Sunday, January 1st, 2006, 8:11 am
Operating System Monoculture
Filed under:
Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)
OW can Microsoft ever permit the existence of something interoperable? To a company so aggressive, interoperability is the very face of evil. It is a threat. What it comes down to is the equivalent of a destructive competition, which is counter-productive to humanity. It portrays the core danger of monopolies, whose power and scale can deter any resistance attempts. It embodies the scenario where people take risks only to avoid what is adverse to ideaology — steering away from the ‘norm’. Windows has become a norm. Its avoidance symbolises a state of social outcasting, at least in people’s perception.
Whether it was Java, or C, or even OpenGL, such technologies had to be ‘extinguished’, at least in accordance with Microsoft’s agenda. Even Adobe’s Flash (Macromedia takeover) and the PDF format are bound to be replaced according to the Microsoft Grand Plan. What about DivX and WMV? MP3 and WMA? The formats Microsoft have proposed are not only inferior in terms of performance, but also they are proprietary.
Will that trend ever stop? To critical IT professionals the current state-of-affair is like a pungent knife in an open sore. To many others, this entire manipulation from up above is misunderstood and thus perceived as innocent. The ‘cattle effect’ is to be attributed for some inertia, not to mention pre-installed software.
