Having been a contractor for the last 2 years, I have run into that mindset once or twice, and I find it very insulting.
As a pragmatic matter, I think the best way to secure my long term interests is to act in professionally and do my best for a company.
As an ethical matter I would have a hard time charging my somewhat exorbitant rate and not doing my best for the customer.
And on a personal level I get as offended as anyone else when my motives are impugned.
As a contractor I do have to take more responsibility for the course of my career, and make sure that my needs are met. But if I can't do that and still serve the client's needs I'll just leave when the contract is up.
Keeping the metadata local prevents the leakage of metadata to the outside world, but would be a pain for me - most of the time I am transferring files from one system to another, and I would want the metadata to travel with the file. If it is a photo that I have tagged I would want those tags to travel with the file. If source code carries info about source control or a preferred editor, I definitely want that data.
Even in distribution situations I often want the metadata. If I take pictures at a family reunion and tag them with date, location and subject, why would I want to suppress that data when I send the photos on to the rest of my family?
I can see it evolving into some sort of notion of private vs public tags, but the obvious flaw there is most people won't know/want to know/bother to use such a system.
I call bullshit. If the hardware has not changed recently then reactivation is automatic and silent. No phone call needed, no begging, just an internet connection.
And how, pray tell, does the fact that Visual Studio comes on 7 CDs (or 1 DVD) affect your opinion of ActiveX in any way?
Dev Studio is a development IDE with boatloads of tools, samples, and documentation. It's size has no bearing on the technologies that it is targeted at.
Buying a competitor for the purpose of an anti-trust lawsuit seems silly. MS has already been through antitrust litigation at least twice, and what has really happened? And those suits take years to grind through the courts.
Plus, don't forget that the acquisition was announced over a year ago, before Vista details were known.
MS has tried to get into the image editing business a number of times - Digital Image Pro is just the latest incarnation. I think it is actually the 3rd product they have brought out, and nothing has even made Photoshop break out in a sweat.
Lastly, I haven't followed Adobe recently, but I don't think they consider Photoshop/Illustrator/inDesign their primary products. Revenue wise, I think Acrobat and Postscript are kings of the hill.
Well, JPEG encoded TIFFs have been deprecated for years, and software that reads them is hard to find. I'm not familiar with the details of the 672 patent, but JPEG in TIFF was essentially a JFIF file wrapped in a few TIFF tags, so it is very possible that it would infringe on the patent just like JFIF/JPEG.
Windows and Office are of course the huge profit centers at Microsoft, and in volume they dominate everything else.
But I suspect that mice and keyboards pay for themselves, and Money, Encarta, SQL Server, and Visual Studio/MSDN all turn a profit (though perhaps Visual Studio is considered a loss leader for Windows).
But I'll concede all of those are all at least related to the domination of Windows and Office.
What about MSN? I don't know the revenue figures, but it seems to be doing OK.
XBox may not be making money yet, but that is clearly a long term bet. And Xbox Live almost has to be profitable.
Microsoft has a large consulting business, and that is almost certainly profitable.
Exxon Mobil is a huge company that derives most of its revenue from oil. It makes money from related business like polymers and drilling eqipment, and no doubt has more or less unrelated side businesses. How is that different from MS?
Besides, I would argue that the idea of diversifying into disparate industries has been pretty well discredited. The current buzzword is core competency, where a company pours all of its effort into a business area it understands. That sure seems like what MS is doing.
The article was sensationalist and attributed to malice and conspiracy what is best explained by profit motive.
The major electronic retailers function as gatekeepers. There are thousands of products out there that they don't put on their shelves, so much so that simply getting a product on the shelf at Best Buy is a huge accomplishment for a small hardware or software vendor.
The primary issue is one of space and inventory turns. Best Buy expects that every foot of shelf space bring in some amount of revenue, and they stock products that will maximize that revenue. A product that only moves 5 copies a month will always lose out to one that moves 5 a day.
Computers with preloaded software take up a lot of space. I suspect that most models don't even give you a choice of XP Home or XP Pro, and XP Pro is far more popular than Linux. But every different SKU to stock means additional inventory headaches, so only the most popular choices are going to be in stock.
Now consider some of the secondary factors. People buying a PC with Linux are going to be less likely to buy additional software. They arguably don't need things like Spyware or Virus products, and much of what they want is OSS and available for free anyway. So the chances for upsell are greatly reduced, and follow on sales are going to be less.
