I admit I got a little frustrated after no one commented on my Dell post, but now I understand - I just have to post three times a day and carry my laptop with me to the bathroom and I might get some attention, like all those best-selling technology blogs that get high Technorati ratings. Or maybe I should write about nifty gadgets instead of ethics. Well, I don't think it's going to happen. So here I go again, after a brief 8 months or so, with my overly lengthy posts, stubbornly focusing on rights and wrongs in the digital world.
But my topic this time is as much historical as ethical. It is a matter of fact as well as a matter of justice. I guess that amounts to poetic justice, as in the giant who ate so much that he finally exploded. I am talking about that formidable giant Microsoft. I've been in IT since the days when MS's main products were GW Basic (officially "Gee Whiz Basic", I think, but everyone knew it was Gates, William). You could say, I suppose, that at that time they were a reasonable company with a few reasonably competitive products - MS COBOL was one of the earlier microcomputer COBOL products, and I think it worked on mainframe and midrange systems too, which gave it some advantages over Ryan McFarland and other products. Then they struck it rich by beating out CPM to make MS-DOS the OS for the IBM-PC, and made themselves a key player in the small computer market.
Still they were nothing like what they are today. MS-DOS was, by most accounts, not really an operating system, but an incomplete I/O manager. In any case, you needed half a dozen supplementary utilities (Norton, Sidekick, Xtree, etc.) to make it even minimally user friendly. The first couple of versions of Windows were complete non-starters; we ignored it and used DeskView for multitasking and window-switching. Early versions of Word had only one reason for existence, the ability to utilize built-in graphical capabilities in some of the early laser printers. People used WordPerfect for ordinary word processing, or XyWrite for more technical stuff, or maybe DisplayWrite if they were big IBM ideologues, or Wordstar 2000 if they wanted more power and more frustration (it had plenty of both).
But my topic this time is as much historical as ethical. It is a matter of fact as well as a matter of justice. I guess that amounts to poetic justice, as in the giant who ate so much that he finally exploded. I am talking about that formidable giant Microsoft. I've been in IT since the days when MS's main products were GW Basic (officially "Gee Whiz Basic", I think, but everyone knew it was Gates, William). You could say, I suppose, that at that time they were a reasonable company with a few reasonably competitive products - MS COBOL was one of the earlier microcomputer COBOL products, and I think it worked on mainframe and midrange systems too, which gave it some advantages over Ryan McFarland and other products. Then they struck it rich by beating out CPM to make MS-DOS the OS for the IBM-PC, and made themselves a key player in the small computer market.
Still they were nothing like what they are today. MS-DOS was, by most accounts, not really an operating system, but an incomplete I/O manager. In any case, you needed half a dozen supplementary utilities (Norton, Sidekick, Xtree, etc.) to make it even minimally user friendly. The first couple of versions of Windows were complete non-starters; we ignored it and used DeskView for multitasking and window-switching. Early versions of Word had only one reason for existence, the ability to utilize built-in graphical capabilities in some of the early laser printers. People used WordPerfect for ordinary word processing, or XyWrite for more technical stuff, or maybe DisplayWrite if they were big IBM ideologues, or Wordstar 2000 if they wanted more power and more frustration (it had plenty of both).
It was Windows 3.1 that finally put MS over the top and created that great sucking sound whereby all new apps had to write to the Redmond API. Soon computer vendors were being forced into MS-only deals. Excel, a ripoff of (Lotus 1-2-3) a ripoff (Visicalc) of a software program, got bundled with Word, which was beginning to resemble a real word processor, and soon MS Office was making a play to be an industry standard, not without some strongarm tactics to help it along.
