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/

[Paul Rubin]

"David Schwartz" <da****@webmast er.com> writes:

So, your observations about Burger King are irrelevant to Microsoft.

Because the error I'm correcting is the belief that Microsoft's conduct
was extremely unusual (unlike anything any reputable company had ever done,
essentially).

MS's monopolistic conduct was uncommon, but not so extremely unusual
as to be unheard of. Congress had indeed seen conduct like that
before, which is why it saw the need for passing laws against it.

[David Schwartz]

Mike Schilling wrote:

"David Schwartz" <da****@webmast er.com> wrote in message
news:dj******** **@nntp.webmast er.com...

There is no different to Microsoft beween a bare computer and one
preloaded with Linux or FreeBSD. One can quickly be converted to
other with minimal cost of effort. In the market, bare PCs really do
compete with Windows PCs.

There's a huge difference to the non-techy consumer. One of the
buggest reasons Linux has had a reputation of being harder to use
than Windows was the fact that Linux had to be installed, while
Windows just booted up.

Is that really true? I mean, I remember distributions of Linux that you
could just stick in the CD, boot from CD, and you were up in minutes.
Installing was as simple as pushing the 'install to hard drive' button.

I think one of the biggest reasons Linux has a reputation of being
harder to use than Windows is that it *is* harder to use. However, the
payoff is that when a Linux machine breaks, you can fix it. When a Windows
machine breaks, you pretty much have to reinstall. And Windows machines
break in this way more often because it's much harder to limit what a user
or program can do.

Linux, for example, would be easier to use if it had no permissions
checks and always ran everything as root. However, it doesn't do this the
way Windows does (or more accurately, the way Windows users typically do),
because that's just not the Linux way.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy to make my point clearer, but I
can't.

IMO, a person who doesn't find installing Linux to be easy wouldn't be
able to use a Linux desktop (or do much with a Linux server either for that
matter). But I could be out of date, I haven't really tried to use the more
recent Linux desktop builds as desktops. But, IMO, that was certainly true
in the time frame we're talking about.

DS

[David Schwartz]

Paul Rubin wrote:

"David Schwartz" <da****@webmast er.com> writes:

So, your observations about Burger King are irrelevant to Microsoft.

Because the error I'm correcting is the belief that Microsoft's
conduct was extremely unusual (unlike anything any reputable company
had ever done, essentially).

MS's monopolistic conduct was uncommon, but not so extremely unusual
as to be unheard of. Congress had indeed seen conduct like that
before, which is why it saw the need for passing laws against it.

But there is no law against that type of conduct, *unless* you are a
monopolist. So your conclusion hinges on the determination that Microsoft
had a monopoly, and that hinges on the definition of the "market". That's a
different can of worms for a different part of this thread.

DS

[Roedy Green]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 02:28:46 +0200, "Peter T. Breuer"
<pt*@oboe.it.uc 3m.es> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

I'm a bit curious about this. If I were a business person, I would
simply have created two busineses (two accounts, etc.). One business
sells only machines with MS on and pays the MS tax on all its machines.
One business sells only machines without MS on and pays the MS tax on
none of its machines.

What's up with that?

Try the same thing to deal with a Mafia extortion racket.

We are not talking about legal agreements. We are talking junior Mafia
style enforcement.

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

[Roedy Green]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 19:50:07 -0700, "David Schwartz"
<da****@webmast er.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

The Microsoft agreement is also up front. It's not "imposed" in any
sense except that it's one of the conditions for buying Windows wholesale.

No it was not . It was never on paper. It was not imposed until I
had been in business for at least 5 years.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

[Roedy Green]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 19:50:07 -0700, "David Schwartz"
<da****@webmast er.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

There is no different to Microsoft beween a bare computer and one
preloaded with Linux or FreeBSD. One can quickly be converted to other with
minimal cost of effort. In the market, bare PCs really do compete with
Windows PCs.

You think it is OK to force someone into a choice of committing a
criminal act with the alternative of losing their established business
and having to put 8 employees out of work. What religion do you belong
to?
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

[David Schwartz]

Roedy Green wrote:

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 02:28:46 +0200, "Peter T. Breuer"
<pt*@oboe.it.uc 3m.es> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

I'm a bit curious about this. If I were a business person, I would
simply have created two busineses (two accounts, etc.). One business
sells only machines with MS on and pays the MS tax on all its
machines. One business sells only machines without MS on and pays
the MS tax on none of its machines.

What's up with that?

Try the same thing to deal with a Mafia extortion racket.
This is precisely my point. Your premise is that a gun is no different
from a persuasive argument. You need this principle to justify responding to
arguments you don't like with guns. I reject this premise at its roots.
We are not talking about legal agreements. We are talking junior Mafia
style enforcement.

Can you cite any evidence of Microsoft actually using or threatening
force?

DS

[David Schwartz]

Roedy Green wrote:

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 19:50:07 -0700, "David Schwartz"
<da****@webmast er.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

The Microsoft agreement is also up front. It's not "imposed" in
any sense except that it's one of the conditions for buying Windows
wholesale.

No it was not . It was never on paper. It was not imposed until I
had been in business for at least 5 years.

I guess I don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying that
Microsoft demanded you pay them per machine you sold under the table in the
absence of a written contract that said that? Or are you simply saying that
they changed the terms of your agreement when it came up for renewal?

DS

[David Schwartz]

Roedy Green wrote:

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 19:50:07 -0700, "David Schwartz"
<da****@webmast er.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

There is no different to Microsoft beween a bare computer and one
preloaded with Linux or FreeBSD. One can quickly be converted to
other with minimal cost of effort. In the market, bare PCs really do
compete with Windows PCs.

You think it is OK to force someone into a choice of committing a
criminal act with the alternative of losing their established business
and having to put 8 employees out of work. What religion do you belong
to?

You often say things that just seem to have come out of the blue with no
connection whatsoever to anything else. What criminal act was someone forced
into committing? What are you talking about?

If you have a business that sells PCs only because those PCs come
preloaded with Windows, and without Windows to offer, there would be no
market, then you have a business that exists at Microsoft's pleasure. The
same thing would be the case with any piece of software by any manufacturer.

Now, not all manufacturers would use their leverage, of course. But
don't you think it would be pretty stupid of them not to? Why shouldn't they
get from you, and why aren't they entitled to, as much as the ability to
sell Windows is worth? Since, by your own admission, it's what made it
possible for you to be in business?

You say you couldn't stay in business without the ability to sell
Windows wholesale. That means that every customer you get, in some part you
owe to Microsoft. Why shouldn't you pay them their fair share of that?

DS

[Roedy Green]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:48:25 -0700, "David Schwartz"
<da****@webmast er.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

We are not talking about legal agreements. We are talking junior Mafia
style enforcement.

Can you cite any evidence of Microsoft actually using or threatening
force?

YES . Have you not read a word I said.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.