Retailers will offer Linux boxes if the numbers justify it. Show them a way to make a buck and they will be all over it. But at the moment they don't feel it is profitable to do so. No grand conspiracy, just economics.
GPS is funded by the military, so they are launched by the Air Force, not NASA. I know nothing about the budget of either, but I would be surprised if the Air Force was unable to afford 2 launches a year - or even 6 or 7 if the failure rate kicks up.
If the fine is only for the amount of the theft, then there is no deterrent factor - the punishment just puts you back to the status quo ante.
The death penalty is extreme (though most/.ers would favor death for spammers, virus writers and GPL violators), but getting caught has to have some negative impact beyond paying the original price.
Suppose my company invests two years of its time and effort into developing a new game. We've spent millions developing it, and until we can sell it we haven't seen a dime.
Now some lamer posts a cracked copy of the last beta build all over the web, and all the retailers decide not to stock our product because nobody is going to buy what they could get free.
We still have all those boxes with the shiny CDs inside them. We have all the code, and nothing tangible has been taken from us. Nevertheless, our ability to sell the fruits of our labor has been destroyed.
How are we not hurt by this scenario?
People stealing (or infringing on our copyright if you must be pedantic) our product does hurt us. Not at a 1:1 ratio obviously, but some number of those people will play our game all the way through and are freeloading on our labor.
There is a more insidious effect as well. Photoshop costs $600. Competitors like Paint Shop Pro, Photo Impact and Photo Paint all run about $100. People justify pirating Photoshop because they say they would never spend $600 on software, so they aren't a lost sale. But if they were unwilling to resort to piracy and needed digital imaging software, they would likely have bought one of the lower priced alternatives (or gone all the way to the GIMP). So while perhaps Adobe hasn't lost a sale, the market for lower priced alternatives is hurt.
Scalable UI is a genuine problem, but it is not something that MS can fix in the OS. Buttons, text, and widgets all scale reasonably well in Windows, though usually they look at least slightly odd, presumably because of rounding issues.
The real problem is icons and bitmaps, especially in the case of toolbars. Scaling a 16x16 bitmap up to 20x20 or even 32x32 results in something that looks awful.
Windows has supported multi resolution icons for years, but not many programs fill in all the available sizes. MFC/Win32 do not have any builtin support for multiple toolbar sizes (though it isn't that hard to do).
The bitmaps are not part of Windows, they are part of the applications. So long as those images are bitmaps and not vector drawings, they won't scale well and anything but standard size is going to look funky.
Early on I remember reading that Longhorn was going to use SVG based icons and toolbar drawings, but i haven't heard anything about it lately, so that might be one of the things that was dropped.
Oh, and I'm 44 and I run my monitor at 1600x1200...
Hiding file extensions is one of my pet peeves as well, but the example you cite makes no sense.
If someone has extensions hidden then blah.jpg would only show up as blah, and the user would look at the associated icon to determine the file type.
If I have extensions hidden and I see "blah.jpg", it either has no meaning to me (because I don't think about extensions), or it immediately tells me that.jpg is not the extension.
Compuserve was not the holder of the GIF patent, Unisys was. IIRC, the patent had nothing to do with GIF files, it was a patent of the LZW compression algorithm - which GIF was.
Unfortunately, 90% of the users differ on what 90% of the features can be removed. That is the problem with trying to get a light app out the door.
But let's compare an old version of Word with a new one.
In the old days you had a choice of draft view or WYSIWYG, because it took too long to render using the right fonts and margins (and resolutions were too low to make it look good).
Spell checking used to be an explicit step you did at the end of a document rather than something that happened as you type.
Grammar checking did not exist at all.
Heuristics like auto correct and auto formatting did not exist.
You can argue if any of those features have value to you, but they aren't bloat in the sense of slowness caused by bad code. The code may be bloated as well, but it is ludicrous to claim that the requirements for word have gone up for no reason.
I don't think colonization of space makes any significant difference to population. To make mass exodus of population feasible you have to assume insanely cheap transport. After all, even to stabilize the population you are talking about transporting millions of people each year. You would have to get transport between Earth and a colony down to the equivalent fare of a plane ticket today.
Second, unless you are contemplating involuntary migration, I don't think you would find the millions of volunteers needed every year.
Someone needs to explain to me how cutting your salary by something like $150K results in cutting your tax burden.
Suppose that the founders have $7B in the bank, and a salary of $150K.
