As for releasing products at no costs being illegal. Maybe Linux should be outlawed as its unfairly competing with other operating systems that cost money.
The key here is that Microsoft is funding the development of this free software with the huge revenues it makes from its operating system monopoly, and then it's tying the free software to its operating system so that you have no choice but to get it and little reason to go to the trouble of replacing it.
Say that one grocery store has a monopoly in America -- every street corner has a Brian's Groceries, and it's enormously profitable to me. Now say you have a wonderful idea for a tasty frozen dessert, and you go into business to make and sell it. But I decide that I want that market, so I copy your recipe and give it away for free in my stores, while refusing to carry you product. How are you going to compete, or even stay in business?
I just realized: There's a very important lesson to be learned from these public comments.
Look at the sheer number of people who simply signed off on a form letter. Look too at the large number of people who, in their own words, condemned the antitrust suit as 'sore losers picking on nice Microsoft.'
What this means is that people have been buying Microsoft's propaganda. Lots of people. It also means that people have no idea there are any alternatives other than Windows.
More clearly than anything else I've seen, this shows the uphill struggle Linux is going to have -- or that anything will have, if it ever wants to unseat Windows.
People have been hit by Windows viruses and Outlook trojan horses, they've had to put up with all the nastiness and instability which is an inherent part of Windows, they've had to deal with exorbitant upgrade pricing and heavy-fisted licensing practices... and yet they still sing the praises of Microsoft.
As long as this continues, we will never have justice.
That's really interesting, the sheer number of comments with the same exact text...
Do all of those people who sent these form letters really exist?
Maybe they used a form which said 'Protest the settlement! Enter your name and address here!' and that form automatically sent email in support of the settlement?
Microsoft has 'cut off the air supply' of dozens of competitors over the years by copying their ideas and selling products at a loss until the competitor is run out of business. They've outright been proven to have stolen code from other companies such as Apple (QuickTime) and Stack. They've violated court decrees telling them not to do this, and they've falsified evidence in court (remember the videotape?). Their products are bad for productivity; look at how much time and money has been wasted fighting the viruses that keep plaguing Outlook and Internet Explorer again and again!
And for all this, they're effectively being given a slap on the wrist and told 'don't do it again.' Microsoft has learned a very important lesson: laws can be broken. Just like speeding tickets don't physically prevent you from speeding, consent decrees don't prevent Microsoft from undermining other companies. They've learned that as long as they can drag out court proceedings, they can keep doing business as usual. It's even better if they can frame the battle as 'the evil government and evil competitors versus Microsoft's innovation, freedom, and all that's good for consumers!'
What's more, they're growing increasingly independent of other companies and outside standards. They tried to break Apple's Quicktime by suddenly dropping support for Netscape-style plug-ins; fortunately Apple was able to quickly release an ActiveX plugin. They decided that since Sun wouldn't allow them to 'embrace and extend' Java to lock users and developers into the Windows platform, they'd make their own replacement instead, and now Java support requires a separate download that most users won't bother with.
My biggest concern with.NET is that Microsoft's going to make it cheap and easy for the biggest e-commerce companies to make web sites which work seamlessly with Windows, using proprietary Microsoft standards... and once that happens, Linux and Macintosh become second-class citizens. The day may come when you can only buy things from Amazon and eBay if you're using Windows XP or if you're willing to jump through lots of hoops.
The real danger with Microsoft is that they have so much money to throw around that they can buy any market they want to buy. Whatever the Next Great Thing is to come down the pipe, mark my words: Microsoft will either buy the company responsible for it, or copy the ideas and give them away for free until the company is dead. You don't agree with me? Tell me how to compete with Microsoft. Say you have a great idea for a technology which will be as much of a leap forward as GUI's were over text screens, what's the use of bringing this to market if you know Microsoft's only going to bundle a workalike with Windows?
It's no longer possible to compete with Microsoft. They own the industry, and the government won't even slow them down.
Actually, didn't Be once make headlines by offering to give its operating system for free to any PC vendor who would sell BeOS preinstalled on its PC's? Either as the sole operating system on its PC's, or set up as a dual-boot with Windows?
Still nobody took Be up on it. Even adding a free operating system to their PC's would have incurred so many penalties from Microsoft that no PC vendor wanted to take the hit.
