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Our love-hate relationship
with Microsoft: love
2004.06.10 — Business | Technology | by Derek Jensen
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Microsoft loves you too, baby. |
This is part one of a two-part series.
I have at times in the past joked that I have a tattoo that says "Microsoft Uber Alles." I get tired of people who bad-mouth the software giant for being a giant. The real reason many people hate Microsoft is that it's success has crushed competition by the sheer weight of its installed base.
But that's just why I love Microsoft.
I say hate them for their ruthless business practices if you like (altho you'll have to hate a whole lot of other companies too). Better yet, hate them for their arbitrary functionality changes from version to version. But Microsoft has made modern office efficiency possible.
In the dark days of early personal computing in the early 1980s, we plodding along with tag-based word processors and amateurish image editing programs. You were lucky if you could find any productivity programs that would run on your machine, let alone a word processor that would print cleanly to your dot-matrix printer.
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Pity the Apple lover who upgraded to a Macintosh and found that his Apple IIe programs were worthless. |
But with the rise of Microsoft's DOS and Windows operating systems, that changed. Suddenly, dozens of programs were available that would run on your machine. Many were even backward compatible! Pity the Apple lover who "upgraded" to a Macintosh and found that his Apple IIe programs were worthless. Apple users took note and reconsidered their decision to go with Apple products with every new purchase.
Meanwhile, PC makers could license the operating system and compete with each other to make the fastest, cheapest computer. PCs users took note and upgraded to newer PCs.
But even as a general consensus emerged about the operating system the world would use, there was another quagmire just around the corner. Dozens of word processors, spreadsheet programs, image editors, and more flooded the market, some good and some bad: Word Star, Word Pro, Word Perfect, Word Whore (or whatever). Our documents were ugly messes of formatting tags and blocky text. In those days, every program output its own format, and the world was a morass of incompatible documents and iffy printer drivers. There were translators and converters, but they were lousy.
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In those days, every program output its own format, and the world was a morass of incompatible documents and iffy printer drivers. |
Microsoft Office changed all that.
The world became orderly… efficient. People from different offices could trade documents with confidence. Users could upgrade knowing that the new version of Office would read old documents and save them in the new format without messing up the formatting.
That's the world we live in now. That's why I love Microsoft. They made it possible for me to create a presentation or spreadsheet for someone else, for that person to open it, and for neither of us to have to think about format or versions.
Thanks to Microsoft, the business world is standardized. Standardization in software is like the dawn of interchangeable parts in the 19th century. It seems obvious, necessary even, but people limped along without for centuries. Or what seemed like centuries.
It made the world a better place. That's all I'm saying.
Look for part two, Hate, soon.
f e e d b a c k
Jason Botwick writes:
Dude, I like that side shot of that woman you have on the site. That's more
in line with what I had in mind for your site.
Let me tell you, Microsoft sucks, and I don't just hate them for being a giant. I hate them for abusing their giantness in so many ways. Don't make me write an article about it, because there are only about 50,000 of them already. And statistics show that over 30,000 of those contain at least one attempt to equate Microsoft with the automobile industry in some way.
I shy away from that metaphor when I rant about those bastards. What I like to ask people while they unquestioningly swallow their products is, "Hey, would you buy Microsoft beef?"
Let me assure you that I have every intention of using more shots of half-nude women on the site. If it's good enough for Cosmopolitan and Vogue, it's good enough for Tysto.
Also, I might buy Microsoft beef if other beef was even more inferior and if superior Apple beef cost twice and much and required me to buy other Apple food products only.
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