Re: ANN: The unix Pestilence

From: Xah Lee (xah_at_xahlee.org)
Date: 05/19/03 

Date: 19 May 2003 13:47:30 -0700

my hatred for hedonistic irresponsible programers is deep. However,
among unix advocates, their hatred for Microsoft is comparable to mime
of unix, and if not greater.

i believe that much hatred of MS is unwarranted, and much of it is
fashionable lip service too. (termed "me too" in newsgroup locution)

i like to present some essays on this issue, because hatred based on
wrong info is ultimately harmful to all.

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Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2002 08:20:17 -0800
From: xah@xahlee.org (Xah Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Microsoft hatred [was: How I lost my faith]
Message-ID: <7fe97cc4.0202230820.19933d2@posting.google.com>

Dear Erik Naggum,

you wrote
> Open Source is in my view an overreaction to the evils of Microsoft and
> it has some "stopping power" towards the progress of those bad people,
> but I seriously doubt that it has lasting value in its own right.

It is well known that you are an avid hater of Microsoft, from their
technologies to their leader to their business practices. I have now
and then seen your impassioned expression of this hatred, scattered
among your comp.lang.lisp posts.

Personally, i have an inherent distrust towards big organizations.
This applies to Microsoft. Since perhaps 1995, MS has become more and
more large, and as well becoming a hate target especially among unix
communities. Of MS hatred there are two aspects: those who think MS
products are utterly incompetent, and those who think MS business
practice are the most evil.

I have always been an Apple Macintosh user. I have used a few MS
products such as MS Word word processor on the Mac since about 1990,
and Mac version of MS Internet Explorer web browser and Outlook
Express email program when they became available around 1997 or so
free of charge. My experiences has been that MS software on the Mac
are pretty good, if not usually better than competitors. In fact,
before the MS-hatred era of late 1990s, i recall that i was found of
MS Word and would say it was the software that never crashed, with the
richest (useful) features. I have not used MS Windows much until 1999,
so i cannot judge from my own experience whether people's complains
about MS's product's poor quality. By the time i used MS Windows daily
in 1999, it was MS Windows NT, and i have moved into industrial
programing field now called IT. At the time Apple's OS is around
version 8. Although Windows is not as aesthetic or intuitive as my
beloved Mac OS, but on the whole i think Windows NT beats the *** out
of Mac OS by far. Mac OS crashed daily if a info-collecting tech-head
like myself are careful, hourly if not, and among quite a few of other
reasons.

As the MS hatred is rolling like a snowball, i started to pay
attention. On one hand, i never cared for Microsoft. Their sole
impression on me before 1998 was that MS Word is good software, and i
hate Windows just because i'm a dedicated Apple fan just because Apple
had made many revolutionary innovations in both software and hardware
and MS was Apple's market enemy. Although i think the unix crowd are
tech morons of the world, but when it comes to political issues, i'm
inclined to side with their freedom loving and paranoia propensities.
I'm ashamed to admit, that i started to visit unix moron's mecca the
slashdot.org around 1999, and have read quite a lot of their MS hatred
verbiage, from drivel of sopho-morons to Eric Raymond's OpenSource
Jihad to Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation. Perhaps due to
their propaganda, at times i shudder at the mind-numbing MS
juggernaut, and have felt ready to join their cause and kill
Microsoft.

Since 1999, my behavior have in fact been mildly anti-Microsoft. I
would, for example, mention FreeSoftware or OpenSource in meetings,
avoid using MS products myself and convert all my MS Word files i have
on my Mac to some standard format such as plain text, and also use the
Free Software Foundation's GNU Public License for my own software
dabblings. Still, i was never a MS hater. Some people i know are MS
haters, but i'm just a mild FreeSoftware proponent and was never sure
i should be a MS hater. I could have investigated the issue, by
studying the various lawsuits, check out MS history, exam and verify
MS hater's essays, but life is short and i have other interests so i
did not undertook such activities and never decided whether MS should
be hated. I just disliked big organizations, and thus Microsoft.

Since 1999 i entered the field of industrial programing known as Info
Technology. In particular, i'm a web application programer on the unix
platform. My daily office machines are PC running Windows (NT and
followings) and remote unix servers. I find NT quite usable and almost
never crashed at least as a desktop machine. I don't know much about
any MS-bred technologies, but i knew quite a lot about unix. My
attitude towards unixes is that it is the MOST incompetent thing in
the computing world. I am an outright unix HATER. I have becoming
increasingly nosy about unix MS-hater's claims technology-wise as most
readily found from slashdot.org, from User Interface design to
protocol embrace & extend to innovation to power & flexibility to
security considerations. In the past few years, i started to pay mild
attention to the question of wether from a technical or technological
point of view MS should be hated.

