Bill Gates and Microsoft ... myths, legends and more

In a post by Elav, the discussion began about what Linux needs to be on the desktop. Well, with this article by Javier Smaldone, we'll try to examine one of the once-dominant companies and the reasons for its success and potential failure.

Summary:

A well-known anonymous saying circulating on the internet begins: " Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question... " This text reflects some aspects not always widely publicized about Bill Gates, Microsoft, its products, policies, and operations; in the search for an answer to the question posed.

Motivation for this article:

Many are the stories that have been told around Bill Gates and Microsoft. In most of them, those that the common people know and those that spread the mass media, Gates appears as a computer genius and his company, Microsoft, as responsible for the advancement of personal computing (and even Internet) in recent decades. Little is known, at the popular level, about the true origin of this empire and about the effect that the strategies carried out by Microsoft have had on industry and information technology.

On the Internet it is common to find sites against Microsoft and Bill Gates. Most focus their criticism from the technical point of view: pointing to the low quality of their products, exposing their gross flaws and notable shortcomings, comparing Windows with other operating systems that are much more stable, efficient and secure. Others warn about the dangers posed by Microsoft's monopolistic position, and the policies implemented by this company to expand its control to other areas, beyond personal computing.

This short article has several objectives:

1. Demystify some stories that are part of folklore, such as the origin of Bill Gates and the alleged inventions attributed to him.
2. Explain, very briefly, the reasons that have led Microsoft to its current position of dominance in the personal computing market.
3. Show the risks and dangers involved in the maneuvers carried out by Microsoft.

Myths and truths about Bill Gates

The computer guy :

His real name is William Henry Gates III and, as he seems to indicate, comes from a wealthy Seattle family. The story that has always been told about his beginnings, playing with his small personal computer, is far from reality. Gates was educated in one of the most expensive schools (tuition was roughly triple that of Harvard University) and, when together with a group of colleagues he wanted to start playing computers, his mothers rented them a PDP-10 ( the same computer used by the Stanford and MIT researchers).

The young visionary who revolutionized computing

Another fairly common myth is that Gates created the Basic language. Could not be farther from the truth. Basic was created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1964. What Gates and Paul Allen did was create a version of the Altair personal computer language interpreter (an achievement that is widely surpassed by any student in a college compiler course). This interpreter is the only known piece of code written, half, by Bill Gates. Later we will see that many other inventions attributed to him were not his work either.

Myths and truths about Microsoft

The beginnings:

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Initially each of them owned 50% of the company, although later Gates gradually took more control over it.

The first great success of Microsoft, determining its future success, was the sale of MS-DOS to the IBM company. DOS was also not designed or developed by Microsoft, but was purchased from a small company called Seattle Computer. Its original author had dubbed it QDOS, short for "Quick and Dirty Operating System" (fast and dirty operating system). It is recognized by all that the quality of design and implementation of MS-DOS in its early versions was very poor. IBM's decision to incorporate it as the operating system of its PCs was motivated by a question of competition with the Digital company, which could provide a much superior product, and because IBM did not really attach much importance to the line of personal computers. What was striking was that IBM did not buy MS-DOS but decided to pay Microsoft a royalty for each copy that was sold together with an IBM-PC. What has rarely been said is that at that time Gates' mother, Mary Maxwell, was a director of the United Way company together with IBM CEO John Opel.

Windows

We must begin by clarifying, for those who have believed the ridiculous stories that are told in some media, that Microsoft did not invent graphical environments, nor windows, nor the mouse. All of this was developed by the Xerox company in 1973 and then copied by Apple in the late '70s and Microsoft in the' 80s.

Windows was announced on November 10, 1983. The first version (1.0) appeared on November 20, 1985, while the first really usable version (3.0) was released on May 22, 1990. A whole sample of the "Efficiency" of the company. Recall that we are talking about a product that provided functionality equivalent to those incorporated by the Apple Macintosh in 1984 (whose stability and robustness were vastly superior). The only "virtue" of Windows was that it ran on top of MS-DOS on IBM-PC compatible computers.

Microsoft and the Internet

Many have come to believe that Microsoft invented the web or, worse, that the Internet is a brilliant idea from Bill Gates.

