Microsoft and the Internet
Computers and Technology
| September 23, 2004
| Tim
When the Netscape web browser first came out in the 1990s it sold for about $20. Not a bad price, considering how much they'd put into developing and marketing it.
Then, Microsoft spent millions duplicating it, and gave away their competing browser, "Internet Explorer" for free.
Why?
Antitrust Laws
It's not uncommon, in the history of American business, for a big company to come into a town, use its profit from other locations to temporarily sell products there for less than it cost to produce them, and thus make it impossible for any other similar business with less-deep pockets to survive, since no profit could be turned at that price level.
Then, once competing businesses in that town have been killed, prices are then raised to levels higher than seen previously. These outrageously high prices are then used to subsize using this same trick against the next town.
Republican Theodore Roosevelt made these pratices illegal: Under the anti-trust laws he supported, you cannot legally sell products for less than it costs you to produce them, especially if the intent is to destroy a competitor -- a practice called "predatory pricing."
People often tell me Bill Gates does well because he's innovative. Only in breaking the law: if that's "innovation" then Jeffrey Dahmer was innovative too.
Usually, the government is pretty serious about this stuff: During the 90's, I'd hear plenty of such stories: drugstones being fined for selling vitamins below cost, computer chips being "dumped" onto the market, steel.
But for some reason, Microsoft could spend millions, or perhaps even billions, developing a competing web browser, and then give it away for free -- far below any reasonable estimate for cost -- without facing any consequences. Later, they integrated IE into the operating system, causing the computer itself to tend to prefer the Microsoft browser, making it nearly impossible for others to compete.
(It should also be noted that at this time, IE was a terrible product, and was competitively inferior to Netscape. So the result of this battle was not due to some superior functionality offered by Microsoft's entre.)
All this was done, of course, to kill Netscape, Inc. It's a practice Microsoft calls "cutting off the air supply" -- denying competitors the cash they need to keep functioning. It succeeded grandly, and Microsoft wasn't prosecuted, even while the feds were looking closely into the cost of your neighborhood "Vitamin C" tablets.
(And that's one of the reasons free software is popular today: You can't "cut off the air supply" of a free, public-domain product. In many segements today, the result of Microsoft's predation is that only free products and/or Microsoft have survived.)
The Importance of the Browser
Why so much focus on the web browser? Well, first it's important to understand Bill Gate's obsessive competitivity: Microsoft at the time (and probably still) wanted to own and control every single segment of the software industry. There was no type of software that Bill Gates didn't desire Microsoft dominate completely.
But, this one even more so: Gates understood clearly the implications of the Internet. And I think you should too.
There are literally millions of computers out there, running all different kinds of software. For reasons explained above, MS IE is the most popular program that people use to interact with those computers.
Many of those computers -- most, in fact -- don't run MS software. By far the most popular web server -- that thing than send your computer this document you're reading now -- is the "Apache" web server, a free product.
Controlling people's access to the web means that you can control the rest of American industry and public life. I want to repeat that: Controlling people's access to the web means that you can control the rest of industry and public life.
It would be a relatively simple matter for Microsoft to change IE so that it could only, suddenly, connect to web sites which ran Microsoft's web servers. Or, more subtly, so that it only worked well with Microsoft's own web servers.
Besides forcing everyone to get rid of Linux and Apache, and forcing companies to only use Windows-based web servers, this would also put Microsoft in a position to dictate every kind of information which could put on the web, and how it can be offered.
For example, if someday people start watching television over the Internet, Microsoft would effective find itself having the same powers the FCC exerts over television broadcasts: It could dictate who would have a liscense to broadcast (i.e. liscense use of MS's broadcast software), and thus could eventually even dictate content.)
Another more contemporary example: Microsoft could prevent corporations which use the Java programming language from interacting with Microsoft web servers. Companies would then have to start using Microsoft's competing programming languages if they wanted to get their data out to the Internet.
And once that is true, it's a simple matter of dictating what database systems, transaction servers, networking protocols, etc. will be supported from Microsoft's programming languages and operating systems.
Ultimately, we could be a position where no computer-based monetary transaction could occur over the Internet without each party paying a kind of "tax" to Microsoft.
And that's truly a scary idea if you think about it.
Keeping the Wolves at Bay
In some areas of software, Microsoft is almost a complete monopoly. But web browsers isn't one of them. Why not?
Monopolies tend to hate competition.