That $7B will generate some amount of income, which will be taxed as ordinary income (interest, subject to income tax), short term capital gains, or long term capitals gains.
The $150K also pays income tax, and also pays FICA and Medicare. FICA is 12.6% of the first $90K, Medicate is 1.45% of the entire $150K.
Based on interest and short term cap gains, assume that the entire 150K is taxed at a marginal rate of 33%.
33 + 12.6 + 1.45 = 47% tax rate, so the 150K salary nets down to about $80K after tax.
At a salary of $1, they next down to $0.53 after tax.
Dropping the salary costs them 80K. Even more, they do get not credit for social security wages, so their eventual social security checks will be reduced. (not that they are likely to need a social security check).
Now they certainly aren't hurting, and anyone with $7B in the bank can afford to forgo $80K, but I don't see any way in which this can be construed as "evil".
I went through Windows Logo back in 2002, and part of the logo requirements were that you had to work properly as a limited user unless you could get an exception for why you needed elevated privs.
We had to do significant work to make sure that data we wrote ended up somewhere in the user's profile, and that the only reg key we touched was HKCU/Software.
I don't know how hard it is to get the exemption, but apps that display the Windows logo should work as non-admin.
There are a number of applications that were possible in the old days but are now immensely simpler with the resources of todays computers.
Take image editing for instance. 8 years ago a large image (for a hobbyist) would have been on the order of 1024x768, or.75Mpix. Graphics adapters that could do 24 bit output at high resolution were a high cost item, and many people ran paletted for the speed boost.
No digital cameras routinely kick out 5 or 6 million pixels, and image editors manipulate them without any problem.
The amount of work done per pixel has gone up dramatically as well - the quality of brushes and filters has improved because it is now feasible to do immensely more analysis on every pixel in negligible time.
IIRC, the conversion from RGB -> L*a*b -> RGB requires a cube root operation. Many image processing functions use L*a*b internally because it is a perceptually uniform color space. But since images may well be stored as RGB, the filter has to convert to L*a*b, do its work, and then convert back to RGB. Go back 20 years and you are looking at machines with no hardware floating point - the processing overhead of working in L*a*b would be prohibitive in those days.
For a more mainstream example, look at the way spelling and grammar flagging is done in Word - as you type, words get squiggly red or green underlines if Word is unsure of the spelling or grammar. Whether or not you think that is a good idea is irrelevant, but that kind of near real time analysis would be much more difficult without gobs of memory and a fast processor.
What makes you think any significant fraction of these people would be willing to switch to Linux?
If someone is running 7-10 year old hardware and OS, it means either that what they have does the job and they have no interest in something new, or that they can't afford anything new.
Some number of people in the "can't afford" camp might be *nix candidates, but I'd bet that the huge majority of people simply don't care about computers. They have something that works, they know how to use it, and they aren't looking to complicate their lives.
OK, so calling it a "browser war" is hyperbole, but if IE has so much market share that there is no significant penalty to creating IE only websites, then all other browsers will be limited to niche markets.
I use FireFox, but if the sites I visit regularly didn't work with it I would switch back to IE. Firefox has advantages, but I am not religous about it. If the advantages swung back to IE I would to.
Claiming that FOSS is above the fray because it doesn't depend on profits is wishful thinking.
You don't necessarily need to buy a router. I believe that as of XP SP2, it is safe to hook up a Windows PC directly to Internet. Not that you'll ever see me try it.
Paradoxically, one reason that MS took so long to deploy a firewall is the Justice Department. Part of the antitrust suits against Microsoft involved charges of illegally tying IE to Windows. Ever since then they have been quite hesitant to include new applications with the OS, for fear of being accused of anti-competitive tactics.
I think it is only because of the ongoing security crisis that we see a firewall in XP SP2, and even there Microsoft made sure that the OS was very willing to host firewalls from many different manufacturers. Now they have purchased and are rebranding a spyware tool as well, but they have not yet said whether that will be bundled or separate.
The fact that Windows needs to sit behind a Firewall and have a spyware blocker can legitimately be laid at Microsoft's feet. But it took years to get into that position, and it is going to take years to get out. I think they are serious about improving the security of Windows and IE, but it isn't going to happen fast enough for anyone.
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Having been a contractor for the last 2 years, I have run into that mindset once or twice, and I find it very insulting.
As a pragmatic matter, I think the best way to secure my long term interests is to act in professionally and do my best for a company.
As an ethical matter I would have a hard time charging my somewhat exorbitant rate and not doing my best for the customer.
