10 geek business myths

Maybe it depends on where you were coming from.

I was using OS/2 at the time and NT wasn’t available yet. I was also quite happy with Wordperfect, but Ami Pro as I recall had much the same functionality as Office. Now all that speaks to my home use, and it was on what we would today see as a pathetically underpowered machine.

On a Department of Energy contract though I found a large group of people using the same tool mix, with Novell networking to tie it all together. Nevertheless they were ordered, or should I say given a choice… accept much newer machines with Windows or keep using what you have. Similar deal were being struck thoughout government and almost overnight the Feds required proposals to be submitted in Word format, triggering a massive migration in the consulting community. This wasn’t about choosing the best technology, it was about back-room deals and kick-backs.

Deprived of all that revenue, these other products quickly faded, and I suspect they hardly knew what hit them.

Can Microsoft afford to bribe the Chinese, the Brazilians and most of Europe to sacrifice their own interest to standardize on a product they have no control over? Time will tell, I’m betting a big N-O.

PS: OS/2 almost never crashed.

Mac: Ami Pro never came with a spreadsheet or presentation package or database. And, it came out way after Microsoft Office did, if I remember right (my memory there might be faulty).

OS/2 and NT came out about the same time (OS/2 was a little earlier, but only by a year or so and didn’t run even 1/4th the amount of software that NT did).

I was working at a small startup. We didn’t have any of those backroom deals deciding for us what we were gonna use.

Also, for our magazines we went with MS Office cause they were WAY ahead of the game on the Macintosh side of things. That was Microsoft’s best investment.

Internet Explorer 1 was free and it still wasn’t worth the price compared to Netscape. Microsoft just used its monopoly power to buy the market. I believe it wasn’t until IE4 came along that Microsoft had a capable product.

“Translation: if you really want to crush the competition, build a better product for a lower price and make your customers very happy.”

Or, as has been shown in court documents that ultimately convicted MSFT, just bundle your new apps on top of your legality abusing monopoly. That’s the ticket!

And, after you crush your competition through bundling, price dumping, paying OEM to carry it, FUD and other well-known MSFT methods, make sure to stagnate the market as you enjoy your (new) monopoly. Just like MSFT did with IE for half a decade.

You are actually foolish enough to propose IE as an example of “making customers happy”?

Take your blinders off Roberto, you are not even working for the evil empire anylonger. Or are you?

IE4 was the first good version of IE (I still think it’s the best release in terms of functionality, IE7 included. The original HTML-rendering quickbar rocked, as did the first “coolbar” look.
Netscape’s big fallacy was sitting too long on that monolithic original version rather than componentizing it so the AOLs of the world would have had a choice in their core renderer. That and I seem to recall Netscape did some weird, weird things when you tried to do -based pages.

Anona: Or, as has been shown in court documents that ultimately convicted MSFT, just bundle your new apps on top of your legality abusing monopoly.

The court documents cover the period on Windows 95 or after (Netscape, specifically).

Now, again, how did Microsoft get to the point where they had a legal monopoly? Hint: they weren’t born with it. I’m talking about pre 1995. They didn’t have a legal monopoly before then. In fact, in 1989 I thought Apple was going to take over the world. It was so far ahead it wasn’t even funny.

Wow, I can’t even believe this post Robert. I think you need to re-read history. The Microsoft shenanigans go back way before Windows and Office. They’ve been screwing people and putting them out of business for dang near their entire existence.

Oooops…forgot…thanks for the link, it’s a good read.

“Now, again, how did Microsoft get to the point where they had a legal monopoly?”

Are you pretending to be naive or just uninformed? Ask IBM, Novell and a host of other companies about dirty MSFT methods, pre ’95. Dr. DOS ring a bell?

“Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history.”
- Ron Garret

We were speaking about the geek myths this afternoon. A co-worker suggested “ajax” and he’s right. XmlHttp comes out of the Outlook Web Access team in Exchange Server. Of course it is a brilliant idea.

