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You are worried about standard, not features

Standards compliance is a reasonable way of evaluating the how "good" one piece of software is in comparison with another. Not the only possible criteria to be sure, but probably better than the notion so beloved of MS apologists that the most widely used software is therefore of the highest quality. Except of course when MS is trying to enter a new market, but I digress...

Do you honestly think that Joe User cared about CSS and XHTML support in 2001? or 2003?

Removing every feature that Joe Sixpack has never heard of is probably not a recipe for a good browser. For instance, we'd most likely lose SSL support if we follow that criteria, even today. "Secure Sockets Layer? Never heard of it!"

The facts are clear. Netscape couldn't compete because it sucked

Oddly enough, that particular opinion doesn't seem to have been widely held at Microsoft at the time. For instance:

It seems clear that it will be very hard to increase browser market share on the merits of IE 4 alone. It will be more important to leverage the OS asset to make people use IE instead of Navigator.
--Microsoft Manager Christian Wildfeuer (from an internal memo dated 02-24-97)

Ah, what did he know, he's only a manager, right? Here's another one:

Pitting browser against browser is hard since Netscape has 80% marketshare and we have --Former Microsoft Vice President James Allchin in an internal memo (ibid.)

Even Bill Gates seemed to think that bundling IE with the O/S was something to be smug about:

Our business model works even if Internet software is free...We are still selling operating systems. What does Netscape's business model look like if that happens? Not very good.
-- Bill Gates, article from Financial Times (London), June 1996

Gosh, if only he'd known. All that effort, and now you're telling us that Microsoft's bundling had nothing to do with Netscape's downfall.

I bet Bill feels really stupid now that you've come along to set the record straight.

Personally, I think this captures it better. Just replace the podium with a chair and you'll have both the monkey dance and the chair incident in one shot:
http://www.msboycott.com/media/ballmer_monkey_musi c.gif :-)

Of course, given they are Ballmer's offspring, they would not be simply Linux developers, but Linux developers! Linux developers! Linux developers!

He is a keen dancer in his spare time .... no, wait, he does that at work, too!

See http://www.msboycott.com/media/ballmer_monkey.mpg

Well, I bought it up
brought Windows home and tried to boot it up
but when I load it up
it says my memory is not enough...

I've been running out,
I need some extra RAM to fix me up
I had to cough it up,
open my wallet up it never stops (never stops, never stops, never stops)

This Windows 95, it's sucking up my drive,
it makes a Pentium Fly!
But my PC is obsolete,
I'll have to buy myself a brand new machine!

Microsoft's public failures are always amusing.

about two minutes ago I got sent this

"What's with Mr. Jobs and the cubes, cubes, cubes anyway?"

He's just jealous of Ballmer's "Developers, Developers, Developers"?

He was probably to busy doing his monkey dance, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, or something else.

Whatever you believe, this dude is a great corporate cheerleader, a real relic from the late nineties. If he isn't genuinely excited about his company, he sure does a great job of faking it.

Chris

He was probably to busy doing his monkey dance, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, or something else.

Whatever you believe, this dude is a great corporate cheerleader, a real relic from the late nineties. If he isn't genuinely excited about his company, he sure does a great job of faking it.

Chris

He was probably to busy doing his monkey dance, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, or something else.

Whatever you believe, this dude is a great corporate cheerleader, a real relic from the late nineties. If he isn't genuinely excited about his company, he sure does a great job of faking it.

Chris

See the last line - no Linux... yet.

Obviously, there is demand for Linux drivers for the Robosaurus, and the hope is that some large scale hardware hacker will rise to the challenge.

Imagine the result: Tyranosaurus Tux.

Then there would finally be a Linux cheerleader with the stage presence of the monkeyman. Send it to Redmond. T. Tux roars: "Ballmer, your ass is mine!"

Yeah, cause lord knows Mars needs Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!

Here's a link to the ad mentioned:

http://www.msboycott.com/media/microsoft_ad_office _bra.mov

HERE !

My first and best guess would be trough their assess. No more, no less.

Never forget that this is the company that have claimed wonderfull things like 'a web browser is part of the system kernal' and that 'a media player is inseperable from a operating system'.

Any thing coming out of that company should be taken with a truckiload of salt.

Heh.

Well, they actually considered buying from Microsoft until Ballmer showed up doing the monkey dance.

There's an old article about that in the register

and this article was even more interesting since it talks about a microsoft company (SCO) suing themselves

developers developers developers developers....

developers developers developers developers....

In case anyone hasn't seen them, the Steve Ballmer music videos are available here among other places.

If Unix is dead, then we're all zombies... Imagine the movie potential! I can see it now...

Zombie Process: Zombies in Manhattan. Zombies from around the world arise from the dead and "kill -9" countless in the relentless pursuit of the Dell Dude.