The rest of the story is pretty well-known: Word elbowing WordPerfect (a 10 times better and more intuitive word processor) out of the market, Foxpro (once purchased by MS) knocking dBASE IV and Clipper out of the water, NT blowing Novell away, IE pushing Netscape to the brink of non-existence... all marketing, my friends, not a single one of these stories is an outright victory for quality. Though we did discover (in case IBM hadn't taught us earlier) that once you own the OS, and thereby pretty much control the industry, you can (a) become big enough to acquire a huge staff of high-end technical people and lure industry bigshots (b) buy up anybody who has an interesting technology, or simply steal it and fight them in court for 10 years with your huge legal staff, and make subtle improvements, and (c) bloat your products with features that 99% of your customers don't really need but that make for good sales pitches. I suppose some people might actually see this as a victory for quality. I see it as the way an unimaginative but unscrupulous corporation fought its way to become the Apollo of the computer industry, holding the sun in its chariot and determining the course of your day whether you like it or not.
The rest of the story is pretty well-known: Word elbowing WordPerfect (a 10 times better and more intuitive word processor) out of the market, Foxpro (once purchased by MS) knocking dBASE IV and Clipper out of the water, NT blowing Novell away, IE pushing Netscape to the brink of non-existence... all marketing, my friends, not a single one of these stories is an outright victory for quality. Though we did discover (in case IBM hadn't taught us earlier) that once you own the OS, and thereby pretty much control the industry, you can (a) become big enough to acquire a huge staff of high-end technical people and lure industry bigshots (b) buy up anybody who has an interesting technology, or simply steal it and fight them in court for 10 years with your huge legal staff, and make subtle improvements, and (c) bloat your products with features that 99% of your customers don't really need but that make for good sales pitches. I suppose some people might actually see this as a victory for quality. I see it as the way an unimaginative but unscrupulous corporation fought its way to become the Apollo of the computer industry, holding the sun in its chariot and determining the course of your day whether you like it or not.
So it is not without some sense of relief - call it poetic justice if you like - that I am able to write the headline above. "Some sense of wishful thinking", you might say. After all, in the last few days I have seen numerous pieces in the press alleging that Windows 7 is going to save MS from the ongoing commercial and publicity disaster known as Vista. A piece by David Pogue in the NY Times, several recent pieces in InformationWeek (this one, for example, or check out this alleged Intel endorsement) - they're pretty much all over the place. Windows 7 will save the day. What is the truth of this?
The truth is that MS has tolerated some rejections before, and has the same tried and true methodology for dealing with them: phase out support for older products so that users have no choice but to switch. And fear not, they have already announced the termination of support for Windows XP, the operating system that, despite all its flaws - absurd lack of registry control, endless security holes, occasional BSOD crashes, dubious handling of memory leaks and memory hogs (Outlook being a prime example of both) - was certainly their "greatest hit", especially with businesses who were looking for an improvement over NT Workstation.
It is typical of Microsoft, and of them alone, that a "hit" in the OS business, while supporting their stock price in the short term, is a kind of disaster for them in the long term. MS alone thinks of the OS as something you sell over and over again to the same computer user. For IBM and Sun, for example, when they were heavily invested in the proprietary the OS business, the OS was essentially something you buy with a new computer and then support with a maintenance contract. For MS, the OS is a huge revenue generator; it is supposed to be thrown out and replaced after a few service packs, to the tune of millions of licenses. (I will not get diverted into talking about their increasingly obnoxious licensing schemes, but keep in mind that they went from providing a full, re-installable copy of the OS on floppy disks, to copy-protected versions that would only re-install on the same computer - on a good day - to the current Vista "license" which is pre-installed, must be backed up by the user, and cannot be backed up or restored if a mistake is made in the backup process. Shameful, but typical.) So when one of those OS versions proves stable enough and flexible enough that businesses (especially) think to themselves, "You know, this OS really does just about everything I need it to do, I think I could save the money and an enormous distribution headache and just stick with it", it's a disaster for MS.
