From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Nov 16 2002 - 05:34:24 MST
Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 11/15/2002 2:49:04 PM Central Standard Time,
>puglisi@arcetri.astro.it writes: The vast majority of the technical community
>regards Microsoft products as low quality, bloated, and focused much more on
>bells and whistles than actual functionality. A high percentage of the
>"innovations" were actually bought or stolen from somewhere else. The market
>dominance is the result of the biggest flaw of a real-world free market
>system, non-informed consumers, readily exploited by a very good marketing
>team. The subsequent monopoly was the result of various illegal activities,
>as found by a variety of legal courts.
>
>Alfio,
> In my entire engineering career I never once built anything that I
>wouldn't have improved vastly had I had a 2nd shot at it. Naturally Ford,
>Gates, etal didn't do anything as well as someone else could have done it
>later. But our system in its wisdom said we will go ahead and give
>innovators a patent and exclusive rights for a period of years -- it is
>better to have the innovation even at the price of the obvious inefficiency
>that causes.
>
Excuse me, but in a company as rich as Microsoft you can afford to take
2nd, 3rd, Nth shots at most everything. Ford is irrelevant to this
conversation. Gates went out of his way to squash "better" in several
well documented instances. He went out of his way to introduce
incompatibilities not for the sake of "innovation" but to screw up the
competition and to reduce the freedom of those in the market for
software. It has all been exhaustively spelled out in the court case so
there is little need to attempt to resurrect it at this late hour. So
why this ridiculous soft soap on a known monopolistic jerk who has
scraped a significant quantity of the world's wealth to his own coffers
without offering enough real value in return?
> If you look at Gates or Ford's works and say I can improve on that all
>I hear is a recitation of the obvious. We should improve on their efforts --
>we stand on their shoulders.
>
No. I do not stand on his shoulders. I take nothing from him or from
Microsoft as a starting point. Generally I did it (for most values of
"it") better from the beginning and have been wondering for years what
the heck the problem is with MicroSloth. There is not one fundamental
thing they did that I have not at one time done more elegantly and
generally long before they did their relatively shoddy version.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:10 MST