Ezekiel wrote:
"Matt" <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:yR1dl.87281$JA5.84901@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ezekiel wrote:
"Matt" <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:C0Tcl.22089$1k1.698@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ezekiel wrote:
I don't expect it would take much to know more about OS than nearly all
the senior execs at Microsoft.
That's why there's often people who manage "business" and other people
who manage the technical aspects of a company. But it's ridiculous to
believe for one second that there aren't some very, very smart technical
people working at Microsoft.
Oh, I wouldn't dispute that. For instance I find now that Allchin has
some very impressive technical accomplishments, also that he came from
poverty, also that he didn't much want to work at MS but was convinced by
Gates to join.
It ended up working out pretty well for him.
An interesting question is why he didn't want to go to MS. By his
emails about how MS had lost its way, and by his resignation upon
Vista's release, you sense that he has some vestige of conscience, that
he would like MS to be true to the beneficent image it presents of itself.
Years ago (early 90's) my
company sent me to a week long C++ training course over at IBM. The guy
teaching the C++ course (forget his name) once worked for Microsoft. He
would talk to us during the break and told us that he was something like
employee #18 or employee #24 or something like that so he worked there right
when MS was getting started. He didn't work there very long and ended up
leaving because he didn't think the company had much future potential and he
got a better job with some other company (that nobody ever heard of.)
Another one was the Turbo Pascal guy, who joined MS and designed .NET or
something.
If it's the guy that I'm thinking of then (no wikipedia peeking) it's an
ex-Borland guy who designed Delphi.
I don't see that their occasional technical excellence justifies their
habit of attacking standards.
I don't agree that developing new technologies and products is attacking
standards.
Of course it isn't, but hiding your APIs and arbitrarily and heedlessly
changing your APIs so that competitors can't use them is not an
essential part of developing new technologies. The pattern you should
discern is destruction of standards that they can't control.
Windows NT (back when Cutler wrote it) was a new product. Delphi
was a new product. .NET is a new product. Back when only "C" existed the C++
was a new product. Computer technology evolves. You can't just sit around
and not develop anything new because of some imaginary attack on standards.
The Turbo guy was a perfect fit because he already had a history of
extending standards so as to create lock-in.
Companies extend standards to provide additional functionality that doesn't
exist in the standard. Firefox has non-standard features in their browser.
The gcc/g++ compiler has non-standard compiler features. MySQL has it's own
set of features that aren't part of the SQL standard. What's the point in
developing a language like Python.... what "standard" does Python adhere to?
Clearly Python exists to create lock-in and to attach languages like Perl.
Once again... computer technology evolves and changes over time. Things
would be extremely stagnant if nobody released any features until they were
officially part of some committee approved standard that took months or
years to approve.
We've been through all this before. There is a clear pattern of
hostility to standards that they don't own as well as hostility to
competitors using their APIs (e.g. DR-DOS). Their intent is to advance
MS, not primarily to advance technology. Now that the possibilities for
OS improvement have pretty much run out, advancing the technology isn't
even much of an option. They can't do much other than to keep changing
the APIs, and hardly anybody wants to buy it.
Linux is driving the price of Windows and Office closer to zero in one
market after another, and they will be running short of revenue to pay
for development.
I believe I mentioned the MS identity crisis in a previous post, and you
denied that there was one. Allchin's email clearly shows that there was
one in 2002. Has it somehow been resolved?
MS will survive in some form for many years yet, but they know their old
business model in OS and office software is not going to work much longer.
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