The OS/2-WinNT connection is rather more tangled than the simplistic “OS/2 came before WinNT” - “But only by a year” …

I heard the IBM people joking about WinNT being “Not There” at a time when Windows was strictly 3.1, and OS/2 was 2.0. OS/2 was partially sunk by IBM’s rather bureaucratic ways of getting the message out, and of course by the “invincible IBM arrogance”, which oversold itself. I watch Microsoft with Vista and am visited by deja vu - not a nice thing, no, not a nice thing at all.

One thing that Bill Gates did do, that probably helped sink OS/2, was to promise he’d release an OS/2 version of MS Office once the number of OS/2 users reached one million. I was still waiting when the number was well over that.

If he had bothered to follow up, he would have made more money than otherwise, MS Office would have had to satisfy a more rigorous environment than it seems the Win32 API offered, and we would not have had to tolerate such an interesting assortment of malware harrassment during the 90s.

Ron Garrett’s on the money when he says: “Reality: No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it’s too late.”

If you follow to my new blog, you’ll find a dissection of one of Microsoft’s latest-and-greatest legal stupidities. Hardware patents help give an investor confidence that their investment in hardware won’t be wasted; software patents serve to inform potential friends and enemies that you’ve lost the plot. And your marbles.

I’d love to know exactly *why* people hate MS so much.

Do they, in some way, resent their success?

At the end of the day they’re just a company. Buy/use their products, or don’t.

Robert, I won’t join in the MS bashing here, since that is relatively pointless. However, you may want to consider the plain face value of what you said:

“Translation: if you really want to crush the competition, build a better product for a lower price and make your customers very happy.”

… and realize that it doesn’t actually contradict anything in the linked article, as brilliant ideas aren’t actually necessary for executing the strategy you’ve described.

See, Scoble. Right here we have an example of you not knowing your history. Anona is right. MS was employing their mafia tactics well before Office, Windows, or NT came around.

Microsoft is the devil!
But’s it’s always going to be better than anything else. I don’t see how an argument can go past that…
Or am I just excercising an opinion? Hmm… Thought Provoking…

MS was employing their mafia tactics well before Office, Windows, or NT came around.

Huh?

Does anybody realize the paradox here? MS wasn’t ‘the MS’ before Office, Windows and NT ‘came around’. And you blame them of employing Mafia tactics back then?

Heck, back then, Apple was the monopoly. Strange, nobody thought of suing it back then…

Just like nobody is thinking of suing GOOG now.

Truth is we like voodoo dolls. We simply want something to throw all our guilt at. MS fits the bill. Don’t be evil, huh? Right…

Regards,
Shri.

“XmlHttp comes out of the Outlook Web Access team in Exchange Server. Of course it is a brilliant idea.”

Yes. And despite what everyone says, Microsoft did not originate that idea. They were just the first to implement a quick method of doing it.

Back in the days before XmlHttp, many of us web coders were using invisible iframes to load data from a webserver “asynchronously.” It’s an idea that predates XmlHttp by several years, and it was functionally the same as what you young’uns are calling “AJAX” these days. We were all making loud noises about how we needed a single Javascript function to handle it.

Brilliant idea. Microsoft did not come up with it. They just had the ability to build it into their webserver without worrying about things like “standards” and whatnot.

Which, really, is a good thing, in the case of XmlHttp. Using iframes wasn’t nearly as elegant. But they used ActiveX to implement it, which was brain-dead.

These ‘anti-anti Microsoft’ comments are just plain silly. I never knocked Microsoft because I was jealous of their success. I started off using Perfect Office (the office suite that had WordPerfect bunndled with it) because a) I had been using WordPerfect for years and b) there was no price difference and Quattro Pro (which was bundled with Perfect Office) was arguably better than Excel. So the point about price doesn’t carry for me. Point one.

