From: orpheus@reed.edu (P. Hawthorne)
Newsgroups: comp.programming,comp.software-eng,soc.culture.usa
Subject: Re: DISMANTLE MICROSOFT (Was Re: Industry market shares)
Keywords: Microsoft
Date: 26 Jan 93 11:55:12 GMT
Article-I.D.: reed.1993Jan26.115512.6873
Organization: Reed College, Portland, OR


  William Chesters, williamc@aifh.ed.ac.uk, writes:
 [Some religious discussion about windowing systems deleted.]
: Anyway, just the threat that Macs or Gem might start being a real 
: challenge did spur MS into some kind of action: so there is _some_ 
: competition.

  Tom Boutell, boutell@isis.cshl.org, sarcastically advocates the devil:
: Never mind that for a company without competition to worry about,
: they have a strange tendency to keep producing new and better products....
: Never mind, more importantly, that these figures utterly ignore the
: issue of international competition. 

  Robert Mah, rmah@panix.com, counters:
: MS products are not, IMO, the paragon of quality.... The only reason MS has
: the vast majority of it's employees here is that the market is here and the
: people with the needed skills are hear. If that changes, they move.

  Neither the quality of Microsoft products nor their Made in America
status is actually at issue here. Certainly Microsoft is as American as
Boeing or Nike, perhaps even more so. And certainly Microsoft is capable of
besting, buying or killing the competiton.

  Microsoft is a fierce competitor, and nobody is going to argue that
point. There are a great many people out there who can describe what it is
like to have Microsoft decide that your employer is a threat. It can be a
bloody mess. (I am amazed that CE Software has done as well as it has.)

  The many parts of a dismantled Microsoft would also be strong
competitors, and would also be American companies. The difference would be
the chances of even surviving competition with them, given x dollars of
capital. We should be able to agree that it very hard for anyone to take on
Microsoft one on one, no matter the details of the products or the
orientation of the market.

  Say you had a prototype of a product that could kill the shipping version
of Microsoft Whatever dead. What kind of capital would you need to get it
on shelves and supported? And when the next version of Microsoft Whatever
ships, having swallowed up and digested whatever advantage your product
had, you're toast unless you've got a lot more capital at the ready.

  Remember, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

  Does anyone deny that the billions of dollars that Microsoft earns in a
year could also be earned by fragments of Microsoft, that many software
markets would be liberated, and that there would be more competitors on the
scene being fruitful and employing people?


  William Chesters, williamc@aifh.ed.ac.uk, writes:
: Do you remember in the early days of micros it looked like there would 
: be an awful lot of incompatible standards?  Until IBM and DOS came along 
: of course.  

  There actually were a lot of incompatible standards. I belonged to a
group that had to translate disks to more operating systems than I care to
remember. That everyone could eventually used PC disks was a real boon.
However, I do not credit Microsoft for this turn of events. Rather, I
credit IBM and the real need for a standard of some sort. I don't think we
should interpret the dominance of the PC as justification for the
predatorial capitalism practiced by Microsoft. Let's not blur the two.

  If all that Microsoft can justify itself with is standards, perhaps we
should take a look at those standards. At what price do these standards
come? With the exception of RTF, I would say that Microsoft standards suck
rotten eggs. And if Microsoft standards are better than no standards, I say
we give Baby Microsoft standards a fair chance.

  Hell, MCI posted big earnings last quarter, didn't they?

  Prometheus Hawthorne - Jones (orpheus@reed.edu)
 
Newsgroups: comp.programming