And there's a bigger monopoly out there than Microsoft even. And unlike Microsoft, this organization has been known to use actual threats of physical violence to keep people in line. It's influence is so pervasive that most people seem almost unaware of the level of control it exerts over their lives. It influences financial markets around the world through it's alliances with bankers. And it has such brilliant marketing that many people voluntarily want to put even more segments of our economy under it's direct control.
That other, bigger monopoly is our government. During the late 90s, only after some political lobbying from what remained of Netscape, the Department of Justice finally got around to looking into Microsoft's behavior in the browser market. This eventually forced Microsoft to make sure that competitor's browsers could still run under their operating system, though it's clear to me that Windows still gives IE an edge.
(For example, I use another browser. But after a while, for some reason, Windows will reset my chosen preference invoked by the mail program back to being Internet Explorer. And I've had to go back and reset it: a difficult task if you don't know some of geekier details of how to work with Windows.)
Today's News
It would seem, for the moment at least, that any further moves it could make to extend its control might again bring sanction from it's only real competitor (government). So rather than attempting to use it's near-monopoly in the browser market to extend it's control, it appears it's going to be using it, for the time being anyway, as a cash cow.
This is bad, but much better than the alternative.
Via Q and O:
If you’re one of about 200 million people using older versions of Windows and you want the latest security enhancements to Internet Explorer, get your credit card ready.
Microsoft this week reiterated that it would keep the new version of Microsoft’s IE Web browser available only as part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, Service Pack 2. The upgrade to XP from any previous Windows versions is $99 when ordered from Microsoft. Starting from scratch, the operating system costs $199.
That, analysts say, is a steep price to pay to secure a browser that swept the market as a free, standalone product.
"It’s a problem that people should have to pay for a whole OS upgrade to get a safe browser," said Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions on Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. "It does look like a certain amount of this is to encourage upgrade to XP."
Remember that Nescape was selling for $20-30 dollars. Remember that Microsoft gave away IE for free, and even "locked out" competitors at times. Now note that MS wants you to pay them $300 for the privilege of browsing the Internet without being infected through the bugs in their poor-quality software.
Q and O suggest you check out FireFox, a browser built from the ashes of what was once Netscape. I agree, and have been using it successfully for a while now.
But I find this complaint a tad ironic, given how Q and O itself has now become a Microsoft-only blog, and mercilessly mocks "geeks" who have stressed to them (though perhaps artlessly) the strategic importance of limiting Microsoft's domination of the server market.
But I find this complaint a tad ironic, given how Q and O itself has now become a Microsoft-only blog, and mercilessly mocks "geeks" who have stressed to them (though perhaps artlessly) the strategic importance of limiting Microsoft's domination of the server market.
That is simply untrue. I mercilessly mock geeks who condemn others for failing to use their favorite technologies.
We became a .NET blog becausze I am a ,NET devloper, and it's what I know, and MT coudln't handle our traffic without PERL using up too many server resources with the constant page rebuilds. So I built the new blog myself, and incorporated it into DotNetNuke.
My position is, and always has been, use the technologies that allow you to build a useful product. For me, that happens to be .NET.
If I was a PHP guy, I'd use that. Where criticism of Microsoft or its products is appropriate, I give it, like I did today. But, I don't subscribe to the Microsoft paranoia that infects far too many otherwise sane members of the IT community.
Me: [Dale] mercilessly mocks "geeks" who have stressed to them (though perhaps artlessly) the strategic importance of limiting Microsoft's domination of the server market.
Dale: That is simply untrue. I mercilessly mock geeks who condemn others for failing to use their favorite technologies.
Dale,
You contend those who wrote to you "condemned" you for failing to use their "favorite" technologies. I don't dispute that (it's your email, not mine), but that's not a refutation of what I wrote.
I wrote that your critics had stressed the "strategic importance" of non-MS [server software] products.
Is this somehow untrue?
Your own paraphrase of these emails, "They will rule the world!" seems to support, not contradict what I said.
As did the snippet of the e-mail you published, which culminated with: "The future is Open." Am I somehow being untruthful for characterisizing this as pertaining to the "strategic importance" of using non-MS products?
Further, you contend here they spoke out of "Microsoft paranoia" -- i.e. out of a fear, which you think is unwarranted, of Microsoft. Uh, I don't mean to point out the obvious, but wouldn't that also be stressing the "strategic importance" of non-MS products?
Look, let's be clear: I like your blog. And I'm not attacking your choice of technology. Nor I am I making any predictions about the future, nor which technology will or won't dominate, if any.
Instead, I'm just defending myself from a charge I've said something untrue.