I was using Windows 3.1 at the time. It just didn’t work right. It was unstable and I had connectivity problems. OS/2 was better with Internet (which Bill Gates had largely ignored) and so I changed to OS/2. Everything worked better. Windows applications worked three to five time faster than with 3.1. There were also some interesting and useful OS/2 applications that worked better than anything else for what I was doing and Netscape worked fine. Point 2

I was never completely anti-Microsoft at this time. I attempted to install Internet Explorer in order to try it out. It didn’t just crash my system, it tore it to bits. I lost a lot of data. OK I should have backed it up but I didn’t expect a sixteen bit Windows program to behave like a virus. So I repaired my system, restored as much data as I could but I lost business as a result of using a Microsoft product. At this point I became rabidly anti-Microsoft and can anyone blame me? Point 3

I continued to enjoy using OS/2 until 2004. My PC was getting creaky and old but it was working fine except that Internet browsing was pretty slow. Also, I wanted to use MSN. I bought a new PC with Windows XP on it. I was shocked to find it was really slow and kept crashing. Had nothing improved? Well, I could use Internet Explorer now but I found that I was always getting SpyWare. Antivirus software really slowed it down but everyone said Windows was especially vulnerable to viruses and IE had a hole in its security. I switched to Mozilla and that was better. I did not realise that I could have got around the MSN thing and used OS/2 and enjoyed a much much faster PC experience so I put up with XP though used eComStation (latest OS/2) on my laptop. Point 4

Eventually I decided to get a better, higher spec PC and so I got one with Vista. It works fine - even brilliantly. I don’t think Vista is perfect. It seems odd that the wonderful graphics shows thumbnails of non-Microsoft files but only represents Microsoft ones with a symbol. It still doesn’t seem entirely stable. It’s a little buggy but nothing serious. I expect a lot will be fixed in SP2. Note that I haven’t insisted on using OS/2 - I haven’t the time to be obsessive and fanatical. If it works I use it. Vista works. Point 5

There’s only one problem. Some of the applications I used in XP aren’t supported by Vista. I upgraded but found the drivers weren’t ready for Vista. They are taking forever to arrive and I can’t wait that long. If this situation does not change I will switch OS. I’ve already got Mac OS X on my MacBook and it’s rather better than Vista (and eComStation.) You can’t (legally) run OS X on a PC and though I’ve used Linux I don’t want to migrate to everywhere I vacationed. I moved to OS/2 because it worked and I stuck with Vista because it worked too. When my PC starts to creak I shall probably buy a Mac - because I know it works too. Point 6.

AND all the stuff about Microsoft’s machinations behind the scenes and conspiracies and how it sank the competition and became a monopoly and everything… Well, that’s true too. It’s not just a simple case of Microsoft made everyone happy because the products were good. They weren’t. They sucked bigtime. No really they did. Trying to airbrush them or pretend everything was ginger peachy is fine if you like to live in a fantasy. Microsoft in large organisations worked because the IT departments made it work; not because the products were good. There were better products that would have worked better without constant tweaking. But it wasn’t just that. OS/2 worked buy IBM’s marketing sucked bigtime. In the end, it was marketing that won the day. Point 7.

Oh, people will argue this that and the other but that was all my experience. As a customer I really did not like Microsoft and I was a Microsoft basher and I was alarmed when OS/2 lost support because it worked and I didn’t want to be landed with slow buggy Windows again when I was used to Warp speed and stable performance. In the end I’m a customer and I just have better things to do with my time than argue the toss over the OS lottery (it never was a war!) I’m only writing this because I’m waiting for the man from the lecky to install a new meter and I saw this post while randomly browsing. I don’t want to start work and then have to close down all my files when the lecky man arrives so I’m indulging a whim. But even so, I can understand customers moaning about Microsoft but why on earth do people rush to defend it? Anybody out there shouting “Sock puppets!” After all, you don’t hear people defending the gas or electricity companies when they go wrong so what’s so special about Microsoft?

Anyway, I’ll stick with Vista as long as it works but if it starts to suck (and I’ve seen it puckering up!) I shall kick it out and get something that blows! I’m a consumer, it’s my job!

Zoe