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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Tuesday, July 13, 2004
18:16 - John C. Dvorak is on crack
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1622629,00.asp

(top) link
He thinks Microsoft is getting bored and planning to shut down.

The company is already saving a tremendous amount of money by offshoring jobs and using cheap H1-B visa holders for U.S. jobs. This is well documented. So what does Microsoft do with the profits besides bank them? It talks a big game about R&D but its most mundane product, the Internet Explorer browser, is full of holes and is essentially a bunch of cobbled-together old code. Here's an interesting exercise for you: Open Internet Explorer. Go to Help, then About, and you'll see that Microsoft still acknowledges that Internet Explorer is the old Spyglass browser based on Mosaic. This was thrown together years ago. Then look at the copyright notice. It ends in 2001. Unless I'm mistaken, that means that there has been no real update since then, just patches. To get a bigger laugh, click on Acknowledgements and see how long you can endure the laundry list of people who worked on the code. It's as if the entire state of Washington did some coding. Why?

The fact is this software, which has been mostly stagnant since the marginalization of Netscape, is just coasting. So where is all the R&D? I don't see it. In fact, I see the entire company coasting along making more and more money with possibly one concept ahead: to close down.

Yeah, I know that sounds ridiculous, but it wouldn't be unprecedented for a high-tech software company to just end its life cycle by closing. I recall the early days of microcomputing when Processor Technology closed. Everyone thought they went broke, but it turned out that the founders were just bored with the business and closed. It has been done.

. . .

With Microsoft shuttered, where would it leave the users? Most users could coast on XP for three years if they had to. Perhaps Microsoft could shut its doors after Longhorn comes out. Perhaps the stable Win2K would emerge as the pass-around operating system of choice, assuming that Microsoft would send all its OS offerings into the public domain as one last slap at Linux.

Is this so very far-fetched? You tell me.

Um... yes.

I think Dvorak is like the proverbial stopped clock: he just throws out one new freakish theory after another, every time a column is due, and sooner or later one of them is bound to be right...


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