From: tobias at weisserth.de (Tobias Weisserth)
Subject: Anti-MS drivel

Hi yossarian,

Am Mi, den 21.01.2004 schrieb yossarian um 20:20:

> Mmmm, who forced them to use it?

Mmh. Nobody "forced" them to use it. They are kind of deceived into
using it. What choice do they have when they buy a new PC? Ever heard of
OEM vendor deals?!
And they might think they are able to use it but actually they utterly
fail. And when a consumer fails to use a product the product is broken.

>  Not the IT people, who at the time where
> still locked up in the Ivory Towers of Data Heaven.

Those are the same people sitting in their tower demanding that user be
educated how to properly use a product.

>  I remember my then CEO (at a big bank) firing the head of IT, because he was still opposing windows
> on the desktop, and the CEO could make splendid presentations and the like
> on his sons windows PC. It was a bottom up revolution, small businesses and
> home users where the early adaptors.

At this blissful time MS still had to show innovation in order to _gain_
market shares. Nowadays they have nothing to gain in terms of market
share.

> The fact that people use Windows and Office, proves that they can - basic
> Vulcan Logic.

No. _IF_ people could use MS Windows/Outlook then things like
Win32/Bagle-A wouldn't stand a chance because people either knew not to
start or couldn't execute attachments from within email clients. The
fact that millions of end users _do_ run email attachments from within
their email clients shows that they _are not_ able to use Windows. It is
the wrong operating system for them.

> The faulty nature does not deter many people from using it, so
> the flaws cannot be too serious.

A problem is only a problem in the eye of the end consumer if "rien ne
va plus". Only when a PC won't start up again, the end user knows
"Uh-Oh...".

In the meantime this same virus and worm ridden system has caused major
traffic jam on email servers and made the day on the Internet a hell.

So, from my perspective these ARE serious flaws.

> Otherwise they would just stop or get an
> alternative. Before Mandrake 9 many companies tried to push their desktop
> OS... and failed.

You know what? This is happening just now. THERE ARE alternatives for
75% of end users.

And please don't give me the "there are no games" crap. You can pretty
much buy a good console and some games from the savings in license costs
when you chose a free operating system and free software. :-)

>  Remember Warp?

I had Warp. It was a great product. A pity MS already had their Office
monopoly established. I used Star Office 3.1 on Warp and it was stable,
MUCH MUCH MUCH more stable than Windows 95 which seemed like an unstable
alpha version of Windows 98 in retro-perspective.

> Or NeXTstep? Or Perihelios? They went to
> bit heaven since the users chose MS.

Yes. That's right. And it's legitimate that everybody chose MS. But now
we are stuck with it and simple demands like "Hey, turn off that damn
RPC service by default for end users please!" or "Hey, why is it you let
Joe Stubborn be Administrator by default on his XP Home box?!" are not
allowed anymore. What happened to customer awareness and innovation? I
guess you don't need those two when you've 90% market share and 50
billion dollars cash.

I don't blame people for choosing MS software. I did so myself in the
past and I actually liked it. But customers have needs and vendors
responsibilities.

cheers,
Tobias

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