The Internet, as such, dates from roughly 1986 (although it originated in the late 60s). The World Wide Web (along with the first browsers) emerged in 1991. Some time later, Microsoft bought a browser called Mosaic from the Spyglass company, to later transform it into the now known Internet Explorer. The first version of Internet Explorer appeared in August 1995.

The truth is that "visionary" Gates did not see the Internet coming. Belatedly, along with the appearance of Windows 95, he tried to set up a parallel (and independent) network called "The Microsoft Network" (many will remember the useless little icon on the desktop) which failed miserably. Following this failure, Microsoft bought several Internet-related companies, including one of the largest webmail providers: HotMail. Around this and other services, he finally set up his website called… Microsoft Network! (currently better known as MSN).

The protocols, standards and norms of the Internet are documented by so-called RFCs (Request For Comments). To date (January 2003) there are 3454 RFCs. Only 8 of them have been prepared by Microsoft employees (the oldest dates from March 1997 and 7 refer exclusively to products from this company), which represents 0,23% of the total. Based on this we can say that we owe to Microsoft 0,23% of the technological advance of the Internet.

Microsoft and the advancement of computing

Many credit Microsoft for having brought computing closer to ordinary users, for having produced the technological advance that facilitated access to personal computers. Reality shows quite the opposite: not only is it not a merit of Microsoft but this company caused, in many aspects, a considerable technological backwardness.

During the 80s, the only Microsoft product that stood out was MS-DOS (called PC-DOS in the version distributed by IBM). The success of MS-DOS did not lie in its technical features but in that it initially went hand in hand with the IBM-PC, whose hardware architecture was copied by many other manufacturers, leading to the proliferation of "compatible" equipment. For these hardware manufacturers, it was much easier to distribute their equipment accompanied by MS-DOS than to develop a new similar product (which ensured compatibility also at the software level). Simultaneously, other operating systems of much higher quality and design appeared, but linked to hardware architectures that were not so successful (an example is the Apple Macintosh already mentioned).

At the end of the '80s, DR-DOS appeared, from Digital Research, whose technical characteristics were far superior to MS-DOS (although, unfortunately, it had to follow the same design for compatibility reasons). DR-DOS version 6 had a large sales volume until Microsoft released version 3.1 of its Windows system. Interestingly, and although the rest of the DOS applications worked correctly, Windows 3.1 crashed when running on DR-DOS. This prompted a lawsuit.

The decade of the '90s began with a total dominance of Microsoft in the area of ​​the operating systems of personal computers, with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Alternatives began to appear at this time: versions of Unix for 386 systems (one of which belonged to Microsoft) and OS / 2 from the IBM company. The main disadvantages that these products had to penetrate the market were the lack of compatibility with the existing software (the design of these systems was very different from that of MS-DOS / Windows) and the control of the market that Microsoft exercised. A notable fact is that, given the advancement of Unix systems, Microsoft decided to discontinue the production of its product compatible with this operating system (called Xenix).

With regard to this issue, behind each successful Microsoft product there are a couple of dark stories where the words "trial", "theft", "espionage", "copy" appear repeatedly. The number of innovative and highly technical products that emerged over the years and were destroyed in some way by Microsoft is countless (a widely used mechanism for this was to buy and then discontinue).
It is also notable how Microsoft intends to introduce each product innovation as a technological breakthrough. It did, for example, with its publicized DLLs (dynamic loaded libraries) in Windows (when they already existed in Unix for a long time), priority multitasking in Windows 95 (already existing in systems implemented in the '60s) and more recently with the possibility of managing space limits per user in Windows 2000 (something that many operating systems have allowed to do for several decades) and the support of journaling in NTFS (a feature that allows maintaining the integrity of the file system in the event of a crash. system, and it has been present in many operating systems for more than a decade).

The quality of Microsoft products

Many people believe that it is common for a computer to hang from time to time. It has even come to seem normal for a computer virus to destroy all the contents of a hard drive and that this virus can arrive by any means and with the slightest lack of caution. They have convinced many that the only way to avoid this is with an always updated antivirus (and that Microsoft does not provide), and if the antivirus fails ... the only culprit of the disaster is the evil author of the virus (usually a teenager with little computer skills). It's common to think about updating software (as if it had an expiration date), and you rarely see any real improvement after updates. It seems normal for a program to exceed 100 Mb in size and require the latest processor and huge amounts of memory.

