I was going to title this little ditty "Why you shouldn't use Micro$oft products", but it occurs to me that while I very much do want to prosthletyze, and certainly hope that what I say here strikes a chord with, and influences you, if even in a small way, I cannot tell you what to do and that is the whole point of what I'm going to say anyway. Somebody is trying to get in a position where they can tell just about everyone on Earth what to do; that someone is, as you should already know, William Gates III, and this is my fundamental objection to him and his company. The products may be shoddy (they are), the support may be nonexistent, ridiculously expensive, or wrong (it is always at least one, and even acheives all three with astounding regularity), his business practices may be asocial (they are, but we are going to have to cover some sociological background if you don't already know that) and his ambition far exceeds Faust's (this is an insult to Faust, I know, but I can't find any stronger metaphor... Machievelli's Prince?) but none of these horrify me even a fraction as much as the personal philosophy that these pieces of evidence delineate. So while I will now go on to detail each of those other points (perhaps enough support will prevent lawsuits... Micro$oft bears much more than a passing resemblance to the Scientologists in more than that regard), they are not the point. They are symptoms. As you read the evidence compiled by one in the trenches, remember what is probably the only crucial point. When you vote for Bill Gates with your dollars, you vote, in a very real way, against your personal freedom.
I don't know how much I have to say to support my allegation that Micro$oft products are shoddy; have you ever used one? That should be evidence enough. Remember WIN1.0-3.0 stepping all over itself? Remember how exciting 3.1 was? Because it crashed a little less? Then 3.11? Then 95? Even less! Goodness, looks like an OS is in the works. Wrong, wrong, wrong; marketing and monopolizing are in the works. Sure, every new release was more stable, but it is also a fact that every new release broke other software houses' products. Which do you think was Bill's priority? As NT was coming up this became painfully, pitifully obvious in their direct attack on NetWare's functionality. Can you make any Micro$oft product interoperate seemlessly with anybody elses' product? I'm no techno-boob (see my resume if you have doubts), but I have encountered insoluble problems. And there has always been a Micro$oft product involved. UNIXes, OS/400, MVS and VMS sometimes crash on hardware failures. NetWare rarely crashes without provocation. NT, on the other hand, how do I put this politely: is an unstable, worthless piece of crap. Okay, the IO subsystem is alright (smells a great deal like VMS actually) but everything on top of that is pure Micro$oft; it's sloppy, it's fat, it's slow and it just falls down without explanation. I have a horrifying vision of a human being's life support running on NT. Well if it's Bill or Paul I guess it's not so bad; instant karma actually. Sorry, now I wax asocial. But this seems alot more serious to me than just 'who owns the desktop'. Our desktop computers are far more powerful than ENIAC and UNIVAC tied together. Top of the line symmetrical multi-processing Power Pentiums have exceeded the raw MIPs of Seymore Cray's early supercomputers. We could do a lot more with these machines. And to those who would say that Micro$oft'stability woes stem from the some flaw with the underlying hardware, may I submit Linux? Or Solaris x86. I challenge you to crash one of these without deliberately exploiting a known flaw (ie. no fork bombs or rm'ing /dev/*). I notice that their windowing systems do crash, but this hardly ever destabilizes the machine, and never outright kills it. Perhaps Micro$oft's mistake is in tying their kernel to the windowing system. Or perhaps it's that they care more about putting their competition out of business than they do about making a worthwhile product. Anybody remember Word 2.0 on the Mac? God, what a horror, couldn't write with it for five minutes without some instantaneous formatting idiocy or mysterious loss of data, or even crashing the application or the whole system. WordPerfect had a perfectly usable, stable product, but did you see what Micro$oft did to them? That particular scenario was fascinating; WordPerfect had a far superior product, but Micro$oft released Word 2.0 with stubs for some nifty functionality. That is to say, Word couldn't even do what WordPerfect could do, but it had more menu choices, most of which were grayed out and unimplemented as of that release. Still, it was at this time that Word began to eat WordPerfect's market, demonstrating most vividly humanity's lack of common sense and susceptibility to hype. All of this dovetails quite nicely with my third point, which makes me regret the linearity (perceived at any rate) of time and space which require me to address my second point between my first and third (non-linear thinkers jump at random as you desire; if you haven't already...).
So, what can we say about Micro$oft's support? And not get sued, hopefully... are you aware that Micro$oft does not support their own products? Can't blame them, I wouldn't want to support that garbage either. But the fact is that Micro$oft farms out their tech support. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, a great many companies outsource support. Generally, however, such companies will supply the outsourcees with accurate documentation and some kind of a troubleshooting paradigm. I can tell you first hand (I have a friend or relative working at one of these outsourcees; I will go into no further detail for obvious reasons) that Micro$oft does not supply adequate amounts of either. The documentation is regularly wrong (and the outsourcees either relay this wrong information or correct it themselves), and the troubleshooting paradigms are, by and large, improvised by these non-Micro$oft trained, non-Micro$oft supported non-Micro$oft employees. And it's certainly no wonder the documentation is wrong; if your product crashes for reasons not even you understand (or will not admit) and its functionality is buggy at best and non-functional at worst, would you put a great deal of resources into documenting it? Me neither. I suppose I would concentrate, as Micro$oft has, on putting my more worthy competitors out of business.
What about this behavior strikes you as asocial? Do you have some exposure to psychology and/or sociology? If so, there's probably not much I have to tell you. Bill Gates is intentionally disempowering people. He is lying about his own industry and he is misrepresenting the fashion in which his influence governs decisions in industries tangential to his own. If you have no such background I can simplify and perhaps give you a little. Asocial behavior is, per Webster, behavior "rejecting or lacking the capacity for social interaction". William Gates III's behavior fits this description exactly. Whether he is rejecting or lacking the capacity to treat others as human beings is immaterial. All that matters for my description of him as asocial to be accurate is that his behavior evidence faulty or non-existent social interaction. The Federal government itself has reached this determination now (read about the Attorney General's anti-trust lawsuit.) And when it comes to asocial behavior is there any entity more expert than the US Government?
How does all the forgoing describe Bill's ambition? Are you familiar with the concept of social Darwinism? Isn't this the only philosophy that could hope to excuse Gates' behavior? Social Darwinism is a badly flawed application of the ideas of survival of the fittest and the evolution of species to social structures and phenomena. It is badly flawed because societies are not organisms. It is downright dangerous because it excuses behavior like Adolph Hitler's, Pol Pot's and Bill Gates'. It is not alright for the 'fittest' in a society to serve genocide on the 'unfit', it is not alright for the powerful to degrade, despise and inflict suffering for their own gain on the powerless, and it is not alright to use one's influence to truncate other's potential in order to increase that very influence. It seems quite clear to me that while we have yet to document a genocide at Micro$oft's behest that the philosophy for excusing such is near and dear to their CEO.
So now I leave all decisions to you. Are you willing to inconvenience
yourself to do what's right? This is a deadly serious question that I am
handling myself at this moment. Can I give up my nice car, my beautiful
instrument collection, my home network and all these other superfluous
comforts in order to live a sustainable lifestyle? I hope and pray that
I can. But I have already given up Micro$oft products, and that, to me
at least, is a real and meaningful first step. What will you do?