I don't think so -- I generated mine while I was using an LCD screen, but OS X doesn't yet do sub-pixel antialiasing.
I still don't see any blurriness on the OS X image. Maybe it's because I'm used to it. I think of it as turning the sharpness way down on a TV set: the image becomes softer and appears to lose definition, but once you're used to it, you realize that you're actually seeing more detail than you had seen before.
In this case, on the OS X image, I can see the curve of the capital 'C', the slight thickness on its back, the small ornament at the upper end of its curve, the way the lower end of the curve tapers off. I can see the ornamentation on the lower-case 'y' along with the very slight curve and ornament at the end of its tail. The Linux screenshot still looks harshly jagged to me, and non-antialiased text looks blocky and crude.
I find jagged fonts hard on my eyes, too... but I also find antialising under Linux to be hard on my eyes.
Here's an example of the Slashdot page antialiased under Mac OS X. Compare it to the example above. How come it looks so much cleaner under OS X (practically as good as printed type) than it does under Linux? Will Linux ever support this quality of antialiasing?
I'm assuming that 'LCD optimizations' refers to antialiasing using specific units in a triad, as has been discussed here a long while ago (with regards to a technology from Microsoft known as 'ClearType', I think -- the only original idea I've ever heard of from Microsoft).
If I remember correctly, it makes use of the concept that every pixel in a LCD display is made up of a red element, a green element, and a blue element, smooshed together horizontally. So if you antialias black-on-white text by breaking down each pixel into thirds like this, you can get much finer results than if you treated each pixel as an indivisible element. Each character antialiased in this way will be faintly edged with blue on the left and red on the right, but it's not noticeable to a casual user.
I could be completely misinterpreting the meaning of 'LCD optimizations,' though.
Let's take the Way-Back Machine back to the year 1996. You're in charge of Netscape. Microsoft has just targeted your company as a threat, and they're pouring all their Windows revenues into the effort of writing software that duplicates every popular feature of your most successful products -- and they're giving it all away for free.
Now tell me how you're going to produce superior products AND capture more market share when your largest competitor has twenty times your revenue and is spending it all to wipe you out of existence. Oh, and you're not allowed to charge any money for your flagship products (browsers or servers) because Microsoft is giving away workalikes for free. Oh, and Microsoft is also forcing your largest customers to stop doing business with you, because they're so dependent on Windows that they can't risk losing their Microsoft contracts.
That's right. The Netscape browser stagnated while Microsoft continued to pour money into IE development and to give IE away for free.
To anybody who says that Netscape should have just made a better browser and competed better: let's play a game of Monopoly! Except I'm changing the rules a little bit. I get to start with all the money I've ever won from every other game of Monopoly I've ever played (six figures by now), while you start with the standard $1500. This means that every property I land on, I can immediately buy and build hotels on, while you've got to work to earn your money.
Think this is unfair? Quit your griping, and put more attention into playing a good game! You can still beat me, it's a fair fight!
But the Netscape browser was bug-ridden piece of crap. That's why they died.
If I hold your head under water long enough, you'll die. My holding your head wasn't what killed you, though; you died because your lungs weren't advanced enough to be able to extract oxygen from water.
Maybe if you'd learned to breathe water while I cut you off from the air, you would have survived.
Maybe if Netscape had put more time and money into developing a better browser while Microsoft was copying every idea Netscape had and giving it away for free, Netscape would have survived.
Nope. Netscape (and AOL) carefully kept out of the fray. Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly to grab more monopolies was a crime against capitalism, and it was necessary to prove that first; now that the findings of fact are in the books, the piranha are coming in to clean up.
Television copying restriction will fail, for one very good reason: advertising.
How much television do you watch live any more? Don't most people record many of their favorite programs for later viewing? Count out the people who can't afford a VCR; they're not going to be buying much of what's advertised anyway.
Now, what happens when a television studio tells their biggest sponsors that they've come up with a way to prevent people from recording shows to watch later? Suddenly the target audience drops by half, and advertisers will refuse to pay nearly as much to buy ad time.
People today lead busy lives. Stop allowing them to record programs, and they're generally not going to shift their schedule around to watch 'em live.
Let's hear you say that next time your girlfriend gives you a $50 gift card for your favorite electronics store, and when you go to use it, the store clerk tells you there's no balance left on the card. He also points to the small print on the card which says (as quoted from the article) "We cannot be responsible for funds used without your knowledge."