To the contrary, it seems that "strategic importance", by your own words and the letter you published -- was very much an issue raised to you. Even according to your own paraphrases of what was said and why.
Sure, you can talk about whether this software was or wasn't someone's "favorite". Or whether it was "open". Or "cheap". Or "reliable". Or well-documented. Or easy-to-use, or popular or a host of other terms.
And those are all great things to talk about!
Nor did I say you don't recommend doing whatever seems convenient in the short term for people, based on their current skills -- I'm clear that is a top criteria for you. (Indeed, that is nearly the opposite of emphasizing long-term strategic importance.)
All good discussions!
But none of these refute my statement that the issue of "strategic importance" was raised to you.
It seems obvious it was.
Am I missing something here, somehow?
I quick mention, you say they have to spend $300 when in the line above you say, $99 for upgrade OR $199 for a new system. Surely you don't need both.
And XP is worth upgrading for. Microsoft release some excellent products that others can't compete with. If Microsoft have monopoly that is fine with me. As long as the government will step in when MS start charging very high amounts.
Microsoft release some excellent products that others can't compete with.
"Can't compete with" in the sense that Microsoft broke laws to promote their products when their competitors did not.
If you're talking quality, the assertion is laughable: in almost every area, Microsoft Windows has always been light-years behind the competition. In the late '80s, when the Mac supported dual-head color monitors, and Amiga was doing video (including production-quality video) Windows could barely even start.
MS Office could never have even made it in the marketplace, unless they used their monopoly on the OS to promote it. In another incident, MS simply ripped off disk compression technology from their competitors, in violation of copyright laws, and included it in their operating system.
Even with video in recent times, Microsoft was so grossly incompetant they had to steal 10,000 lines of Quicktime code from Apple in order to come up with a reasonable proprietary format for video.
So why "can't" others "compete" with that? Because when you're an ethical law abiding company, it's rather hard to "compete with" a company which flagrantly violates the law and actually steals proprietary technologies, and government agencies who are incredibly slow or even uninterested in doing anything about enforcing the laws they've told everyone to follow.
The resulting situation is basicly a government subsidity to reward dishonesty and punish ethics, at the cost of taxpayers and consumers.
As long as the government will step in when MS start charging very high amounts.
Yes, of course. Government to the rescue. After all, they've done such a great job so far -- let's give them more control. What you're basicly saying is that the government and Microsoft should agree to soak the consumer and guarantee Bill Gates a profit.
Yes, excellent advice.
Consider: Before MS entered the market, good word processing software sold for $30 to $100, usually towards the lower end. After MS achieved corporate monopoly in this area, MS Word now costs $230. That's easily a 500% increase.
According to you, is it time for government intervention yet? No? So when does that time start? At $500? $1000?
Time for a John Cena moment:
Yo yo yo, chill chill chill
First, I'm a developer and I'm jack of all trades, done VB, PERL, PHP, ASP, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, ODBC to JDBC, Java, Beans, servlets, and all sorts of HTML, XML, DHTML, CSS thingies. oh I'm an MCSE as well :)
I don't love or hate Microsoft. I can't control the market; all I can do is pick a product that gets the job give to me done. That's all. Had spend a LOT of time of computer crashing and Microsoft products, but can't blame Microsoft. Mostly in back home, most of the hardware was unbranded, and software is pirated Chinese version!! (More on it later) so who to blame? Office + ASP made it easier for me to learn web DB connectivity (save an access database as ASP and viola!) and from there I picked on difficult stuff like PERL. Java....yeah....worked on it, GREAT for big budget big companies who can afford $180 / hr programmers. When that parent company gone bankrupt, I developed the same software that costs 50 grand in a week...in PHP :) ok i'll stop bragging and list pros and cons
Microsoft PROs
- Microsoft has a great contribution of toward PC, i.e. personal computer. It won't be as fast if not for monopoly race.
- Now after 10 years their products are 'nuff tested, sadly by us...to trust...a little. e.g. I have a scanner, TV card, geeky games, ORACLE, IIS, Java, PHP and God knows what else running and XP never crashed once!!! Last 2 years. yup! XP rocks.
- SQL server is a great choice for database and data importing and exporting. Beats MySQL in ease and functionality and ORALCE in pricing and ease.
- Any one can learn ASP in days and switch from either VB or PERL and can start working web-based.
- Let their software to be pirated and have unlimited supply of programmers from Asian countries. (uh...me!)
- One company that gives it all, web-server + browser + OS. And have many users using it too! For some scenarios, it's great!
