Re: Transcript of MS Remedies

[Dan Strychalski <dski@cameonet.cameo.com.tw>]

"The Buck Family" (abuck@BLomand.Net) wrote --

> What about a remedies discussion of the seperation of development
> tools from both the core OS and application groups. The OS is about
> resources and development tools give access to those resources. If
> the OS and dev tool groups remain together they will continue to be a
> significant point for control of competition.

If a separation is to be effected, yes, development tools must be
broken out as well. I *don't* think a separation would do much good,
but if it were done, there is no question that development tools would
have to be separated from everything else.
 
One of the design goals of this so-called OS is to *deny* access to
certain resources. Funnily enough, in designing products to run under
MS/PC DOS, the other two big mass-market application developers of the
1980s, WordPerfect Corp. and Lotus Development Corp., bent over
backward to avoid using those very resources -- resources that they had
full access to and that would have been particularly valuable for a
multi-platform word-processing program such as WordPerfect. It is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that these companies were operating
under some sort of constraint imposed behind the scenes by Microsoft,
which began its campaign to annihilate those resources in 1980:

   ....when it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put
   the funny Wang character set into the machine -- you know, smiley
   faces and boxes and triangles and stuff....           -- Bill Gates
   <http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/magazine/1995/951002/cover.html>

I'm talking about ASCII Ctrl-key combinations. The moment I came to
understand the relationship of these keystrokes to the basic encoding
method used on all microcomputers, I saw them as the greatest boon of
all time to anyone who works with text. And many people who have no
inkling of those keystrokes' standards-based nature feel the same way.

But for ten years, neither the MS-DOS command-line interpreter nor any
MS-DOS utility used any Ctrl-key combinations but the few inherited
from the CP/M command-line interpreter. Microsoft doctored the MS-DOS
manuals to hide the fact that Ctrl-A, for example, is as much a part of
our basic encoding standard as Shift-A. I recently found a description
of Microsoft Word for DOS keystrokes on the Web; there is no mention of
any ASCII Ctrl-key combination. And *no* ASCII Ctrl-key combination did
*anything* in *any* of the applications bundled with Windows 1.0.
However, I digress. Shamelessly. As usual.

If a single company produces the operating environment for all
applications, and that company can do whatever it wants with system
resources, breaking that company's other operations off from the
operating environment business is meaningless. All others still have to
toe the line. That is the basic design philosophy of Windows. It has
been the foundation of Microsoft's business philosophy since 1980.

Dan Strychalski                              dski@cameonet.cameo.com.tw