| Thursday, December 27, 2001 |
13:27 - Windows XP and Microsoft's Business As Usual
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23496.html
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Whenever I read something like this nowadays, it's simply with bemused detachment-- the way one reads about a train crash in France or something. It doesn't directly affect me, and I've learned better than to hope that it will change anyone's mind about whether to trust Microsoft with their technological lives.
But what it does do is to make me stop and think about just what it is that I'm standing against when I take an anti-Microsoft stand. As the article at The Register notes, "Truth be told, I'm not completely biased against the company, and will even acknowledge that it has, at various points, produced some decent products. I also don't 'bash' Microsoft because it's the 'in' thing to do these days, but because there are serious problems with the software company's products and services that they continue to ignore." And so I have to ask myself, is that what I'm doing? Or is it just that I'm being so hip and cool that I'm following a trend? I don't seem to be hopping nightclubs or getting fan mail, so my gut says "no" to the latter, but let's think about it.
The conclusion I come to is that while most companies understand the concept of fair play, introducing a new product and seeing it gain in acceptance purely through its merits, Microsoft cheats. And they do it over and over again.
Netscape, to take one example, became so much more popular than NCSA Mosaic so quickly because it was a very obviously more sophisticated product. It did things Mosaic could only dream of, things people needed. It was filling a niche in the market that was coalescing with each passing day, often in response to the features Netscape itself added (background colors/images, tables, frames, embedded movies). It was a truly unique period in recent history: people didn't even realize what they could do until they saw the next version of the software come out, and then they all went nuts over it. Everything Netscape did turned to gold.
But then Microsoft came along. It was too late to introduce fundamental features that would make people flock to it the way they'd flocked to Netscape. So they cheated. They paid their way into the front of the line. They bribed up a market share. Striking deals with big-name ISPs (AOL not least) and leveraging their own operating system monopoly, they got a copy of Internet Explorer under the noses of every single computer user within two years. That's unheard-of. Rubik's Cubes didn't catch on that fast. And they went away.
It wasn't because IE was better than Netscape. At the time, it wasn't. It was in fact a good deal worse. But Microsoft knows that quality is of secondary importance if you know you don't have to play by the rules. Why bother? Just buy yourself whatever market share you need, and work on improving the user experience later. Indeed, IE is now really the only browser that anybody takes seriously, and it's in fact a good, polished product (aside from a few horrific exceptions, like the fact that it completely ignores Content-type headers and does its own mother-knows-best content parsing, bypassing the site designer's intent). But that all came about after the fact.
But IE isn't the only example of this practice of Microsoft's. Oh, no. I could name several more off the top of my head, and I will.
The Windows Media format was never inherently superior to QuickTime or Real. But they've bribed their way into contracts with all the major content providers, and given sweet deals and adoption incentives to the minor ones, so that now their format-- out of nowhere-- is seen on almost every site. Only now do they decide that it's worthwhile to try to improve the product's quality, now that that tedious business of gaining market share is taken care of. Gee, and all this time I thought that it was supposed to be the other way around. Improve quality, gain market share. But nooo, that's too slow. That's too haaaard.
The same goes for WMA music. It has yet to be shown that it has any merits over MP3 aside from digital-rights management... except that in order to speed acceptance, they've crippled MP3 playback in Windows Media Player so that people will think WMA sounds better. You know, when I was in college, when you sabotaged someone else's experiment in order to make yours look better, that was called "rat-fucking". It was not looked upon as a legitimate or honorable means toward excellence or recognition. In fact, it was considered cheating, and whoever did it was cruising for some rapid and severe punishment. But apparently the software world works under different rules.
And then there's the Xbox. They're trying to pull the same trick once again. Every fast-food restaurant, every gaming magazine, every cable channel, every box of cereal-- they all have Xbox giveaways. Have you ever heard of a game console launch where the company had to flood the world with giveaways in order to get people to use it? I don't seem to remember Sony needing to fling Playstation 2 boxes out over the piazza to get people to want them. I don't recall the NES experiencing slow sales until Nintendo started giving away consoles at Taco Bell. If the product is genuinely superior, why would you need to cheat your way into the market?
Normally you don't. But Microsoft simply doesn't have what it takes to create products that are genuinely superior from day one. But what they do have is lots and lots of money and an easily-manipulated installed customer base. So just because they can, they cheat and bribe and slither their way into the lead-- and only then do they give thought to improving the products in order to actually be competitive. And that's if you're lucky.
Every time Microsoft buys some smaller company-- Bungie, Blizzard, DirecTV (or whoever it was), Vermeer, Expedia, Hotmail, or any of the hundreds of other now-anonymous small startup companies with revolutionary products-- it's to scalp themselves a cut-rate ticket to the top of the field that company threatens to take by storm. This is in keeping with the letter-of-the-law of capitalism, but absolutely contrary to the spirit. They're sidestepping the whole premise of the free market (the idea that competition will force innovation and cause the best product to rise to the top naturally). If we ran capitalism like the USSR ran communism, Microsoft would be guilty of crimes against the state. But because we like Big Business, and because we all watch with bemused detachment whenever Microsoft comes up with some new slimy underhanded tactic by which to pound an off-the-shelf insta-victory out of an otherwise humiliating defeat, they get to keep on doing it. And we'll keep on rewarding them for it, right up until the Rule of Law and the Rule of Microsoft will have separated into two entirely independent concepts, having nothing to do with each other. And eventually one will swallow up the other. Which one do you think it will be?
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