When it comes right down to it, there’s one main reason that Microsoft is in the position they’re in today — their businessmen.  It certainly isn’t their software, and there’s no way that it’s their executive charm (although Steve Ballmer does seem to have an awkward boyish glow at times).  One might even go so far as to say that Microsoft itself would not be here today if not for their business guys.  It seems that Microsoft is more of a company that sells software, not a software company.  For the majority of their products, they will typically buy other peoples’ software out, load it full of MS logos and slap a price tag on it.  They never do anything innovative, and rarely ever come up with any software ideas on their own.  As stated before:  Microsoft is a company that sells software … not a software development company.

I slightly digress on the main focus of this article, but this needs to be explained further.  Let’s start at the beginning:  MS-DOS.  Formerly Q-DOS, written by Tim Paterson.  Microsoft bought out the rights and put their logo on it.  It wasn’t until their full 32-bit version (the Windows NT line) that they switched to an alternative platform.  There was nothing really innovative about Windows or its future versions — Mac had already made popular the GUI concept years before, cooperative multitasking had already been done by Mac OS, preemptive multitasking had been in Unix almost 30 years prior to MS incorporating it in Windows ’95, etc., etc.  Also, I think I only have to say the word ‘Vista’.

So how about Internet Explorer?  That was originally software written by Spyglass, Inc. called Mosaic.  Also, MS seemed to take the “go screw yourself” approach after they released IE 6, basically telling customers to take their complains about IE to /dev/null (or NUL, I guess) because they were finished updating it.  It wasn’t until new browsers like Firefox started stealing a portion of their customers away that they obstinately decided to release IE 7 with absolutely no innovative features whatsoever.  They threw together an ad-hoc implementation of tabbed browsing (which Fx already had for over 3 years) and didn’t even bother to fix their long-lived, glaring HTML and CSS problems.  I guess their customers should be happy that they were willing to throw them some scrap meat after years of complaints.  The worst part is probably that their newest version (IE 8­) still doesn’t support the XHTML standard … the standard has only been around for 9 years, I guess we should give them a few more decades to catch up with the rest of the world.

And how about Windows Defender?  Actually written by GIANT Company Software, Inc. and called GIANT AntiSpyware.  And Microsoft’s nifty virtualization software, Virtual PC?  Well, Connectix actually wrote that for the Mac originally, until MS bought it from them.  Sooo, how about PowerPoint?  MS Word?  They’re not quite creative enough to come up with stuff like that on their own.  And since we’re on the topic, doesn’t .NET seem reeeeeally similar to the concepts behind Java?  Maybe that’s why MS got sued (gotta love J++)?  How about Silverlight?  Maybe someday MS will be old enough to come up with clever ideas on their own, but until then … monkey see, monkey do.

I think it’s a well-established feeling that Microsoft cannot be trusted; their continuous “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” tactics leave you with a warm, cozy feeling inside but an acrid taste in the mouth.  The vast majority of the people I’ve known mainly use Microsoft products because they “don’t have a choice.”  Either the software they need was only developed for Windows, their company only supports Windows, or they just don’t even realize there are alternatives available.  So why in the world do we need them?  Why are they still so important to us even though we dread using their products?  And how in the world do we get rid of them?  (By the way, this is the point of the article … there was just a massive suspense build up).

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