The hackers aren't just inflating the value of the card -- they're re-encoding the card so that it represents a card that someone else bought. Sure, they're "exaggerating the value of the gift card," but by lowering the value of someone else's card.
- Microsoft gets its proposed settlement through as it stands. They donate millions of dollars worth of PC's and Microsoft software to schools, establishing a education market monopoly overnight and effectively snuffing out Apple's claim over that market.
- Over the next five years, the three oversight committee members raise several examples of questionable business practices. Microsoft very strongly and staunchly insists that (a) it's perfectly in the right, (b) the committee is standing in the way of innovation, and (c) the committee has bias against Microsoft. Another court case starts up over this, and by the year 2009 it's about where the current court case is today.
- Microsoft launches a campaign to make web browsing even easier for consumers! They add new technology to their web server software and market the server very cheaply to all the major e-commerce web sites. However, the new features are tightly integrated with Windows and can only be used with IE -- so if you want to buy something from eBay or Sears.com or Amazon.com, you'd better not be running Linux or Mac.
- Microsoft also introduces new security technology, a new page layout standard, and new standards for online digital images. These new features are a snap to use with Microsoft's web server, especially if you use Microsoft's site design software, all available for cheap or free! Of course, all this is proprietary, so Linux and Mac users don't get to use sites built with this technology. Nothing's keeping you from still using Linux and Mac, of course, as long as you're okay with not having access to major web sites.
- Want to chat with your friends? The MSN button's right there on your desktop! Want to buy movie tickets or make airline reservations? The button's right there on your desktop, and it leads to Microsoft partner services which work directly with your day planner and online checkbook in Windows! Want to use AIM or ICQ? Well, you'll have to download the software, install it, and hope it works with the current version of Windows. Want to use Moviefone or Travelocity? Well, sure, but they're slower and not integrated with Windows, and the integrated services do just as much or more -- why bother with anything else?
Eventually, the question becomes: Why use anything other than Windows? Other companies try to compete, but Microsoft clones their technology before they have their first release, or else Microsoft buys them and integrates them into Windows. All of this is in the name of progress and innovation, and providing a better experience to consumers!
Microsoft will set a team of lawyers to find every exploitable loophole in the court order which lets you oversee them. They will balk you, they will delay you, they will drag their heels at every possible opportunity; they will give you the bare minimum of help that they're required to give you; and in every situation where you even hint at any possible less-than-upright dealings on their part, they will cry from the mountaintops about how biased you are against them.
Their ultimate goal will be to get you to grumble about them -- and then they can go back to the government and use that as evidence that you're in fact not impartial, and you'll be out of their hair. It worked against a federal judge; it could work against you.
Why do you believe you're up to the task of sitting on the shoulder of this eight-hundred-pound gorilla while it flings monkey dung at you? Why should we believe that you'll be able to work with them, unwilling as they are, and be able to point out their illegal business practices without appearing to be biased against them?
Just a correction to a point raised in the interview:
Netscape made the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make" by deciding to rewrite their code from scratch.
Netscape didn't rewrite the browser from scratch. Back in April 1998, Communicator 4 was the current version; to get from there to the open-source Mozilla browser, everything that couldn't be distributed (code from other companies, and security code with export restrictions) was stripped out of the source code. What was left was made available as the start of Mozilla. It didn't even compile at first, but Mozilla didn't start from scratch.
Admittedly, the fact that this next-generation browser hardly worked at all for more than three years did keep Netscape from capturing any market share, but the browser had already been commoditized, and the battle had already been lost.
I think that the real browser battle is yet to come -- when the bulletproof and iron-clad Mozilla, carefully fine-tuned to scratch every developer's personal itch, is finally ready sometime next year to take on whatever Microsoft has got. I think that's when the real interesting things will happen -- not just on the technical and marketing fronts, but also on the legal front, as Microsoft finds ways to make sure Mozilla isn't a threat...
I'll post my usual public service announcements here:
SpamCop is a great service for reporting spam; just paste the spam message into the web form, and it'll automatically figure out where the smap came from and send complaints off to the appropriate people.
The Spam Bouncer is a procmail-based personal spam screening tool. It's got some interesting features, but I haven't used it in a long while.