And on a personal level I get as offended as anyone else when my motives are impugned.
As a contractor I do have to take more responsibility for the course of my career, and make sure that my needs are met. But if I can't do that and still serve the client's needs I'll just leave when the contract is up.
Keeping the metadata local prevents the leakage of metadata to the outside world, but would be a pain for me - most of the time I am transferring files from one system to another, and I would want the metadata to travel with the file. If it is a photo that I have tagged I would want those tags to travel with the file. If source code carries info about source control or a preferred editor, I definitely want that data.
Even in distribution situations I often want the metadata. If I take pictures at a family reunion and tag them with date, location and subject, why would I want to suppress that data when I send the photos on to the rest of my family?
I can see it evolving into some sort of notion of private vs public tags, but the obvious flaw there is most people won't know/want to know/bother to use such a system.
I call bullshit. If the hardware has not changed recently then reactivation is automatic and silent. No phone call needed, no begging, just an internet connection.
And how, pray tell, does the fact that Visual Studio comes on 7 CDs (or 1 DVD) affect your opinion of ActiveX in any way?
Dev Studio is a development IDE with boatloads of tools, samples, and documentation. It's size has no bearing on the technologies that it is targeted at.
Buying a competitor for the purpose of an anti-trust lawsuit seems silly. MS has already been through antitrust litigation at least twice, and what has really happened? And those suits take years to grind through the courts.
Plus, don't forget that the acquisition was announced over a year ago, before Vista details were known.
MS has tried to get into the image editing business a number of times - Digital Image Pro is just the latest incarnation. I think it is actually the 3rd product they have brought out, and nothing has even made Photoshop break out in a sweat.
Lastly, I haven't followed Adobe recently, but I don't think they consider Photoshop/Illustrator/inDesign their primary products. Revenue wise, I think Acrobat and Postscript are kings of the hill.
Well, JPEG encoded TIFFs have been deprecated for years, and software that reads them is hard to find. I'm not familiar with the details of the 672 patent, but JPEG in TIFF was essentially a JFIF file wrapped in a few TIFF tags, so it is very possible that it would infringe on the patent just like JFIF/JPEG.
Windows and Office are of course the huge profit centers at Microsoft, and in volume they dominate everything else.
But I suspect that mice and keyboards pay for themselves, and Money, Encarta, SQL Server, and Visual Studio/MSDN all turn a profit (though perhaps Visual Studio is considered a loss leader for Windows).
But I'll concede all of those are all at least related to the domination of Windows and Office.
What about MSN? I don't know the revenue figures, but it seems to be doing OK.
XBox may not be making money yet, but that is clearly a long term bet. And Xbox Live almost has to be profitable.
Microsoft has a large consulting business, and that is almost certainly profitable.
Exxon Mobil is a huge company that derives most of its revenue from oil. It makes money from related business like polymers and drilling eqipment, and no doubt has more or less unrelated side businesses. How is that different from MS?
Besides, I would argue that the idea of diversifying into disparate industries has been pretty well discredited. The current buzzword is core competency, where a company pours all of its effort into a business area it understands. That sure seems like what MS is doing.
The article was sensationalist and attributed to malice and conspiracy what is best explained by profit motive.
The major electronic retailers function as gatekeepers. There are thousands of products out there that they don't put on their shelves, so much so that simply getting a product on the shelf at Best Buy is a huge accomplishment for a small hardware or software vendor.
The primary issue is one of space and inventory turns. Best Buy expects that every foot of shelf space bring in some amount of revenue, and they stock products that will maximize that revenue. A product that only moves 5 copies a month will always lose out to one that moves 5 a day.
Computers with preloaded software take up a lot of space. I suspect that most models don't even give you a choice of XP Home or XP Pro, and XP Pro is far more popular than Linux. But every different SKU to stock means additional inventory headaches, so only the most popular choices are going to be in stock.
Now consider some of the secondary factors. People buying a PC with Linux are going to be less likely to buy additional software. They arguably don't need things like Spyware or Virus products, and much of what they want is OSS and available for free anyway. So the chances for upsell are greatly reduced, and follow on sales are going to be less.
Retailers will offer Linux boxes if the numbers justify it. Show them a way to make a buck and they will be all over it. But at the moment they don't feel it is profitable to do so. No grand conspiracy, just economics.
GPS is funded by the military, so they are launched by the Air Force, not NASA. I know nothing about the budget of either, but I would be surprised if the Air Force was unable to afford 2 launches a year - or even 6 or 7 if the failure rate kicks up.
