[Am-info] Why Microsoft is evil and should be nuked

[Fred A. Miller]

This from another elist.

=46red
______________________

I picked this up from a newsgroup I frequent.....

 --- Quoting begins ---
 So we bought a digital camera after our little Kodak 2megapix died. Its
OK,a Canon Powershot A300 - not top of the range but we did not want that,
we wanted something that was light, slipped in the pocket and did not weigh
a ton to carry when I was out in my chair.

 So...

 Followed the instructions to the letter (yes I RTFM!). Error message,
"camera not found"

 Checked the system, camera there. So I re-installed, just in case I had
screwed up. Still not found, even though XP said it had installed it.

 Gave up and called Canon, went through the checklist, found no probs. So
the guy passes me onto their "higher" technical department (never knew they
had one of them!)

 They call me back (!) after 45 minutes (BTW I got through to a human first
time, when I called their help desk). and we go through the list again.

 This time, he tells me to look at the drivers. "It says Microsoft
corporation," I inform him.

 "It would," he says. "They have been making their own drivers, without a
licence from us, for XP for all peripherals and install their own."

 We manually install the Canon driver and, voila! It works, no problem.

 Then he tells me that Microsoft have, for the past five months been doing
this secretly for all drivers for all peripherals. As soon as they find out
about a new product, they buy one and take the code apart so they can
provide their own drivers, rather than use the generic ones the actual
manufacturers provide. They are, it is suspected, working on "locking out"
third party peripherals from XP in the near future unless the makers pay a
fee to allow their products to be installed.
 --- Quoting ends ---


If Microsoft has begun doing that then I don't think they realize how much
antagonism that action would raise among consumers.  More than just passing
the 'license fee' along to consumers, raising the price of peripherals, it
would encourage the peripheral makers to cancel their own driver
development and leave that to Microsoft,  creating another
'drivers-available-only-from-Microsoft-lockin' for consumers.   This is
exactly what Microsoft did to the modem and printer market.   Microsoft
would, of course, put the drivers in their kernel, obfuscate the code, and
add encryption.   OpenSource developers would have to go the same route -
reverse engineering - but it would slow deployment of drivers for new
peripherals.
Only a corporation with a monopoly mindset could afford to think/act this
way, even if they are no longer the monopoly they once were.

=2D-=20
Planet Earth - a subsidiary of Microsoft=AE.
We have no bugs in our software, Never!,=20
We do have undocumented added features,
that you will find amusing, at no added cost,=20
to you, at this time.