The way I avoid spam is to have my mail client screen out any email which contains any of these phrases:
to be removed
to be permanently removed
to get removed
to get off the list
to get off this list
to be taken off
to remove yourself
removal instructions
remove in subject line
"remove" in subject line
remove in the subject
"remove" in the subject
'remove' in the subject
S.1618
S. 1618
This list by itself catches about 80% of the spam I get.
IE 1.0 was just a repackaged Mosaic. IE 2.0 was buggy as all hell. IE 3.0 was finally useable, though it lacked many of Netscape's features. IE 4.0 was useable *and* copied Netscape's features.
Microsoft has often been compared to the Borg from Star Trek; this is an excellent example of it. They adapt. They can't be stopped. You might win a few battles against them for a while, but they learn from what you're doing, and eventually your tactics stop working against them.
If Microsoft had been the size of Netscape, and had to deal with earning revenues and winning accounts just like Netscape did, then this would have been a fair fight -- but since Microsoft never had to concern itself at all with actually earning money from IE to sustain its development, since they had near-infinite money to throw at it from Windows revenue, it was inevitable that it would eventually become better software than Netscape.
You're absolutely right. Netscape 4 was (and still is) terrible.
But this isn't because Netscape chose to stop innovating, any more than a drowning victim chooses to stop breathing.
Let's rewind history and put you in charge of Netscape circa early 1998. Your largest competitor is giving away free work-alikes to all of your flagship products, and they've got enough money to keep doing this (and to keep stealing any new features you add) indefinitely. Meanwhile, you've got to focus on fixing bugs AND adding features, but with your company's slipping revenues, the best you can do isn't even going to keep pace with what's needed. You simply don't have the money to do proper development and QA.
Netscape failed because Microsoft purposefully, aggressively, and illegally cut off its air supply.
(1) Microsoft claimed all along that the web browser was a useful application which deserved to be tied to Windows. The crucial question they never answered was: what about Microsoft Word? Everybody uses a word processor; why didn't Microsoft add Word's powerful features into Windows, to benefit consumers in the same way they did by adding Explorer's powerful features to Windows?
The answer is that Word had no serious competition, so Microsoft was content to sell it separately and to offer a stripped-down word processor ("WordPad") bundled with Windows.
I've believed all along that a great solution to the tying issue would have been for Microsoft to include a stripped-down basic web browser with Windows, and to sell the full-featured Internet Explorer separately. This would let customers surf the web without buying anything extra, but if they wanted additional features, plenty of competition in the market would give them lots of choices of more-powerful web browsers.
(2) Microsoft defeated Netscape simply because they had the cash, the resources, and the time to copy every one of Netscape's most important products feature-for-feature, and give it away for free. They rarely got things right on the first try, but by bundling browsers and servers in with Windows and by releasing subsequent versions with more features, it was inevitable that they would eventually match Netscape's quality -- and then it was inevitable that customers would choose the free solution over Netscape's. Many of Netscape's customers still remained loyal, and purchased Netscape software rather using Microsoft's give-aways, but still, Netscape was doomed from the very start.
Netscape did the research and development. Microsoft saw what worked, copied it, and gave it away. How could Netscape possibly survive?
More importantly, what does this say about the Next Big Thing, whatever that may be? What incentive does a person have to turn his great idea into a company, when he knows that Microsoft can simply steal his idea and undersell him once he proves that his idea is a success?
(3) Microsoft has a long history of abusing their power, and they've been taken to court for it many times in many different countries. They've learned, however, that if they can get a court case to drag on for years, any ruling will become irrelevant because the competition it was supposed to benefit has long since died off. And not only are they skilled at dragging the proceedings through molasses -- but they also thumb their nose at the government while doing it; were they ever reprimanded for introducing a falsified videotape into evidence two years or so ago?
Any ruling against Microsoft must be strong and unyielding. So far their punishment for shrugging penalties aside has been another court case which has dragged on for another few years, and they'll only ignore the outcome of this one too; this must come to an end.
Slashdot Mirror
As for releasing products at no costs being illegal. Maybe Linux should be outlawed as its unfairly competing with other operating systems that cost money.
The key here is that Microsoft is funding the development of this free software with the huge revenues it makes from its operating system monopoly, and then it's tying the free software to its operating system so that you have no choice but to get it and little reason to go to the trouble of replacing it.