I wish more of the professional commentators, the ones who (unlike yours truly, so far at least) get paid for their opinions or make money from their blogs, would just get off the bus and say this in plain English. MS wants desperately for the OS to be obsolete, and it is a plain old catastrophe for them if the rest of the world thinks they actually did a good enough job with the last one that a few maintenance tweaks and a couple of utilities (you know, the much-ballyhooed support for new devices and all that) would carry it through day. This of course does not apply only to their OS; it applies to their Office suite. I mentioned the horribly reconfigured, visually confusing implementation of Word in Office 2007, all for no tangible gain whatsoever except to make it look like a new product so they can re-sell it to you. The same is true of most MS products. Every new version of MS Access caused us to have to rewrite a good portion of our Access apps, while keep the same extremely kludgey implementation of client-server. .Net framework 2.0 makes some things easier than 1.1 (database connectivity, for example), and provides a built-in membership class (which, without extensions, is good for only the simplest apps) but it is mainly there to sell Visual Studio upgrades. Every product MS makes is the same: the upgrade cycle is what makes or breaks the company. It is not consumer-oriented. Yes, consumers ask for this or that feature, computers and networks evolve, etc. A well constructed OS can go on for a long time being upgraded and patched to keep up with current standards. That model, however, ends up making very little money. MS never intended to follow the model where they provide basic OS functionality and sell service. They just want to resell the product over and over again, repackaged and made more nifty to suit current tastes.
That is, essentially, what Vista is. I am not talking about code-level Vista vs. XP vs. Windows 7. You can debate that all day. I am talking about functionality, performance, compatibility. It is not a new OS, except in the sense that trading this flaw for that flaw while having essentially the same functionality counts as something new. It is a new interface; it allegedly still has a lot of NT code in the kernel; it rewrites the I/O features (e.g., how it handles audio files) but not in a way that universally improves performance. See the Slashdot debate referenced above regarding the audio delivery system; it sounds extremely sophisticated, but here I am writing this post using Vista Home Premium 32-bit with 2GB RAM, listening to the Dandy Warhols on Lala.Com, and I get audio dropouts. As I did last night playing another album on Lala. For that I need to buy a new OS?
As for performance, also extremely debatable, it depends so much on the total configuration of hw and sw and drivers and what tweaks you do or don't apply. As for compatibility, Vista is totally incompatible with all 16-bit apps, does not support a lot of 32-bit apps, denies rights to a lot of drivers, etc. The one area in which it actually improves things is in the area of security, but at what cost? For example, the driver-signing rules are supposedly there to prevent rootkits from installing, and the numerous required user-acknowledgment dialogues are to keep viruses and trojans from loading. 'Scuse me, but I have anti-virus and anti-spyware sw installed, and I didn't pay for them. So how many of those millions of PC's with the "downadup" worm have Vista installed? A few? Oh, is that because with all those annoying dialogues, most users haven't got the slightest idea which processes should be allowed and which should be denied? Please take a letter: "Dear Steve/Bill/Whoever'sListening: the same unsophisticated users you talk down to by putting in dozens of auto-correct (or as I prefer to call them "auto-annoy") features in Word are the ones who are going to be responding to millions of those dialogues. How awkward is that?"
I cannot go on and on here trying to analyze and compare every feature of Vista, W7 and XP, and it is kind of beside the point. The OS rewrite, if it helps anyone, helps people for whom the main purpose of a computer is to play games. With all due respect to the Wii and Guitar Hero crowd, and the flight simulators who are now busily practicing their water landings, that should not be what drives the PC OS. Not in the least. Not even the consumer OS.
Windows XP was not, in spite of what they say, a great OS. The taskbar is extremely problematic and gets corrupted easily, causing huge headaches. The registry fills up over time with thousands of unreferenced entries, slowing down or crashing the system, and then you can take your life in your hands using some registry cleaner and hope you don't get rid of something you need. BSOD crashes are too common. Errant drivers can crash the system on bootup. Security was pitiful until SP2, and merely bad afterward. There are a lot of things you could say about XP that would recommend some improvements. But they do not need to be much more than XP without the bad features. Don't tell me you have to totally rewrite an OS to keep the registry clean, much less to deliver streaming audio so that it (allegedly) hits both your ears at the same time! That is bullshit, the kind of BS that lets MS sell millions of copies of each new version of Windows.