These ideas, with which most of the people who use Windows computers live on a daily basis, have been the result of the computer "evolution of technology" of the last decade. This is what Microsoft has sold even better than its products, to the extent that many professionals have assumed them as common currency.

Solutions to gross bugs in programs have been "sold" by Microsoft as breakthroughs throughout its history. When a new version of Windows crashes once a week instead of twice, the message is that "it is now much more stable." A very interesting anecdote is what happened in the first versions of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It so happens that said program was unable to read files generated by versions in other languages ​​since, when saving a spreadsheet as a file, it stored the names of the functions used (the function to add in the Spanish version was «sum», while which in the English version was "sum"). At the same time, other similar programs such as Quattro Pro did not have this drawback: instead of the name of the function, they stored a numeric code that was later translated into the corresponding name according to the language. This is something that is taught in any initial programming course, but the Microsoft programmers did not know how to apply such a basic idea. When a new version of Excel was released, in which the notable flaw was corrected, the advertising highlighted it as a great improvement: now it was possible to open documents generated by versions in different languages. Of course, those users who wanted to access the new version to overcome the ridiculous limitation of the previous one, had to pay for the license again (perhaps with an "advantageous" upgrade discount).

Microsoft's dubious practices

Unlawful competition

There are several documented cases (and some that have gone to court) where Microsoft is suspected of altering the code of its operating systems to make competing programs run slower or with errors. Microsoft has been brought to justice several times (and sometimes with rulings against it) for intellectual property violations.

It is also common practice for Microsoft, taking advantage of its excellent economic-financial situation, to buy from those small companies that stand in its way by developing products that could compete with its own.

Breaking the rules

A tactic widely used by Microsoft to achieve market dominance is known as "Embrace and Extend". It consists of extending certain protocols or norms beyond the standards in an arbitrary and unilateral way, so that later only the products that implement them in the same way can interoperate correctly. There are plenty of examples of this type of practice (the implementation of SMTP in Microsoft Exchange, the alteration to HTTP in Internet Information Server, among others), but perhaps the most notable is the one that led to the lawsuit that Sun Microsystems initiated against Microsoft for having extended the specification of your Java language in violation of the terms of your license, which allows anyone to implement a Java compiler, but without departing from that specification. The objective pursued by Microsoft was that the Java programs generated with its J ++ development environment could only be executed on Windows, since Java was designed as a language that allows the development of portable applications between different platforms (something that, obviously, does not suit it ). When this attempt failed, Microsoft made the decision not to include Java support in its new operating system: Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

Closed and changing formats

The formats in which information is stored have historically been used by Microsoft for two purposes:

1. Prevent interoperability with "non-Microsoft" programs.
2. Force users to upgrade to new versions.

This occurs because these formats are "closed" and are not publicly documented. This means that only Microsoft knows about them and it is the only one that can make a program that stores or accesses information in such formats. Having absolute control over the format allows Microsoft to change it at will. It is quite common for applications like Microsoft Word to use new ways to encode information in .DOC files (always with the promise of new features, but technically not justified), which has the direct consequence that the files generated by the new version they cannot be opened with previous versions (although a way to store the data in a compatible way is provided, it requires certain additional steps). This means that gradually, given the circulation of files in the new format, users have to migrate (with the consequent cost) even though they do not need the "new features" (does anyone use Word functions from Office 2010 that were not in Word of Office 95?). What Microsoft achieves through this is to limit the choice of users who are trapped within this true vicious circle.

Microsoft and hardware manufacturers

Due to its monopolistic position, Microsoft can exert great pressure on PC hardware manufacturers. This pressure translates, for example, into the prohibition of selling equipment with other operating systems installed, on pain of not offering discounts on the sale of Windows or Office licenses to said seller. No manufacturer of personal computers would dare stand up to Microsoft and lose the ability to offer their computers with Windows preinstalled (and at a lower price than the retail price). This has led to the fact that it is currently very difficult to acquire a well-known brand computer without the cost of at least one license of some version of Windows being included in the price (even if one does not want to use this product).