Say that one grocery store has a monopoly in America -- every street corner has a Brian's Groceries, and it's enormously profitable to me. Now say you have a wonderful idea for a tasty frozen dessert, and you go into business to make and sell it. But I decide that I want that market, so I copy your recipe and give it away for free in my stores, while refusing to carry you product. How are you going to compete, or even stay in business?
I just realized: There's a very important lesson to be learned from these public comments.
Look at the sheer number of people who simply signed off on a form letter. Look too at the large number of people who, in their own words, condemned the antitrust suit as 'sore losers picking on nice Microsoft.'
What this means is that people have been buying Microsoft's propaganda. Lots of people. It also means that people have no idea there are any alternatives other than Windows.
More clearly than anything else I've seen, this shows the uphill struggle Linux is going to have -- or that anything will have, if it ever wants to unseat Windows.
People have been hit by Windows viruses and Outlook trojan horses, they've had to put up with all the nastiness and instability which is an inherent part of Windows, they've had to deal with exorbitant upgrade pricing and heavy-fisted licensing practices... and yet they still sing the praises of Microsoft.
As long as this continues, we will never have justice.
Yup, that's someone else. It's hard to misspell 'Brian' as 'James'.
:-)
Apology accepted.
That's really interesting, the sheer number of comments with the same exact text...
Do all of those people who sent these form letters really exist?
Maybe they used a form which said 'Protest the settlement! Enter your name and address here!' and that form automatically sent email in support of the settlement?
Who knows?
Microsoft has 'cut off the air supply' of dozens of competitors over the years by copying their ideas and selling products at a loss until the competitor is run out of business. They've outright been proven to have stolen code from other companies such as Apple (QuickTime) and Stack. They've violated court decrees telling them not to do this, and they've falsified evidence in court (remember the videotape?). Their products are bad for productivity; look at how much time and money has been wasted fighting the viruses that keep plaguing Outlook and Internet Explorer again and again!
.NET is that Microsoft's going to make it cheap and easy for the biggest e-commerce companies to make web sites which work seamlessly with Windows, using proprietary Microsoft standards... and once that happens, Linux and Macintosh become second-class citizens. The day may come when you can only buy things from Amazon and eBay if you're using Windows XP or if you're willing to jump through lots of hoops.
And for all this, they're effectively being given a slap on the wrist and told 'don't do it again.' Microsoft has learned a very important lesson: laws can be broken. Just like speeding tickets don't physically prevent you from speeding, consent decrees don't prevent Microsoft from undermining other companies. They've learned that as long as they can drag out court proceedings, they can keep doing business as usual. It's even better if they can frame the battle as 'the evil government and evil competitors versus Microsoft's innovation, freedom, and all that's good for consumers!'
What's more, they're growing increasingly independent of other companies and outside standards. They tried to break Apple's Quicktime by suddenly dropping support for Netscape-style plug-ins; fortunately Apple was able to quickly release an ActiveX plugin. They decided that since Sun wouldn't allow them to 'embrace and extend' Java to lock users and developers into the Windows platform, they'd make their own replacement instead, and now Java support requires a separate download that most users won't bother with.
My biggest concern with
The real danger with Microsoft is that they have so much money to throw around that they can buy any market they want to buy. Whatever the Next Great Thing is to come down the pipe, mark my words: Microsoft will either buy the company responsible for it, or copy the ideas and give them away for free until the company is dead. You don't agree with me? Tell me how to compete with Microsoft. Say you have a great idea for a technology which will be as much of a leap forward as GUI's were over text screens, what's the use of bringing this to market if you know Microsoft's only going to bundle a workalike with Windows?
It's no longer possible to compete with Microsoft. They own the industry, and the government won't even slow them down.
Huh. I emailed a comment to the DOJ, at the proper address, very soon after they began accepting public comments.
I can't find any permutation of my name or email address in the 'public comment' list.
Did this happen to anyone else, did you mail a comment but it's not showing up there?
Actually, didn't Be once make headlines by offering to give its operating system for free to any PC vendor who would sell BeOS preinstalled on its PC's? Either as the sole operating system on its PC's, or set up as a dual-boot with Windows?
Still nobody took Be up on it. Even adding a free operating system to their PC's would have incurred so many penalties from Microsoft that no PC vendor wanted to take the hit.
I don't think so -- I generated mine while I was using an LCD screen, but OS X doesn't yet do sub-pixel antialiasing.
