"One Bullet is never enough" Paper

Tue May 21 21:45:04 EDT 2002

> -----Original Message-----
> From: python-list-admin at python.org
> [mailto:python-list-admin at python.org]On Behalf Of James J. Besemer
> Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 1:03
> To: David K. Trudgett
> Cc: python-list at python.org
> Subject: Re: "One Bullet is never enough" Paper
>
<snip>
> I'm no big fan of MS but as a businessman I appreciate and respect their
> position in the market.  It's stupid to ignore their installed base.
> Whether you agree or not, their economic power is something to be reckoned
> with.  The value you get for what you pay is one of the best bargains in
> the PC world.  Like Intel, they're relentlessly competitive AND they take
> a balanced view of running a business (paying attention to finance,
> marketing, sales, strategic planning, HR and other functions in addition
> to technology), which is the main reason they have been successful.  It's
> the quintessential American Success Story -- after all they started out
> just 12 geeks in a room, writing software for the 8008.  From a purely
> meritocratic standpoint, they deserve to be where they are today.  From a
> pure Zen, go-with-the-flow standpoint, WinTel is the #1 platform to target
> for commercial products.  There are other choices and you don't have to
> use Microsoft products, but like it or not MS IS a big part of our reality
> today and its likely to be around for the rest of our lives.

Ah yes, respect for Microsoft. I suppose they deserve the same "respect" as
any mobster or shark. Microsoft's main claim to their position is a
willingness to practice illegal and predatory marketing upon their customers
as demonstrated by the anti-trust suite. BTW, Microsoft didn't start out as
"12 geeks...". It was Bill Gates and Paul Allen in a dorm room at Harvard
(of which, Gates dropped out) working on 8080 code for the Altair 8800
microcomputer (Gates had interned there the summer before IIRC). MS has been
primarily successful because momma Gates served on the same charity board as
some big IBM bigwig's wife and who got him the lead for the PC work (AND
because Gary Kildahl was too much of a space cadet to see the opportunity,
not to mention the culture clash with IBM). At the point where they got it,
they where pretty much out of work after the Apple and TRS-80 Basic ROM
work. I believe they screwed Apple and Radio Shack too (I recall there was
some back and forth between Apple and Microsoft about floating point Basic,
but the details elude me after so long). We know they screwed IBM over both
DOS and OS/2. (To be fair, IBM did leave the door open for loosing DOS since
they didn't see the potential at the time they signed the contract.)

The value you get for what you pay is one of the best bargins in the PC
world? Actually, if you do the math, it's _infinately_ worse then... oh,
say... LINUX wich is FREE for the downloading. The ratio of one cent to zero
cents is infinite! With MS you pay a lot more then one cent. Of course, it
is nice being in that 90% profit margin market. 90% of Microsoft's revenue
stream from software comes from the mere act of granting use permission - no
physical product is actually produced. I bet GM would love to be in a market
where they could grant permission to drive a car without actually having to
produce the car!

I won't get into the quality or lack thereof of Microsoft products, but
suffice it to say an OS which verbosely pretty much says "it's broken, buy
more stuff to fix it" which is what NT and 2000's "help" systems do does not
make me believe that it's "mission critical and enterprise ready" (you did
want to spend the extra $200-$300 for the 2000 Resource kit with the real
diagnostic tools and messages in it didn't you?).

> From this standpoint, people who view MS as "evil" or some big scary bogey
> man, ARE simply being childish, neglecting many practical and realistic
> issues.  You want bogey men?  What about IBM, who spends more in marketing
> each year than MS grosses in revenue?  What about Big Oil, controlling
> about 10% of the GNP?  By last count, 100% of US oil companies today are
> direct descendants of Rockafeller's Standard Oil.  What about Big
> Government?  20-25% of the GNP.  MS's large fraction of the computer
> industry is nothing by comparison.

Damn! the US government is "being childish". While this isn't news
(considering who the presichimp is), I doubt it was a temper tantrum that
prompted them to prosecute AND WIN an anti-trust suite against Microsoft.
Alas, it looks as though Microsoft's wiggling and big payouts in the 2000
elections (a first for the company) has enabled them to wait for a favorable
administration to negotiate their "punishment" little though it may be.
Kudos to the states for not tamely laying down with the Justice Department!

I'm not in Oil or government. I am in computers, so that's my focus of
interest. BTW, speaking of the oil companies, if their GDP (to be accurate
since "GNP" is obsolete) fraction is so small, why are we busily fighting a
war in Afghanistan that will enable them to have the favored pipeline route
from the Tajikistan oil fields safeguarded? There is so much that has worked
out so well for the government and big oil from 9/11. Too bad they didn't
have a clue that _someone_ might use airplanes to fly into structures -
although the Japanese did it 55 years before in WW II.

BTW, I doubt your claim that "100% of US oil companies are descended from
Rockafeller's Standard Oil". Would you consider Arco a US company? They're
owned by British Petroleum (BP). Actually, it's moot - they're all so
mult-national now that debate about origions are pointless. (One of the
great things about being a multi-national is you can just move your base of
operations to where the legislative climate is either suitable to your
liking or can be bought cheap.)

> Incidentally, re. C#, MS came out with it as a product well AFTER Sun
> threatened to cancel their license to use Java (eventually making good on
> this threat).  So in forcing MS to abandon Java (rather than negotiate a
> settlement), one could argue it's really Sun Microsystems rather than MS
> that fucked up the wonderful world of "open standards" in this narrow
> regard.

Yes indeedy, Sun did revoke Microsoft's license - after they won a court
case demonstrating that Microsoft violated said license. Nobody forced
Microsoft to abandon Java except they themselves with their insistance on
violating the terms of the license agreement they signed. I see C# as just
one more case of Microsoft "embracing and extending" (think of being grabbed
and bent over a desk) Java by making a proprietary language with a laughable
and cynical nod towards open sourcing. While the language might be open
source, OS features it depends on are either not open or not generally
available or both. C# won't ever run on non-Windows platforms as well as on
Windows given that C# is intimately dependent on COM, which costs $$ on
non-Windows platforms. As has been mentioned on the mailing list, it's worth
noting that Microsoft is persuing patents for features of C#, and that will
make it even more unavailable to the open source community.

> Regards
>
> --jb
>
> --
> James J. Besemer  503-280-0838 voice
> http://cascade-sys.com  503-280-0375 fax
> mailto:jb at cascade-sys.com
>
>