Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: A World Without Microsoft

Author:John Kinney
Posted:6/10/2000; 6:56:17 AM
Topic:A World Without Microsoft
Msg #:17692 (In response to 17649)
Prev/Next:17689 / 17693

> On some level I think they have always understood that if > Windows (or any specific MS product, really) were required > to compete on its own terms, it might lose.

I really don't think that's the case - I think Gates just stumbled across a huge market, he's out to protect that market, and he'll do whatever it takes to keep it.

He got into it as part of IBM's destruction of the innovative desktop computer industry of the early 1980s and he *hasn't* forgotten the Roolz he learned back then [1]. Sell to the folks who don't really need all the bells and whistles but want the "latest and greatest" because... Haven't we all read marketing studies that suggest the most effect word you can put on the label of any product is "NEW"?

And sell to the folks who just want the damn thing to *work* and don't really care what or how, so long as the results are at least marginally acceptable. Bloatware, what's bloatware? They'll just have to make faster computers, that's all.

Too bad for the rest of us.

I do agree that the Windows software is astonishingly flawed. I operate a small consulting business that's more or less forced by *our* market to use MS products because that's what our clients use. At any given time, we may have to run anything from graphics software to business applications to browsers to whatever, wishfully all at more or less the *same* time.

Alas, the Windows environment is entirely incapable of handling anything approaching this sort of workload, with the result that our Windows boxes end up getting rebooted several times a day. I've heard using Windows in a high-production business environment likened to operating a modern inter-city quick-delivery service using Ford Pintos -- a perfectly acceptable car for cruising the suburbs and commuting to work, but all day every day on the highway at interstate speeds? Nah...

Conversely, my lone Linux server box chuckles away day in and day out for months doing whatever it's asked to do in a comparatively reliable and painless manner. I can leave applications up for a month, or have multiple copies of applications running simultaneously for different projects/clients. I don't have to completely unload a project to get access to data from another for fear the whole mess is going to croak and require the (also unreliable) 3-finger salute that kills *everything*. I've already shifted 95 % of my personal connectivity tasks over to the server box, and beginning to experiment with word-processing and graphics-processing possibilities.

For us, as soon as I can reliably read/write/print MS Office 97 files in any Linux-based application, and run CorelDraw under Linux, Windows is outta here. We're already setting up all our office machines with dual-boot Win/Linux capability so we can switch when the time is right.

I don't need the Windows grief any more...

Regards, John Kinney

[1] Anybody remember the old Intertec Superbrain? Twin Z-80 processors running a patched copy of CP/M that did actual background printing in Wordstar 2.0? And did it *every* time. These days, I can't get MS Word to print reliably in the background to an supposedly competent HP inkjet printer if there are any graphics in the file.

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