I still don't see any blurriness on the OS X image. Maybe it's because I'm used to it. I think of it as turning the sharpness way down on a TV set: the image becomes softer and appears to lose definition, but once you're used to it, you realize that you're actually seeing more detail than you had seen before.
In this case, on the OS X image, I can see the curve of the capital 'C', the slight thickness on its back, the small ornament at the upper end of its curve, the way the lower end of the curve tapers off. I can see the ornamentation on the lower-case 'y' along with the very slight curve and ornament at the end of its tail. The Linux screenshot still looks harshly jagged to me, and non-antialiased text looks blocky and crude.
That's interesting... at what resolution and color depth were you viewing the OS X screenshot?
I honestly don't see any blurriness in the OS X screenshot at 1280x1024 resolution and 24-bit color...
I find jagged fonts hard on my eyes, too... but I also find antialising under Linux to be hard on my eyes.
Here's an example of the Slashdot page antialiased under Mac OS X. Compare it to the example above. How come it looks so much cleaner under OS X (practically as good as printed type) than it does under Linux? Will Linux ever support this quality of antialiasing?
I'm assuming that 'LCD optimizations' refers to antialiasing using specific units in a triad, as has been discussed here a long while ago (with regards to a technology from Microsoft known as 'ClearType', I think -- the only original idea I've ever heard of from Microsoft).
If I remember correctly, it makes use of the concept that every pixel in a LCD display is made up of a red element, a green element, and a blue element, smooshed together horizontally. So if you antialias black-on-white text by breaking down each pixel into thirds like this, you can get much finer results than if you treated each pixel as an indivisible element. Each character antialiased in this way will be faintly edged with blue on the left and red on the right, but it's not noticeable to a casual user.
I could be completely misinterpreting the meaning of 'LCD optimizations,' though.
Okay, Mr. Anonymous Coward, educate me.
Let's take the Way-Back Machine back to the year 1996. You're in charge of Netscape. Microsoft has just targeted your company as a threat, and they're pouring all their Windows revenues into the effort of writing software that duplicates every popular feature of your most successful products -- and they're giving it all away for free.
Now tell me how you're going to produce superior products AND capture more market share when your largest competitor has twenty times your revenue and is spending it all to wipe you out of existence. Oh, and you're not allowed to charge any money for your flagship products (browsers or servers) because Microsoft is giving away workalikes for free. Oh, and Microsoft is also forcing your largest customers to stop doing business with you, because they're so dependent on Windows that they can't risk losing their Microsoft contracts.
Ball's in your court, bucko.
That's right. The Netscape browser stagnated while Microsoft continued to pour money into IE development and to give IE away for free.
To anybody who says that Netscape should have just made a better browser and competed better: let's play a game of Monopoly! Except I'm changing the rules a little bit. I get to start with all the money I've ever won from every other game of Monopoly I've ever played (six figures by now), while you start with the standard $1500. This means that every property I land on, I can immediately buy and build hotels on, while you've got to work to earn your money.
Think this is unfair? Quit your griping, and put more attention into playing a good game! You can still beat me, it's a fair fight!
But the Netscape browser was bug-ridden piece of crap. That's why they died.
If I hold your head under water long enough, you'll die. My holding your head wasn't what killed you, though; you died because your lungs weren't advanced enough to be able to extract oxygen from water.
Maybe if you'd learned to breathe water while I cut you off from the air, you would have survived.
Maybe if Netscape had put more time and money into developing a better browser while Microsoft was copying every idea Netscape had and giving it away for free, Netscape would have survived.
Nope. Netscape (and AOL) carefully kept out of the fray. Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly to grab more monopolies was a crime against capitalism, and it was necessary to prove that first; now that the findings of fact are in the books, the piranha are coming in to clean up.
Television copying restriction will fail, for one very good reason: advertising.
How much television do you watch live any more? Don't most people record many of their favorite programs for later viewing? Count out the people who can't afford a VCR; they're not going to be buying much of what's advertised anyway.
Now, what happens when a television studio tells their biggest sponsors that they've come up with a way to prevent people from recording shows to watch later? Suddenly the target audience drops by half, and advertisers will refuse to pay nearly as much to buy ad time.
People today lead busy lives. Stop allowing them to record programs, and they're generally not going to shift their schedule around to watch 'em live.