CONS
Too many. :)
- Paid most high fines in history for monopolizing. And they did monopolize. Ate quarter-deck (remember cleansweap, no? Defrag software? MS hired their main programmers and left them with nothing). Did it with God knows how many companies.
- Their software never stop crashing. Even on Dot Net 'professional' seminar, presenter software crashed!!! Not once.
- Bastardize java. Visual J++. I mean come one! Stick to your products and work on them: VB, ASP, OS, IE. Don't finger other software.
- Whole WinNT and beyond based on Unix. NTFS etc. Yet look down on 'open source'. Yeah, I heard it on seminars. You learned from the same thing, what are you talking about?
- Unsecure.....I mean come one! using IE is like going Mexico, leaving keys in car and leaving the doors open.
- tried to screw Intel by 64 bit fiasco.
- Spend billions, yet NO product like iTunes, QuickTime, Adobe Photoshop, FireFox, Wiki. And claim to be better than open source!
- Not much new ideas since Billies original Dos for PC. Yup!
MS OS = Unix + MAC
Browser = copy of netscape (netscape is copy of some other I forgot, more shameless copy than IE)
Blog = non-Microsoft thing
Internet = non-Microsoft thing (spanked by FireFox)
No decent Virus guard. (Spanked by Norton)
No decent Forum software. (Spanked by PHP)
- Going away from actual programming syntax (VB classic) and coming back to them 10 years later (VB.Net)
I use Microsoft OS. Can't do my job on MAC. I use Office. Yup. Use ASP, SQL server at work, although I'd rather use PHP or Java but.........But I don't have no choice for OS, Office. and Microsoft is not the only one to blame for it.
Why can't apple support many popular applications?
Why apple is expensive choice?
Why can't Java be less sluggish?
Why can't Macromedia or Sun release a better version of office? "Works" was great though.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward for .Net. Honestly, there is a LOT of hype. Just like it is for every thing they do. Win95, ActiveX, DCOM....lets see. .Net other than 2005 version were crap though .... don't force ppl to work in ur terms. Sell software for them. Don't expect every developer to upgrade to windows server and have IIS running on EVERY machine. Not all companies have budget as big as yours.
I can type all night :) c ya.
PS: If perl takes up too many resources, switch to PHP 5. Either way, it uses less resources than M$ .Net.
Imran,
Mostly agree, some disagree -- overall, one of the more sensible posts I've seen on the topic, IMO. Generally agree except for this statement:
"Microsoft has a great contribution of toward PC, i.e. personal computer. It won't be as fast if not for monopoly race."
No way. I've been programming professionally since the mid-80s, and saw what happened. Very cool, robust and functional things were emerging at the end of the 80s and start of the 90s which were completely shut down and put back a decade or more by Microsoft's appearance and clamp-down.
Is XP reliable? Yes. Finally. Especially compared to MS's many other little disasters. But so was UNIX -- and it was that reliable back in the mid-80s. "Wait, wait!" I hear you say: "UNIX is user-hostile!" Well, yes, true, but that's not my point: The technology was available and people were already, even back then, starting to try to make user-friendly products based around it. By contrast, MS took its customers on huge leaps backwards in time, and kept them at a very primitive level of functionality until very recently.
Tiny examples: Everything else had better color and graphics. Almost every other operating system supported long, mixed-case filenames back in the 80s. MS was still (and in some ways, still does) have to deal with stupid 8.3 character names. Multi-head graphics monitors were available -- and affordable by college students -- on other platforms in the 80s. Again, it took nearly 15 years for Gates to get around to fixing his mess of an OS to do the same. Multi-user OS? Protected memory? Parallel processing? Dream on.
And most people have no idea about the kind of technology which never saw the light of day because MS had it killed. Just one example: in the mid-90s, big, important players like digital had ironed the kinks out of "Net PCs", which would have allowed businesses to save a fortune on ownership costs, and buy new graphical, full-color, windowed terminals (with UIs superior to Microsoft 3.1 and 95) for just hundreds of dollars. Schools could have saved a bundle too.
MS had the technology killed by threatening to deny Digital a right to use MS operating systems. They also deep-sixed some very cool computer chip technologies in the same way.
Does MS do some things well? Sure. Do they offer some good products? Yes. Does their offering work out well for some programmers? Yes.
But there is simply no way, after what I've seen for 15 years, given all the platforms I've worked on, that I can agree MS has helped technology progress. We've lost billions of dollars, years of progress, and countless technologies people will never even know they've missed. And much of that squandered wealth could have been better spent elsewhere.