In the same way, it has reached the extreme that those responsible for providing the technical support service of computers equipped with Windows is the manufacturer itself. This is ridiculous because said manufacturer does not have the means (internal documentation, source code, etc.) to be able to troubleshoot or correct errors in the program. Again, manufacturers must agree to these terms to continue to receive "preferential treatment" from Microsoft.

With the arrival of Windows 7, an even greater level of dependency has been reached: due to the new "security functions" of Windows 7 (which have not prevented a single virus from working under this new version) the drivers or controllers of Devices must be "certified" by Microsoft in order to be installed on the system. This again forces the hardware manufacturers to maintain "good relations" with the company, adding another pressure mechanism.

Microsoft, lies and ... "steam"

The term "vaporware" is commonly used to refer to a product that is advertised by a company, when it does not really exist (or will not be available within the promised time frames). The objective of this strategy, generally used by companies that are in a situation of market dominance, is to discourage their competition and create a mixture of concern, expectation and hope in their users.

Microsoft has used this resource many times. We have already talked about the seven years it took from the official announcement of Windows to its first really usable version. A similar case has occurred with Windows 95 (announced as Windows 4 in July 1992 and released in August 1995) and with Windows 2000 (whose first beta version was released in September 1997, under the name Windows NT 5, and which finally appeared in February 2000). In all these cases, promises of supposed functionalities and improvements were made that ultimately were not fulfilled. In some cases, incomplete products were released, as happened with Windows NT 4, which became really usable after the so-called "Service Pack 3", released one year after it began to be marketed.

Bill Gates, the philanthropist

The mass media often show Bill Gates making donations of software and delivering bombastic speeches about Microsoft's efforts to bridge the technological backwardness of underdeveloped countries. These donations, the amounts of which are measured in several million dollars, are not real. The supposed value is calculated taking into account the cost of licenses in the market, but the reality is that Microsoft has almost zero cost (just that of duplicating CD-ROMs). In this way, the company ensures its growth, adding a good number of users of its products at a much lower cost than an advertising campaign would have meant, without taking any risk and last but not least ... obtaining excellent publicity in return!

In other cases these "donations" have another connotation. Recently Gates, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, made a series of donations in India for the fight against AIDS. This occurs simultaneously with a series of negotiations and studies carried out by the Indian government, with the aim of promoting the development of Free Software in that country.

We must not fail to take into account that this supposed philanthropist has (as of January 2003) a personal fortune of 61.000 million dollars, which is equivalent to 9,33 dollars for each inhabitant of this planet.

The future

The future looks both encouraging and terrifying. On the one hand, the constant advance of Free Software seems to have put a brake on Microsoft's voracious expansion. Finally, after many years of absolute dominance, an opponent appears that Microsoft seems to fear. Until now, their attempts to stop the growth of Free Software have been useless, exposing its contradictions more than once and exposing its limitations to compete with a model that does not conform to its schemes (its large heritage is of little use to compete with a movement based on community development, totally decentralized and outside its sphere of power).

On the other hand, threats appear on the horizon such as the attempt to create a computing platform called TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance), which proposes a model in which computers are dominated by companies and no longer by users, being able to these restrict and monitor access to information. This type of initiative puts us one step away from the dire situation posed by Richard Stallman in his short story "The Right to Read."

Fortunately, a large number of people around the world, grouped in organizations of different types, who fight to stop the advance of these types of dangers and who bet on the emergence and crystallization of new alternatives, make the future appear more like an opportunity of change that like the consolidation of the positions that companies like Microsoft have built during these last years.

Conclusions

My personal opinion, taking into account the points raised in this text (and many others that I have not included because they are beyond my possibilities) is that Microsoft represents a serious threat to the development of computing and, worse still, to the free development in the world of the future, increasingly linked to information technologies. We must realize that it is not only a technical issue, but that there is much more at stake.

A key to the establishment of the monopoly that Bill Gates has achieved over the last twenty-five years is the great misinformation (and in many cases disinterest) that exists, which has allowed him, through very effective marketing campaigns, to achieve that the common of the People and many professionals in the discipline have a totally distorted image of the objectives of this company and its true contribution to information technology.

Those who produce the true advances are those who work for the evolution of science and technology, not those who try by any means to impose their products, destroying advances, corrupting standards, stealing ideas, destroying potential competitors. For all this, I already found an answer to the question.

Microsoft? No thanks.