Let's hear you say that next time your girlfriend gives you a $50 gift card for your favorite electronics store, and when you go to use it, the store clerk tells you there's no balance left on the card. He also points to the small print on the card which says (as quoted from the article) "We cannot be responsible for funds used without your knowledge."
The hackers aren't just inflating the value of the card -- they're re-encoding the card so that it represents a card that someone else bought. Sure, they're "exaggerating the value of the gift card," but by lowering the value of someone else's card.
My predictions:
- Microsoft gets its proposed settlement through as it stands. They donate millions of dollars worth of PC's and Microsoft software to schools, establishing a education market monopoly overnight and effectively snuffing out Apple's claim over that market.
- Over the next five years, the three oversight committee members raise several examples of questionable business practices. Microsoft very strongly and staunchly insists that (a) it's perfectly in the right, (b) the committee is standing in the way of innovation, and (c) the committee has bias against Microsoft. Another court case starts up over this, and by the year 2009 it's about where the current court case is today.
- Microsoft launches a campaign to make web browsing even easier for consumers! They add new technology to their web server software and market the server very cheaply to all the major e-commerce web sites. However, the new features are tightly integrated with Windows and can only be used with IE -- so if you want to buy something from eBay or Sears.com or Amazon.com, you'd better not be running Linux or Mac.
- Microsoft also introduces new security technology, a new page layout standard, and new standards for online digital images. These new features are a snap to use with Microsoft's web server, especially if you use Microsoft's site design software, all available for cheap or free! Of course, all this is proprietary, so Linux and Mac users don't get to use sites built with this technology. Nothing's keeping you from still using Linux and Mac, of course, as long as you're okay with not having access to major web sites.
- Want to chat with your friends? The MSN button's right there on your desktop! Want to buy movie tickets or make airline reservations? The button's right there on your desktop, and it leads to Microsoft partner services which work directly with your day planner and online checkbook in Windows! Want to use AIM or ICQ? Well, you'll have to download the software, install it, and hope it works with the current version of Windows. Want to use Moviefone or Travelocity? Well, sure, but they're slower and not integrated with Windows, and the integrated services do just as much or more -- why bother with anything else?
Eventually, the question becomes: Why use anything other than Windows? Other companies try to compete, but Microsoft clones their technology before they have their first release, or else Microsoft buys them and integrates them into Windows. All of this is in the name of progress and innovation, and providing a better experience to consumers!
To further the point of the previous question:
Microsoft will set a team of lawyers to find every exploitable loophole in the court order which lets you oversee them. They will balk you, they will delay you, they will drag their heels at every possible opportunity; they will give you the bare minimum of help that they're required to give you; and in every situation where you even hint at any possible less-than-upright dealings on their part, they will cry from the mountaintops about how biased you are against them.
Their ultimate goal will be to get you to grumble about them -- and then they can go back to the government and use that as evidence that you're in fact not impartial, and you'll be out of their hair. It worked against a federal judge; it could work against you.
Why do you believe you're up to the task of sitting on the shoulder of this eight-hundred-pound gorilla while it flings monkey dung at you? Why should we believe that you'll be able to work with them, unwilling as they are, and be able to point out their illegal business practices without appearing to be biased against them?
Just a correction to a point raised in the interview:
Netscape made the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make" by deciding to rewrite their code from scratch.
Netscape didn't rewrite the browser from scratch. Back in April 1998, Communicator 4 was the current version; to get from there to the open-source Mozilla browser, everything that couldn't be distributed (code from other companies, and security code with export restrictions) was stripped out of the source code. What was left was made available as the start of Mozilla. It didn't even compile at first, but Mozilla didn't start from scratch.
Admittedly, the fact that this next-generation browser hardly worked at all for more than three years did keep Netscape from capturing any market share, but the browser had already been commoditized, and the battle had already been lost.
I think that the real browser battle is yet to come -- when the bulletproof and iron-clad Mozilla, carefully fine-tuned to scratch every developer's personal itch, is finally ready sometime next year to take on whatever Microsoft has got. I think that's when the real interesting things will happen -- not just on the technical and marketing fronts, but also on the legal front, as Microsoft finds ways to make sure Mozilla isn't a threat...