If the fine is only for the amount of the theft, then there is no deterrent factor - the punishment just puts you back to the status quo ante.
/.ers would favor death for spammers, virus writers and GPL violators), but getting caught has to have some negative impact beyond paying the original price.
The death penalty is extreme (though most
Well, let's take it to the logical extreme then.
Suppose my company invests two years of its time and effort into developing a new game. We've spent millions developing it, and until we can sell it we haven't seen a dime.
Now some lamer posts a cracked copy of the last beta build all over the web, and all the retailers decide not to stock our product because nobody is going to buy what they could get free.
We still have all those boxes with the shiny CDs inside them. We have all the code, and nothing tangible has been taken from us. Nevertheless, our ability to sell the fruits of our labor has been destroyed.
How are we not hurt by this scenario?
People stealing (or infringing on our copyright if you must be pedantic) our product does hurt us. Not at a 1:1 ratio obviously, but some number of those people will play our game all the way through and are freeloading on our labor.
There is a more insidious effect as well. Photoshop costs $600. Competitors like Paint Shop Pro, Photo Impact and Photo Paint all run about $100. People justify pirating Photoshop because they say they would never spend $600 on software, so they aren't a lost sale. But if they were unwilling to resort to piracy and needed digital imaging software, they would likely have bought one of the lower priced alternatives (or gone all the way to the GIMP). So while perhaps Adobe hasn't lost a sale, the market for lower priced alternatives is hurt.
Scalable UI is a genuine problem, but it is not something that MS can fix in the OS. Buttons, text, and widgets all scale reasonably well in Windows, though usually they look at least slightly odd, presumably because of rounding issues.
The real problem is icons and bitmaps, especially in the case of toolbars. Scaling a 16x16 bitmap up to 20x20 or even 32x32 results in something that looks awful.
Windows has supported multi resolution icons for years, but not many programs fill in all the available sizes. MFC/Win32 do not have any builtin support for multiple toolbar sizes (though it isn't that hard to do).
The bitmaps are not part of Windows, they are part of the applications. So long as those images are bitmaps and not vector drawings, they won't scale well and anything but standard size is going to look funky.
Early on I remember reading that Longhorn was going to use SVG based icons and toolbar drawings, but i haven't heard anything about it lately, so that might be one of the things that was dropped.
Oh, and I'm 44 and I run my monitor at 1600x1200...
Note that he hidden text was copied from a PDF file (Adobe), and pasted into Word to see the clear text. Microsoft has nothing to do with this.
Hiding file extensions is one of my pet peeves as well, but the example you cite makes no sense.
.jpg is not the extension.
If someone has extensions hidden then blah.jpg would only show up as blah, and the user would look at the associated icon to determine the file type.
If I have extensions hidden and I see "blah.jpg", it either has no meaning to me (because I don't think about extensions), or it immediately tells me that
Compuserve was not the holder of the GIF patent, Unisys was. IIRC, the patent had nothing to do with GIF files, it was a patent of the LZW compression algorithm - which GIF was.
Unfortunately, 90% of the users differ on what 90% of the features can be removed. That is the problem with trying to get a light app out the door.
But let's compare an old version of Word with a new one.
In the old days you had a choice of draft view or WYSIWYG, because it took too long to render using the right fonts and margins (and resolutions were too low to make it look good).
Spell checking used to be an explicit step you did at the end of a document rather than something that happened as you type.
Grammar checking did not exist at all.
Heuristics like auto correct and auto formatting did not exist.
You can argue if any of those features have value to you, but they aren't bloat in the sense of slowness caused by bad code. The code may be bloated as well, but it is ludicrous to claim that the requirements for word have gone up for no reason.
I don't think colonization of space makes any significant difference to population. To make mass exodus of population feasible you have to assume insanely cheap transport. After all, even to stabilize the population you are talking about transporting millions of people each year. You would have to get transport between Earth and a colony down to the equivalent fare of a plane ticket today.
Second, unless you are contemplating involuntary migration, I don't think you would find the millions of volunteers needed every year.
Someone needs to explain to me how cutting your salary by something like $150K results in cutting your tax burden.
Suppose that the founders have $7B in the bank, and a salary of $150K.
That $7B will generate some amount of income, which will be taxed as ordinary income (interest, subject to income tax), short term capital gains, or long term capitals gains.
