by A few thoughts of Microsoft's place in the market, from someone
more concerned with the market than with Microsoft...
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Most everywhere we turn on this wonder our tax dollars built
there are the warning signs, barbed wire fences and armband wearing
thugs of an electronic new world order. They're a one party, one
platform bunch for whom a rainbow is 'too much color for your own
good' but a thousand shades of red is 'the freedom to choose.'
They're a Borg-like 'resistance is futile' army too enthralled with
the spoils of war to see all that's wrong with their homogenous,
single source, one-size-fits-all approach to personal computing.
With blind loyalty they carry out their leader's 'final software
solution,' slaughtering entire races of brainchildren for the sake of
their 'Master OS.' And now that they've assimilated or destroyed most
of the resistance, now that there are precious few choices left for us
to make, now that there are so many fewer places for us to go that
they have the nerve to ask "Where do you want to go today?"
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At some point you're going to have to do something about the
'race to the bottom' or suffer for it. We CANNOT be a country of
middle-managers. There simply isn't enough middle-management work
to go around. Besides, plenty of our countrymen don't want to be in
management at all, and neither will plenty of our children.
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No, Bill Gates isn't the only guy whose company has a history of
despicable business practices, but neither was Hitler the only guy
whose government had a history of despicable social practices. It
just doesn't make any sense to keep forgiving one criminal because
there are still other criminals. If you're going to stop rewarding
criminals for their criminal behavior, a good place to start is with
the biggest criminal. And no, I'm not suggesting that Bill Gates has
been or will be responsible for causing as much pain and suffering in
this century as was Hitler. But in that race, and as far as the US is
concerned, I wouldn't make any bets about him taking a distant second
place...
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Someone asked me if I knew what it would mean for the PC OS
market to become equally divided between twenty competitors. For one,
it would mean that no single virus, trojan, worm or other malicious
program could do damage to more than five percent of PC systems on
which a growing number of businesses depend. Eighty percent Windows
means eighty percent susceptible to malicious programs written for
Windows. With record numbers of Windows machines connecting to the
Internet there's a virus epidemic of horrifyingly enormous scale just
waiting to happen. What might it be if eighty percent of the machines
*running* the Internet were running Windows?
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Money doesn't grow on trees, but even if it did the supply would
still be finite. In order for anyone to have more, someone else must
have less, or you have to make more and that makes it all worth less.
$30,000,000,000 could be just that for one person, $30,000,000 for one
thousand people, or $30,000 for one million people. Which does your
brain tell you would be better for your economy? Which does your
heart tell you would be better for your society? Which does your
faith tell you would be better for your soul? So why give even more
money to a man who already has $30,000,000,000? I can see how one man
might be valued by his community ten times as much as another, but
ten-thousand times? Or a million times? Personally, I think that
anyone who has tens of millions of dollars and still wants more is
mentally ill and spiritually bankrupt. And I put it to you that for
you to become a billionaire, children somewhere must die. Statistical
*. You may well have killed someone with that credit card.
<singing> It's * by numbers, one, two, three...
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Remove all error checking from a program and it will be faster
than it was. Where software is concerned, 'slower' doesn't
necessarily mean 'more stable,' but 'more stable' does mean 'slower.'
Similarly, 'slower' doesn't mean 'safer,' 'more feature rich' or
'easier to use,' but all these things do mean 'slower.' If you want
to beat the competition for speed, you've got to sacrifice features,
safety, stability, or ease of use. Of course none of those traits
means nearly as much if you don't have any competition.
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If a market is stable or growing, fewer companies competing in
that market means fewer jobs. If the available work force for that
market is stable or growing, fewer jobs means lower wages. If a
market and its work force are both stable and growing, fewer companies
competing in that market means fewer jobs and lower wages. One way to
beat your competition is to reduce your costs. One way to reduce your
costs is to farm out jobs to countries with lower wages. The Internet
is already helping many US based corporations reduce their labor costs
by allowing them to move programming, technical support and sales
positions overseas, just as so many have moved manufacturing and
packaging jobs overseas. What's that that Microsoft is funding in
India? And for what purpose? Perhaps the reason that Microsoft is
asking you "where do you want to go today" is that they don't want you
to think about where you're going to be tomorrow.
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