Blogging Ottinger (tim)Big Changes out Redmond Way
Take a look at Ballmer’s Right Hand Man Waves Goodbye to Microsoft at OSNews.com. Now thats Kempin, Taylor, and Gates are leaving. Only a few more to go. Maybe microsoft will be a whole new company now. Only time will tell. And in Bill’s case (humanitarian that he’s become), it looks like a lot of the evil left him before he left; maybe about the time he got married he softened and became more “real”.
Not all Linux people have an instinctive loathing of Microsoft (as I do). Linus Torvalds is famous for saying that he doesn’t think they’re evil, just that their software isn’t very good.
I was actually a big Microsoft fan back in the day. IBM and Microsoft were the power behind the PC and I loved my PC. Then IBM went back on their full disclosure policy and went “evil” by trying to take back the market from the people. Microsoft was smart enough to have maintained control of the OS, and they were able to ride the expanding market. It was Microsoft’s David v. IBM’s Goliath. I remember back in the OS/2 days how the rumor mill buzzed about MS being really smart about distribution and positioning, but their code being quite poor and buggy. We didn’t mind. It was “the enemy of my enemy.”
As OS/2 matured, it was increasingly stable and fast. Sad, but they were shut out of the market very effectively (as were lesser, more ethically favored players, sadly) by Kempin’s evil machinations. When Microsoft acquired better channels for selling software, they were heroes. When they started closing those channels to other vendors and mistreating their partners, then it was clear that evil had a new home. They didn’t want merely to have success, but to own the rights to it.
There were many alleged or proven abuses of power since then, and we found that some of these guys were pretty unsavory characters. This eventually led to the antitrust trial (which, in case you didn’t know it, they LOST). Microsoft had become the evil empire, as IBM had taken over evil from AT&T (who used to be “the death star”). Many people don’t realize that it was not always Microsoft that the industry railed against. Oh, and if you think Microsoft is hardened, I hear that Allen Bradley is twice the tyrant MS ever was.
In the meantime, IBM became a champion of open systems and community involvement. Linux and IBM became very good for each other, and now the ex-evil-empire is our ally against the “jeckle-and-hyde” Microsoft enemy. We don’t know where evil will live next. It tried SCO, but SCO couldn’t sustain it, and imploded.
Maybe we’ll see whether Sun, Microsoft, or RedHat is most able to open their hearts to the community and become heroes, or will clamp down and become the new villian. But for now, clearly it is the end of an age for Microsoft.
As OS/2 matured, it was increasingly stable and fast.
WHAT? I implemented several dozen Lotus Notes servers for GM, all running (if you can call it that) on OS/2. Every problem we ever had (well, aside from the IBM junk hardware they ran on) was OS-related. Memory leaks IN the OS, lockups, mystery reboots…yuck. I understand that OS/2 Warp was a better product, but by then, they’d pretty much poisoned their own well.
Now, the NEXT operating system…there was a gem. As, actually, was TSR’s OS/9…sigh. A drink for the living, a toast to the dead.
Comment by Kris Cook — 2006-June-22 @ 12:19