The $150K also pays income tax, and also pays FICA and Medicare. FICA is 12.6% of the first $90K, Medicate is 1.45% of the entire $150K.
Based on interest and short term cap gains, assume that the entire 150K is taxed at a marginal rate of 33%.
33 + 12.6 + 1.45 = 47% tax rate, so the 150K salary nets down to about $80K after tax.
At a salary of $1, they next down to $0.53 after tax.
Dropping the salary costs them 80K. Even more, they do get not credit for social security wages, so their eventual social security checks will be reduced. (not that they are likely to need a social security check).
Now they certainly aren't hurting, and anyone with $7B in the bank can afford to forgo $80K, but I don't see any way in which this can be construed as "evil".
I went through Windows Logo back in 2002, and part of the logo requirements were that you had to work properly as a limited user unless you could get an exception for why you needed elevated privs.
We had to do significant work to make sure that data we wrote ended up somewhere in the user's profile, and that the only reg key we touched was HKCU/Software.
I don't know how hard it is to get the exemption, but apps that display the Windows logo should work as non-admin.
>higlight a section of code and right click and select "Surround by try catch block".
No, that is not in the editor out of the box, but it sounds like a pretty simple macro.
Full screen editor is out of the box though - shift alt enter, or view->full screen.
There are a number of applications that were possible in the old days but are now immensely simpler with the resources of todays computers.
.75Mpix. Graphics adapters that could do 24 bit output at high resolution were a high cost item, and many people ran paletted for the speed boost.
Take image editing for instance. 8 years ago a large image (for a hobbyist) would have been on the order of 1024x768, or
No digital cameras routinely kick out 5 or 6 million pixels, and image editors manipulate them without any problem.
The amount of work done per pixel has gone up dramatically as well - the quality of brushes and filters has improved because it is now feasible to do immensely more analysis on every pixel in negligible time.
IIRC, the conversion from RGB -> L*a*b -> RGB requires a cube root operation. Many image processing functions use L*a*b internally because it is a perceptually uniform color space. But since images may well be stored as RGB, the filter has to convert to L*a*b, do its work, and then convert back to RGB. Go back 20 years and you are looking at machines with no hardware floating point - the processing overhead of working in L*a*b would be prohibitive in those days.
For a more mainstream example, look at the way spelling and grammar flagging is done in Word - as you type, words get squiggly red or green underlines if Word is unsure of the spelling or grammar. Whether or not you think that is a good idea is irrelevant, but that kind of near real time analysis would be much more difficult without gobs of memory and a fast processor.
What makes you think any significant fraction of these people would be willing to switch to Linux?
If someone is running 7-10 year old hardware and OS, it means either that what they have does the job and they have no interest in something new, or that they can't afford anything new.
Some number of people in the "can't afford" camp might be *nix candidates, but I'd bet that the huge majority of people simply don't care about computers. They have something that works, they know how to use it, and they aren't looking to complicate their lives.
In Minnesota groceries and clothing are not subject to sales tax.
There are some quirks and exceptions, but for tax purposes the definitions of groceries and clothing are what you would expect.
OK, so calling it a "browser war" is hyperbole, but if IE has so much market share that there is no significant penalty to creating IE only websites, then all other browsers will be limited to niche markets.
I use FireFox, but if the sites I visit regularly didn't work with it I would switch back to IE. Firefox has advantages, but I am not religous about it. If the advantages swung back to IE I would to.
Claiming that FOSS is above the fray because it doesn't depend on profits is wishful thinking.
You don't necessarily need to buy a router. I believe that as of XP SP2, it is safe to hook up a Windows PC directly to Internet. Not that you'll ever see me try it.
Paradoxically, one reason that MS took so long to deploy a firewall is the Justice Department. Part of the antitrust suits against Microsoft involved charges of illegally tying IE to Windows. Ever since then they have been quite hesitant to include new applications with the OS, for fear of being accused of anti-competitive tactics.
I think it is only because of the ongoing security crisis that we see a firewall in XP SP2, and even there Microsoft made sure that the OS was very willing to host firewalls from many different manufacturers. Now they have purchased and are rebranding a spyware tool as well, but they have not yet said whether that will be bundled or separate.
The fact that Windows needs to sit behind a Firewall and have a spyware blocker can legitimately be laid at Microsoft's feet. But it took years to get into that position, and it is going to take years to get out. I think they are serious about improving the security of Windows and IE, but it isn't going to happen fast enough for anyone.