I can see that alternate reality: Small, cheap computers, costing a fraction of one's income, available to even the poorest. Multi-computing systems, expandable power-wise by just plugging in more processing arrays, or sharing power over networks. (Though home-based bandwidth was always going to be the bottleneck -- that would not have changed.) Reliable, self-replicating software and data backups. Many, many hardware and OS competitors lowering prices, offering radical new propositions, interface and functionalities, and yet working together relatively well. (By standardizing on protocols and formats -- much like HTTP and HTML, or MP3, for example.)
That reality is gone, or pushed to the distant future. We might not have had it entirely yet -- only a fool would believe that -- but we'd be a lot closer to it than we are now, where our fundamental computing model is still stuck in a late-80s paradigm, just a bit later than MS's technology's start point. (QDOS, their first offering, as a late-70s technology.) Perhaps someday that will change, but not if MS has a say -- it started anchored in the past, and has too much vested interest allow any movement towards the future, unless fully under its control.
Regarding the other stuff, except the MS languages (which I can't afford and won't pirate), we have many similar skill sets. Perl is insane -- and I say this as someone who's written a lot of it. I've done a lot of C, some C++, lots of assembly languages back in the 80s, lots of hard-core UNIX stuff and scripting, worked on parts of some of the original Java web stuff (I wrote the standard JHTML parser code way back when).
Java rocks, but the way in which people are being encouraged to use it (pointless EJBs, too hard to construct simple objects -- see Ruby's "@variables" for a better option) increases its typical cost.
But, as you'd guessed, I don't like to discuss technology and software development much. It occupies even less space here than Quixtar.
Random answers:
Why can't apple support many popular applications?
I suspect it has to do with a lack of common standards. When there are multiple competitors, standards emerge.
For example, on UNIX, one can write software which can run on literally hundreds of different hardware platforms. Java is another attempt (though which mixed attempts, graphically).
Right now, apps are entirely structured around MS. My guess is that too much rewriting needs to be done to go to a second platform. If the situation weren't MS - 95%, Apple - 3% for the last decade, but instead included more players, porting apps between OSes wouldn't be as difficult as it is.
Why apple is expensive choice?
Hardware-wise, it's because they don't allow competition. They also lack the same economies of scale.
Why can't Java be less sluggish?
Java starts slow because it's running a VM. But you knew that. Java apps (under Swing/AWT) also have to attempt to map a UI, pixel-by-pixel, onto whatever is native on the local system -- if each UI were custom-programmed by calling native OS methods, that sluggishness would disappear.
But in performance tests, over time, it runs about as fast as C++, and could, sometime in the future, theoretically run even faster. For server-based apps, that's very useful and quite acceptable. (See here, for an old article on the subject, and here for a newer one.)
Why can't Macromedia or Sun release a better version of office? "Works" was great though.
I also knew a lot of people who preferred early competitors over Word. But MS didn't win that battle by providing superior functionality -- MS Word sucked very badly for about 7 years in the late 90s. It won that battle through liscensing.
There's no point in putting big budget into beating Word now. So you won't get high-effort competitors as long as MS still has the liscensing lock in, which they will for the forseeable future.
Great inside. I started using computers in 1996 so I didn't know before that. I thought 1995 started it all. I stand corrected.
In a nutshell, they are revolving in a circle. Trying to change main concepts, than falling back on them. I have seen it from VB -> VB.Net.
What is ironic is non of my favourite products are Microsoft. None!!
E.g.
Unix
Real VNC
GotMyPC
Homesite
DreamWeaver
Photoshop
iTunes
Quiktime
Kazaa (yeah! but I use it legally)
Trillian
FireFox / Mozilla
phpBB, Mantis, php-collab
Flash
Mail Washer
Apache
Java Beans
I really hope .Net is worth the wait.
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That is simply untrue. I mercilessly mock geeks who condemn others for failing to use their favorite technologies.
We became a .NET blog becausze I am a ,NET devloper, and it's what I know, and MT coudln't handle our traffic without PERL using up too many server resources with the constant page rebuilds. So I built the new blog myself, and incorporated it into DotNetNuke.
My position is, and always has been, use the technologies that allow you to build a useful product. For me, that happens to be .NET.
If I was a PHP guy, I'd use that. Where criticism of Microsoft or its products is appropriate, I give it, like I did today. But, I don't subscribe to the Microsoft paranoia that infects far too many otherwise sane members of the IT community.
Posted by: Dale Franks on September 23, 2004 08:13 PM