Even i don't know much Microsoft technologies except using their OS,
but in my personal judgment system among all things considered, i
think that if MS has done damage to society then unix has done hundred
times more. I believe that Microsoft Windows technologies is on the
whole FAR superior to unixes both as a PC and server, all things
considered. (this includes the fact that unix is more stable then
Windows NT, today.) Comparing to the other major desktop Operating
System the Mac OS (where unixes are so incompetent it is out of the
question), with intact conscience i think that MS's OS since about
1997 has left my beloved Mac OS in dust. If Windows 98 is poor
quality, then Mac OS of that year is crap.

(i plan to have book-length material on the reasons, but here for now
i can only briefly state my beliefs in a conclusive manner.)

The above is my beliefs on product or technological quality aspect of
Microsoft-hatred. I have much interest in technology than politics or
business, thus my know-how of social oriented issues pales in
comparison. I have never examined the accusations of MS's evil
business practices, other than news hearsay. To this day, i know
little of what is true or false regarding MS's business practices.
Although i have never undertook an interest of a topic, but as a
philosopher i have gathered opinions regarding a topic from great
variety of sources and experiences, and can form a personal judgment.
And from my observations of computing industry, and my little
knowledge of economics, all things and experiences lead me to believe
that there is little to no reason to hate MS for their business
practice either. Sometimes last year i read Thomas Sowell's Basic
Economics. Although he never talked about software in the book, but
that book made a major impression on my views of MS-hating issues.

Around 1994 i read the book _Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing_ by
historian Randall E. Stross, and i was highly positively impressed by
him. I have then learned that he also wrote a book in 1997 on MS: _The
Microsoft Way : The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its
Competition_. Although i have not read the book, but from amazon.com
reviews it indicated that he simply think that the success of MS is
due to being smart.

There are various lawsuits against the MS giant in the last few years,
from Sun Microsystem's Java lawsuit, to United States vs Microsoft
anti-trust lawsuit, to last month's AOL suit for Netscape browser. As
you know, Sun is a unix vendor, with its own greedy grip on Java. I
frankly don't buy any bull*** from the Sun Micro commercial turd. MS
may be devious with their own "standard"-breaking java, but no more
hanky-panky than Sun's Universal Java sham in the first fucking place.
Any commercial organizations do devious things for their own interest.
As to United State's claim that MS screwed innovation by bundling
browser, that itself is a fantastic fucking idea. Integrating browser
into OS is an innovation, and amid so great many claims that MS does
not innovate, i can think of quite a few cases where MS has in fact
been innovative or responsible for technological lead from my personal
computing experiences. (Microsoft Word accounts for great many
innovations in word processing along.) And, who needs the government
to meddle with industry? (as i have learned in Thomas's Sowell's book,
anti-trust cases are invariably all the same.) Lastly is the AOL's
bandwagon-hopping lawsuit in the name of fantastically incompetent
Netscape the-loser-browser. *** America On-Line.

I'm often ignorant when it comes to economics practicality, such as
stock market or personal finance. Since about 1999, i started to
become a stock holder, thus started to learn a bit of its nature. On
this process, one thing came to my attention is that Microsoft is a
public owned company. Public owned companies are directed by the
people who owns its stock, and any joe can purchase it. That means, if
Microsoft is an evil empire, then public shares a great blame. From
this aspect, i don't see any sense of Microsoft-hatred either. Blame
the public, such as your boss and neighbors and wife and friends and
community, or, blame the fantastic greed-oriented system called
capitalism that made USA so prosperous far beyond the moral-oriented
communist/socialist nations or sovereignly ruled kingdoms & queendoms.

Dear Nagg'm, among all i've seen, i think you are the most vehement
Microsoft hater by far. From your various rants i've gathered that you
think MS products are the most poor quality, their business practice
the most unethical, and Bill Gates one of the greatest criminal of
mankind. Though, i don't think i have came across a cogent detail of
why. Your rants tends to be mythically incendiary, and defensive in
nature when risen the challenge. I would really like to see you give a
plain account of why Microsoft is worthy of hatred.

Please put aside tones and grudges, and propound for the good of
humanity.

(
here is a relevant essay i've written regarding Mac OS X, unix, and
Windows.
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/20020105_macosx_rant.txt
)

 Xah
 xah@xahlee.org
 http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html

> Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
> Subject: Re: How I lost my faith (very long)
> From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
> Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 11:55:19 GMT

----------------------

the above article and three subsequent essays on Microsoft hatred is
archived at
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/gnur.html

again, feedback welcome.

thanks.

 Xah
 xah@xahlee.org
 http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html

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