
John Wingate Mathematics is the art which teaches
jo****@worldpat h.net one how not to make calculations.
--Oscar Chisini

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 16:54:13 +0000, John Wingate wrote:

Steven D'Aprano <st***@removeth iscyber.com.au> wrote:

That would be a good guess, except that Microsoft's predatory and illegal
behaviour began long before OS/2 was even planned. It began in the mid
1970s, with MS DOS.

Nitpick: MS-DOS first appeared in 1981.

[slaps head]

Of course it did.
--
Steven.

[entropy]

st***@REMOVETHI Scyber.com.au wrote...

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 16:54:13 +0000, John Wingate wrote:

Steven D'Aprano <st***@removeth iscyber.com.au> wrote:

That would be a good guess, except that Microsoft's predatory and illegal
behaviour began long before OS/2 was even planned. It began in the mid
1970s, with MS DOS.

Nitpick: MS-DOS first appeared in 1981.

[slaps head]

Of course it did.

The first thing I ever bought of Microsoft's, in 1982 or so, was a
CP/M board for my Apple IIe.

CP/M, whose programmers to this day defend sticking with 8-bit CPUs
because 'they can't find a 4-bit chip they like'. Yeah, there's some
desktop innovation for you.

OS/2 1.0 was released in 1987, but the "selling" of it started in
1985 or so by IBM and Microsoft. It was a 286 OS.

IBM seems to have had a history of squeezing out competition in the
same way Microsoft has, if I recall correctly.

[Not Bill Gates]

st***@REMOVETHI Scyber.com.au wrote...

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:35:47 +0000, Not Bill Gates wrote:

Heck, I dunno. Like you, I don't even really care all that much.

You don't care that innovation in desktop software has been crippled by
the actions of the monopoly player Microsoft?

You need to first prove innovation in desktop software has been
crippled, don't you?

[Martin P. Hellwig]

Not Bill Gates wrote:

st***@REMOVETHI Scyber.com.au wrote...

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:35:47 +0000, Not Bill Gates wrote:

Heck, I dunno. Like you, I don't even really care all that much.

You don't care that innovation in desktop software has been crippled by
the actions of the monopoly player Microsoft?

You need to first prove innovation in desktop software has been
crippled, don't you?

How about their "java" implementation between 1998 and 2004?
Sure killed the _easier_ write once run everywhere mantra, of course
they where not alone in the killing, SUN helped a great deal.

--
mph

[David Schwartz]

"Peter T. Breuer" <pt*@oboe.it.uc 3m.es> wrote in message
news:lg******** ****@news.it.uc 3m.es...

Yes, it certainly is. However, it is also Microsoft's right as a
seller
to refuse discounts to those who also sell competing products. You may
not

No it is not their "right"! That would be a discriminatory practice,
not to mention an anti-competitive practice. Totally.

Businesses have the right to be discriminatory and anti-competitive in
this way. McDonald's won't sell a Burger King their burger patties. This is
both discriminatory and anti-competitive, but also perfectly legal, moral,
and proper.

You only run into a problem under United States law if the company is a
monopoly. And I've already addressed that issue in this thread.

DS

[David Schwartz]

<jo*@invalid.ad dress> wrote in message
news:m3******** ****@invalid.ad dress...

I'm hesitant to get into this, but I keep wondering why, if there is
no other competing OS, or not one worth worrying about, the MS
business agreements are so draconian? Why would a company come up with
such heavy handed agreements if it wasn't worried about competition?

Yes, I know, they can do whatever they want, it's not a crime,
etc. However when they use their market position to disallow
competition, it sounds to me like they're worried about something, and
trying to squelch it.

If they have a choice, should their competitors have 1% of the market or
0%, they'll choose zero. Who wouldn't? What they're worried about is a
customer going to a store because they advertise that they have Windows and
being switched to another OS.

In fact, they weren't draconian. A draconian agreement would have been
one that prohibited you from selling any other OS if you want to sell
Microsoft OSes. Instead, what they did was much less restrictive in that it
only affected discount levels rather than right to resell and only increased
the cost of selling other operating systems rather than prohibiting them.
Many other companies totally prohibit you from selling competing products if
you want to get the wholesale price on their products.

DS

[David Schwartz]

"John-Paul Stewart" <jp*******@bina ryfoundry.ca> wrote in message
news:pj******** ****@mail.binar yfoundry.ca...

David Schwartz wrote:

If nobody wants these operating systems, then it doesn't hurt him not to
be able to sell them. If people want them, then he could have shown
Microsoft the door.

If only 5% want another operating system, the vendor has to choose between
selling to those 5% -or- to the 95% who want Microsoft. Had it not been
for the underhanded tactics, he could have sold to *both* groups.

From a purely economic standpoint, the sensible thing is to accept that
95% and let the 5% go elsewhere.

But if *every* vendor has to make that same choice, there is no place for
that other 5% to go to buy another operating system. So the other
operating system(s) die off. And those 5% become customers of Microsoft
since there's no other choice left. And *that* is where the legal
problems start: they gained market share by preventing consumers from
finding competing products.

Right, except that's utterly absurd. If every vendor takes their tiny
cut of the 95%, a huge cut of the 5% is starting to look *REALLY* good.

DS