Zombie Process II: Zombies in Redmond. After successfully slaying the Dell Dude, the zombies point their efforts towards Steve Ballmer. Lots of loud, undiscernable yelling would take place this one.

Zombie Process III: Zombies Everywhere. In this exciting wrap-up to the trilogy, the zombies chase around anyone who is found to be using a Windows computer. Mayhem breaks loose in server rooms and homes across the world, and in the end Unix systems supplant all Windows systems. What a happy ending to the trilogy!

Zombie Process IV: Zombies in Space. In a somewhat odd extension of the trilogy, this movie would have an unclear, poorly-defined plot, but it would take place in space! Lots of exciting lasers and spaceships for sure.

chant "Microsoft developers are weenies"?

I just got this image of a really thin and really dry guy with long hair sitting perfectly still and chanting:

I have four words for ya:
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
C'mon! Wooooooo! C-c-c-c'mon, c'mon! Wooooooo! C'mon!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Wooo! C'mon! Get up! Get up! C'mooon! Woo! Augh!
C'mon! Give it up for me! Woo! Woooo! C'mooon!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
Weenies, weenies, weenies, weenies!
I...hate...this...company, YEEEEEEEEEEAH!

If anyone doesn't get it, click here and Microsoft's very own Steve Ballmer will explain it to you.

-

But maybe the sight of some 40-something, balding fat guys does something for you, I don't care.

Yes, balding fat guys do do something for me....

What they needed then and need now is a comprehensive, grass-roots developer support program and to get humble quick about the power and performance.

It's a nifty freaking technology, and it was a LOT of fun to play with. Did you realize that the Crusoe during the launch party was the fastest native picojava bytecode processor in the world? Did you realize that had they exposed an interface to CMS (code morphing software), that someone out there could have written a PowerPC personality for it, allowing it to run both x86 and PPC apps at the same time? Can you imagine what else you could do with access to this incredibly powerful, real-time, back-end compiler? Did you realize that you could decode, issue and retire two integer ops and an MMX or fp op on every cycle, the same decode rate as a modern Athlon and a faster decode rate than the P4? Did you realize that all the tech is in place to allow you to download CMS upgrades that vastly improve performance? Did you know they have a perf monitoring tool that puts vtune to shame? Did you know that using gdb connected as a cross-debugger, you can hit "ctrl-C" in an NMI handler or anywhere else and get a complete dump of the internal processor state, including numerous perf statistics?

Tip of the iceburg for the current core, and their next generation architecture (TM8x00) is SO MUCH COOLER. Like hella-cool with chocolate sauce.

But you probably didn't know any of this because they don't think developers are their #1 customers. Someone there needs to watch Ballmer do his developer dance.

Crusoe's are cool. Transmeta was cool, too. Working there was like working down the hall from about a dozen John Carmacks. You could walk into any one of these offices and be blown away by what they were working on. They were crossing real-time translation and optimization bridges that Intel won't be getting to in years but will eventually have to face.

Microsoft learned long ago how important developers were. That should have been the main market to chase. Crusoe wasn't ready for the masses, not by a long shot. The performance is catching up with a vengeance with every new core, but they made so many promises and IPO'd on so much hype, that they entered the classic promise debt trap that so many dot-coms fell into, and their lofty marketing plan claiming that benchmarks are "wrong" (please!) and that it offers this brilliant power savings are just goofy.

Had they remained lean, not staffed up to 400+ people from the 150ish they had when I joined, and stayed quiet, humble, and in the service of developers until developers helped propel them to mass marketability, they would not be the laughing stock they are today.

Yes, they hoped to be faster than "native" x86 based computers by morphing to VLIW, but what they didn't realize was that there would be a terrible price in instruction bandwidth. They ended up with a lemon, made lemonade, then added red food coloring and called it wine.

If they exposed an API to CMS, I think they would be truly impressed by the tricks that independent developers could come up with to compress their own instruction stream to make the compression ratio competetive with x86 code footprint.

Do you realize that's really the main performance problem with Crusoe? The instruction bandwidth! On average, x86 instructions, because they're variable width and byte granularity, are 6X smaller than the average Crusoe instruction, which is made up of two or four 32-bit atoms in the current architecture.

OK, that's too darn bad, but it's the youngest surviving newcomer to the x86 market, and this is a solvable problem, and "with many eyeballs, all problems become shallow," once said a bright chap who ought to put his foot down and say it again.

Tablets: I made the demos that ran on tablets for their shows and IPO roadshow. They're cute, fun, no market for them yet, but again, something to get in the hands of developers so that they can make killer apps to create a market for tablets.

Finally, OSS is getting songs, too.
Micro$oft has had music for years.

"Developers Developers Developers Developers!"

