Why The U.S. Surrendered To Microsoft

hoggardb writes: "The Nation has an excellent column by Eben Moglen, general counsel of the FSF, on why the U.S. has surrendered to Microsoft: because the big campaign contributors like Hollywood and PC manufacturers now want Microsoft to stay a monopoly." Not everyone will agree about the PC makers, but the Hollywood argument is harder to sidestep. The free-marketeer in me especially likes the last paragraph -- Moglen didn't get to be general counsel of the FSF for nothing.

Comments

What total FUD.

[Telek]

If you're a linux zealot that hates microsoft then don't bother reading and just moderate away as Troll, save yourself a few minutes.

The article looked reasonable until I read this:

He can do this by releasing a new operating system even more bloated, slow and enormous than his current excrescences, thus requiring a general round of expensive and pointless consumer hardware upgrading-pointless for the consumers

What type of bull-ass-shit FUD is that? Excuse me, Mr Eben Moglen, but what information do you have to base this claim on? This is hardly surprising that this would up on /. with a classic gem like that in there. For-your-information I am using XP now as I type, and there is quite a lot of innovation that went into this product. Quite a lot, I might add, that customers have been bitching about for years and years. For starters, they finally got rid of the hideous Win3.11/Win9X codebase, which BTW they have been trying to do since Windows95 came out. Windows 98 was supposed to be based on the NT kernel, but there was far too much resistance from the consumer base who was claiming that their legacy applications would not run, thus MS had to release another version off their 3.11 base. Windows98SE was supposed to be an indication that they wanted to stop yet again, and WinME was supposed to be called Win98TE (third edition) but marketing thought that it would be a very bad idea to do that again.

In any case, they have finally released a product that is, IMO, much more user friendly, finally away from the Win3.1/9x codebase, which is what people have been asking for for years. Sure, it does take a bit more processing power, however I noticed that on a fresh install, NOT ONLY does it boot in less time than linux does (30s from POWER ON to completely logged in. It's insanely fast), but it also takes LESS memory on boot than W2K did. MS did extensive user testing on their new modifications to their interface to make it much more friendly for Mom&Pop and the traditional Win9X user base, and included the options to turn this off so that you can go back to the W2K style interface. They have also abstracted the user interface layer sufficiently so that it is possible to create your own user interface entirely, as these people have done to give you whatever type of interface you want. They have made the system much more robust and fault tolerant, indeed even more than W2K. They've added driver rollback, system restore and numerous other features to save people from their own mistakes, they've implemented a much more rigerous testing plan to ensure that drivers can't cause a system problem, they've implemented a system where drivers that are known to cause system problems will have the user warned prior to installing (and before you scream foul here, you can not only disable this, but you can edit the list yourself. It will not prohibit you from installing anything that you are determined to install). They have made it very simple to use webcams and cameras and scanners and other devices with very very little effort at all, they have given simple file sharing and networking and firewall and routing capabilities for home networks, and countless other features designed to be nice to the users. Indeed this is one of the largest changes that has happened for the average user since the Windows 95 release.

In addition, the hardware requirements are negligably higher than that of W2K. The memory has been doubled under the "Recommended" arena from 64MB to 128MB, but at $20USD for 128MB who cares? I'm glad they did this too because the memory management algorithms in W2K were far too old and based upon the premise of never having enough memory so swapping was agressive.

My system is much faster now than it was running Windows 2000.

They've added in many new support features like (Essentially) a built in high efficiency PCAnywhere/VNC based on the terminal server system that is fast, and designed in this case to allow other users to connect to your desktop to interface with you and help you out to configure that printer that you just bought and can't figure out how to setup. There's numerous other enchancements that I won't bother to go.

So how do the users respond? Actually most of them like it, but there's always the super-linux-rulez-MS-sucks crowd that is impossible to please and screams foul when MS does what they've been asked to. There is no winning no matter what they do.