I'll post my usual public service announcements here:
SpamCop is a great service for reporting spam; just paste the spam message into the web form, and it'll automatically figure out where the smap came from and send complaints off to the appropriate people.
The Spam Bouncer is a procmail-based personal spam screening tool. It's got some interesting features, but I haven't used it in a long while.
The way I avoid spam is to have my mail client screen out any email which contains any of these phrases:
to be removed
to be permanently removed
to get removed
to get off the list
to get off this list
to be taken off
to remove yourself
removal instructions
remove in subject line
"remove" in subject line
remove in the subject
"remove" in the subject
'remove' in the subject
S.1618
S. 1618
This list by itself catches about 80% of the spam I get.
Yeah, they could market it as a video game and call it 'Dreamcast'!
Oh wait.
IE was a better product
IE 1.0 was just a repackaged Mosaic. IE 2.0 was buggy as all hell. IE 3.0 was finally useable, though it lacked many of Netscape's features. IE 4.0 was useable *and* copied Netscape's features.
Microsoft has often been compared to the Borg from Star Trek; this is an excellent example of it. They adapt. They can't be stopped. You might win a few battles against them for a while, but they learn from what you're doing, and eventually your tactics stop working against them.
If Microsoft had been the size of Netscape, and had to deal with earning revenues and winning accounts just like Netscape did, then this would have been a fair fight -- but since Microsoft never had to concern itself at all with actually earning money from IE to sustain its development, since they had near-infinite money to throw at it from Windows revenue, it was inevitable that it would eventually become better software than Netscape.
You're absolutely right. Netscape 4 was (and still is) terrible.
But this isn't because Netscape chose to stop innovating, any more than a drowning victim chooses to stop breathing.
Let's rewind history and put you in charge of Netscape circa early 1998. Your largest competitor is giving away free work-alikes to all of your flagship products, and they've got enough money to keep doing this (and to keep stealing any new features you add) indefinitely. Meanwhile, you've got to focus on fixing bugs AND adding features, but with your company's slipping revenues, the best you can do isn't even going to keep pace with what's needed. You simply don't have the money to do proper development and QA.
Netscape failed because Microsoft purposefully, aggressively, and illegally cut off its air supply.
(1) Microsoft claimed all along that the web browser was a useful application which deserved to be tied to Windows. The crucial question they never answered was: what about Microsoft Word? Everybody uses a word processor; why didn't Microsoft add Word's powerful features into Windows, to benefit consumers in the same way they did by adding Explorer's powerful features to Windows?
The answer is that Word had no serious competition, so Microsoft was content to sell it separately and to offer a stripped-down word processor ("WordPad") bundled with Windows.
I've believed all along that a great solution to the tying issue would have been for Microsoft to include a stripped-down basic web browser with Windows, and to sell the full-featured Internet Explorer separately. This would let customers surf the web without buying anything extra, but if they wanted additional features, plenty of competition in the market would give them lots of choices of more-powerful web browsers.
(2) Microsoft defeated Netscape simply because they had the cash, the resources, and the time to copy every one of Netscape's most important products feature-for-feature, and give it away for free. They rarely got things right on the first try, but by bundling browsers and servers in with Windows and by releasing subsequent versions with more features, it was inevitable that they would eventually match Netscape's quality -- and then it was inevitable that customers would choose the free solution over Netscape's. Many of Netscape's customers still remained loyal, and purchased Netscape software rather using Microsoft's give-aways, but still, Netscape was doomed from the very start.
Netscape did the research and development. Microsoft saw what worked, copied it, and gave it away. How could Netscape possibly survive?
More importantly, what does this say about the Next Big Thing, whatever that may be? What incentive does a person have to turn his great idea into a company, when he knows that Microsoft can simply steal his idea and undersell him once he proves that his idea is a success?
(3) Microsoft has a long history of abusing their power, and they've been taken to court for it many times in many different countries. They've learned, however, that if they can get a court case to drag on for years, any ruling will become irrelevant because the competition it was supposed to benefit has long since died off. And not only are they skilled at dragging the proceedings through molasses -- but they also thumb their nose at the government while doing it; were they ever reprimanded for introducing a falsified videotape into evidence two years or so ago?
Any ruling against Microsoft must be strong and unyielding. So far their punishment for shrugging penalties aside has been another court case which has dragged on for another few years, and they'll only ignore the outcome of this one too; this must come to an end.