I wrote a review of Productive 3 for my Web site a while back... Check it out at msboycott.com/thealt/reviews/gobeproductive.shtml.

This is great news for everyone because gobeProductive is slim and trim - it is to office suites what Opera is to Web browsers.

--

I hope he does a reprise of the Monkey Dance first.

Back in February I wrote a lengthy report on Metropolis for my college cinema class. The report was supposed to be about the themes of the film, but its history was so interesting I spent 2/3 of my time on that instead of the plot and events. An assignment for a 600 word paper turned into a 1700+ word essay that received an A+, not that I'm bragging or anything. I think it's an interesting read, whatever the grade was. The paper includes links to other sources and reviews more knowledgable than I. Check it out at www.msboycott.com/kmarks/metropolis.shtml .

There you have it.

Besides Opera there are a lot of others you might want to check into... Replacements for Internet Explorer on every computer platform: MSBC's The Alternative.

StarOffice Impress. Applixware. HancomOffice. KOffice. There are plenty of replacements for Powerpoint's functionality, on Linux and other platforms as well. See MSBC's The Alternative for a longer list.

For a full list of replacements for Internet Explorer on any computer system, check out the Internet Explorer listing on MSBC's The Alternative. It's worth a read to see just how many IE replacements are available, quite a few of them for Macs.

I reviewed StarOffice about a year ago for my Web Site. Some of you might be interested in reading it, since its an independent review written by someone not working for a major media Web site. Or maybe you wouldn't... Either way, here it is.

I reviewed StarOffice about a year ago for my Web Site. Some of you might be interested in reading it, since its an independent review written by someone not working for a major media Web site. Or maybe you wouldn't... Either way, here it is.

i know msboycott.com isn't made for IE :)

Thank you! I'm glad someone besides me finally said that. I am extremely pro-business and extremely conservative, but I've spent the last five years now working on The Microsoft Boycott Campaign. Look how many conservatives are working with Ms opposition groups. Bob Dole and Robert Bork?? AND Ralph Nader. Considering that, who can still actually believe only liberal anti-business people oppose The Behemoth? Microsoft is a threat to you no matter where you are politically - a company that doesn't care about consumers or competition one bit. It's like cancer or some other deadly disease - you don't have to have any certain political viewpoint to be against it.

Or your credit card numbers, or your medical data, or your telephone number, or any number of things that will be stolen from .NET users the next time Russian hackers have unlimited access to Microsoft's networks for six weeks... How soon we forgot what happened back in October. .NET is a disaster waiting to happen.

Join the club! We've been actively boycotting The Behemoth since late 1996.

THE MICROSOFT BOYCOTT CAMPAIGN

Microsoft is pushing people to buy Office XP not for the new features but because it hides Clippy. That's pretty much it. $300 for an upgrade just to hide the Office Assistants (they'll still be on the help menu, just not on by default). Microsoft could release a 100KB patch to do the same thing. [Also see News.com, The Register, and MSBC NewsSource.]

So what does XP stand for? eXtra Profits, of course.

This is similar to what Microsoft is planning for Windows XP's sound infrastucture. XP will send all sound signals to the sound card with some kind of encrypted static in them. The card, using a Microsoft-approved driver, will then decode the signal and remove the static for playback [see The Register].
Its all intended to prevent us from somehow getting between the OS and hardware to 'steal' audio (and video, with the monitor system) after the software decodes it. Microsoft is jonesing to help the RIAA kill MP3 and replace it with WMA, and the best way to do that is sucking up to the RIAA and its member companies by taking control away from the end user/listener. Yet another reason to Boycott Microsoft!

Microsoft is going all out with its own monopolistic products, Windows and Office, to drive customers into the arms of .NET, its proprietary Internet-as-a-service scheme. The end goal is to have every Internet using paying Microsoft a fee. Give it a year; XML and HTML will be so corrupted that you can't help but use a Microsoft product to view the Internet.

Bribing Corel into using .NET in its own products is just a small step in locking us all into that mess. Considering Corel's recent financial trouble, selling its soul to the devil may have been easier than standing up for the right thing. I'm just thankful we still have products like StarOffice, ApplixWare, and AppleWorks that don't depend on .NET to function.

Paul Rickard, Editor, The Microsoft Boycott Campaign

No single news service will ever report all stories first. The original point of Slashdot was to get Rob Malda's editorial slant on the news. It's cool that a lot of stuff is reported here before I'd see it anywhere else, but when I want to follow a particular issue closely, I make a point of reading closer to the source! When you want blow-by-blow details on Micro~6 abuses and remedies, look at the appropriate site. I count on getting stories about the latest game console stuff from Slashdot -- eventually -- because it doesn't matter whether a few days go by before I skim past that kind of news.

You obviously still read Slashdot. Go easier on the people who run it. You can criticize the site without bashing it.