Standing Up For The Big Guy

Standing Up For The Big Guy
How Goliath Might Not Always Be The Bad Guy

Wanna hear something crazy?  Microsoft makes some of the best software and deserves to be recognized for it.  I’ve never met or heard of anyone that shares that opinion because there is no company more hated than Microsoft.  While people complain about Haliburton, Wal-Mart, Enron and others, they don’t share the vitriol aimed at Microsoft.  Barring an occasional begrudging appreciation for some products such as Word, few people ever say something nice about them.  In fact, the first Wikipedia entry I’ve ever seen devoted to criticism of a subject was this one.

Linux guys complain that Windows is bloated, unstable, unsafe, and just “sucks.”  Office workers complain that MS Office and Windows are hard to use, don’t allow for such and such, and just “sucks.”  Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the presiding judge in the anti-trust suit against MS made by Netscape, has said that they are “gangland killers,” “stubborn mules who should be whipped with a two by four,” and compared Bill Gates to a drug-trafficker.

A charge often leveled at MS is that they are a monopoly, and by extension we can assume this is why they get so much guff.  But that’s not the case with Adobe–they completely dominate the graphic design market with Photoshop and Illustrator.  Though CorelDRAW is still around, and The Gimp is available, very few people use those applications.  Perhaps the argument that Macromedia is also out there making products like Flash and Freehand alleviates the potential for ire.  Unfortunately, Adobe recently purchased Macromedia.  In fact, Adobe performs the exact same business practices that people complain about Microsoft engaging in, yet no one hates them.  

Compare a Google search for criticism of Adobe versus criticism of Microsoft.  For Adobe, the most shocking complaint states that it is a deathtrap, but that it survives earthquakes… oh, they’re talking about adobe, not Adobe.  The biggest complaint I’ve found is that their new icons aren’t as pretty.  The anti-MS articles continue for pages.

When I was trying to figure out how to get my silly little videos online I looked into the various compression formats.  YouTube recommends using DivX or XviD with MP3 compression, which is odd because they ultimately convert the file to a Flash video (FLV).  After two days of experiments I determined that the best compressor was Microsoft’s WMV.  It had the highest quality, fewest artifacts, and smallest filesize.  In fact, Baby Got Back in DivX and XviD formats came out to the same size as WMV, but the video looked like unbelieveable crap.  So I figured this should probably be a popular format for delivering video over the web.

Unfortunately, my research also determined that WMVs “suck.”  It was very hard to find reasons why, though.  The best I could find related to some arcane features that WMV doesn’t provide–features also not available from most other non-sucking compression algorithms.  This complaint was akin to saying that a CD player is crap because it doesn’t have sub-chapters.  I doubt anyone reading this blog even knows what a sub-chapter is because this function–a part of the original CD audio spec–has not been used since the ’80s.

Apparently the reason WMVs “suck” is because the format is made by Microsoft.  That’s it, no further opinion-making needs to happen because if Microsoft did it, then the product must suck.

Do Microsoft products actually suck?

The MS applications with which we are most familiar are Office, Internet Explorer and Windows.  Let’s take a look at them:

There is no other office application suite on the market that compares positively to MS Office.  Critics argue this is because of the supposedly evil business practice of having computer manufacturers include it with new computers.  But has anyone tried the competition?  OpenOffice genuinely sucks, and not just in that meaningless way applied to MS.  Writer, their word processing app, is clunky and is very diificult to use for any slightly advanced word processing functionality.  On the other hand, Impress, their presentation suite, compares reasonably favorably against PowerPoint.  Math, their spreadsheet app, lacks many functions compared to Excel.  The only real advantage OpenOffice has over MS Office is that it’s free.  We don’t even need to talk about WordPerfect, as it has become such a joke compared to where it used to be.

Internet Explorer 6 certainly shows its age, and it should–it’s old in the browser world.  Mozilla and Firefox are certainly improvements over IE6 in terms of functionality.  But let’s consider IE6 from when the anti-trust suit occured.  Netscape was a total dog.  The complaint that Microsoft tried to redesign the standards of the World Wide Web to become proprietary MS products is a conflation of what Netscape tried to do.  People hear that a business did something evil, and assume that it must have been Microsoft.  Netscape had been the dominant browser until they started trying to make the web only work on Netscape browsers, and then they lost marketshare.  Then they panicked.  Then they sued Microsoft.  Dorks.  

From an HTML coding perspective, IE6 was very solid.  As a web developer you knew that if you coded for IE, most everyone would see your page the same way–largely in compliance with the intentions of the W3C.  Opera and early versions of Firefox attempted to interpret W3C standards in a different way, perhaps with good intentions.  But MS had established how the undefined aspects of W3C standards should be displayed and their interpretations are hard to discount because they work.  Firefox quickly realized that if they want to stay in the game they needed to follow what 97% of the world was doing and go with established standards for interpreting code. 