This blog is about ethics, not technical arguments over the virtues of 32-bit vs. 64-bit or this audio codec vs. that one. But here we have a case where the putative technical virtues of the OS are supposed to justify forcing the entire computer world into a huge project involving billions of dollars, millions of man-hours of installation, and millions more dollars and hours in software and hardware upgrades and application rewrites, and the supposed technical virtues are either not there, or they are gratuitous for most users, or they could have been done in a much less costly way. What right does one company have to create this sort of havoc for the sake of debatable or ephemeral improvements? It is absolutely an unethical business practice to change a widely used and understood interface and I/O standard for the purpose of supporting your own bottom line. It is also unethical to conclude deals with every single major retailer - Circuit City (RIP), Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, etc. - to carry only systems with an OS that nobody really wants. (I asked both CC and BB to sell me a system with XP installed and both of them refused.) MS's whole concept of how to do business is unethical, which is one reason they have ended up in court so often on restraint-of-trade charges (or something very similar). It starts with strongarm tactics with smaller sw companies, PC vendors and retailers. It extends to the development and marketing of their OS and all their products. It should be recognized for what it is by journalists and bloggers. That's what objectivity is, calling a spade a spade.
Now that they have suffered their most embarrassing defeat in the marketplace with Vista, and lost further ground to Linux and Apple on the desktop, what is their answer? They will push even harder for W7, cut the XP support lines, and pretend Vista never happened. And unfortunately, a lot of the tech-savvy journalists and bloggers are going along with this. That has an enormous influence on the industry, as corporate buyers read the buzz and think they have no choice and might actually gain something by moving to W7. But will that be enough? I have my doubts. W7 is scheduled for release early next year, and some analysts are suggesting that MS may move up the release date to save their necks. Meanwhile, we are in the midst of one of the worst financial crises in the history of western civilization. Nothing is stabilizing at this point, not housing, not banking, not technology (bye-bye Nortel, you did give it the old college try, didn't you? is Sun next in line for closeout sales?), not employment, and certainly not government, which will soon have committed (by my count) more than a trillion and a half dollars in one form or another to pulling us up by the bootstraps. So is corporate America, and faltering economies worldwide, going to sign up, in the next year or two, for a massive, expensive upgrade to a new desktop OS that is still not really necessary? And what if they don't?
There is indeed a serious question whether they will have a choice. Nothing strikes fear into the heart of corporate system administrators more than the idea of using "unsupported" sw/hw. So MS will make good on the threat to desupport XP, and it doesn't matter if the company has not called MS in three years for support - no more security patches, no more compatibility packs for new devices or hw interface standards - OMG, can't live with that, gotta bite the bullet and go with W7. But what if there is finally a critical mass of companies who decide to turn to open source, SaaS (Software as a Service) or "cloud computing", i.e., hosted apps on a remote Internet site, and other such options? And what if in response to this the level of support for coprorate use of these technologies grows? What if more users conclude that they don't need a PC OS at all, and can make do with tablets and other devices? In case you think MS is not the least bit concerned, note for example the pre-emption attempt with the "Tablet PC" feature in Vista, under Accessories. MS has been offering a thin client OS for something like 12 years (Windows CE) and is now positioning the little-known XP Embedded for service on older PC's that can't run Vista or W7. They are increasingly doing the open-source shuffle without actually committing to much.
Nevertheless, I'm not here to tell you that Linux desktops, thin clients, Android devices, OpenOffice and Joombla/PHP/Perl/etc. are your future. I don't think anyone can predict the future. But as the saying goes, the harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. And this giant is due for a comeuppance the size of Mt. Rainier. You know, that's the active volcano which tops off at 14,411 feet above sea level, and which according to Google maps is a 99-mile drive from Redmond. A little less as the crow flies. That's a lotta Java, I mean lava. Come to think of it, Pompeii was very important at one time too.
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