While a few niggly problems came out of this, it is ultimately a good thing.  Some web developers would love it if certain lines of code could do this or that.  But most web developers want everyone to have the same experience using their website, especially if that website is a marketing tool.  Imagine if commercials on one TV set looked great, but on a different TV the text and characters appear half off screen in jumbled locations.  Now that would suck.

MS Windows does have its share of problems, but compared to every other operating system it is easily the best.  Perhaps you’d care to argue that Mac OSX is the best OS out there, and maybe it is.  But there’s a major problem:  It’s only available for Macs.  Saying that I can run Windows apps on a Mac doesn’t even remotely compare to the impossibility of running OSX on my Dell.  I like being able to pick and choose from numerous hardware manufacturers.  If something goes wrong with my Dell, I can buy an Alienware, a Gateway, or even make my own computer.  If something goes wrong with a Mac, there’s no more robust manufacturer out there.  You are stuck with Apple.

Perhaps you’d like to argue that Linux is superior to Windows?  Well, first, you’re wrong… and sorta right.  If you are a programmer and you have a lot of patience with untested and unreliable technology but can appreciate the unique advantages of Linux, then it is absolutely better than Windows.  That takes care of a very small percentage of the population, and almost all of those guys run a web server.

For the rest of us, Linux is a nightmare.  It is extremely difficult to use–even finding new applications is a chore, much less installing them with all their shared libraries and doodads and geegaws you have to download from who knows where.  Additionally, you are limited to Linux software (let’s not even talk about the kludgey Windows emulators), which means you are basically limited to open-source apps.  In other words, you’ll get lots of half-baked software with arcane features that come close to working well but fail in basic functionality.  Progress is being made on this, and maybe someday Linux will be a better competitor for Windows.  But right now it is utter crap for the majority of computer users.

Let’s face it, we can gripe about certain aspects of Microsoft’s products, but there’s nothing out there that does a better job.  Some argue that this is because of shutting out or buying potential competition.  MS have done some unpleasant things in the past, but they haven’t shut out or bought OpenOffice or WordPerfect.  With Netscape the reverse was actually true:  Netscape attempt to lock IE out of the market.  IBM’s OS/2, an earlier (and arguably better) competitor to Windows 3.1, disappeared because of a lack of development–a refrain familiar to anyone involved with IBM over the past thirty years (remember Micro Channel Architecture?).

Our Love/Hate Relationship With Competition

Humans want to see the big guy defeated.  My theory is that this is genetically coded into us after millenia of trying to get food.  If someone else is stronger and better than us, we might not get all the food we want.  Of course, if we are stronger and better than someone else, we tend to horde our food as well–why do all that work just to give it away to people who couldn’t earn it?  So the Big Man On Campus is perceived as a threat to us.

Of course, this isn’t true in terms of business or even modern individuals.  The hatred/fear we feel is just a leftover of that constant struggle, yet we continue to apply it to any large entity.  Since Microsoft is huge, they can’t possibly be good, can they?  We love to see larger-than-life celebrities fail.  We want to see Wal-Mart and Starbucks get reamed by unions or local governments (but we also want to continue shopping at those places).  Heck, I’m writing this article and feel an overwhelming need to clarify that I certainly wouldn’t shop at Wal-Mart or Starbucks–a thought completely contrary to my point.

When an organization becomes so large that the individual no longer feels they can have any impact on it, that organization becomes a threat.  At that point it is difficult to see any good in what they do, and it becomes impossible to see the deleterious results of losing them from our lives.

One could argue that this behavior is minor, and that Microsoft will continue doing what they do regardless of the public’s hatred.  In other words, these opinions are benign.  A look at the most extreme example of this pattern of behavior will quickly show that it is anything but benign:  9/11.  

The terrorists feel similarly about America and are driven by similar mechanisms as the folks who complain meaninglessly about Microsoft.  Not everyone who hates America has had a direct negative experience with it.  They just know that America is the BMOC and that it is a threat to their existence.

As is the case with any organization made by human beings, there are bad decisions, mistakes, and failings.   Microsoft, the United States, the UN, Wal-Mart, GM, etc., all have screwed up.  But these mistakes are made by people, and unless we think that people are perfect, we need to accept some of these mistakes and move on.  

Fundamentally, we should find the good in what these people do and isolate and correct the bad.  The approach now is to dismiss the good and loathe the bad so strongly that we wish for the abolishment of these organizations.  This is a dangerous and utterly moronic mindset because all corporations, governments, businesses, politicians–anything!–are people.  

The people of Microsoft have made some of the best programs on the market, even if they have made some mistakes.  But I continue to appreciate the good work they have done, and I want them to improve their failings.  

We should respect all people–whether an individual, a business, or a country–as we respect our friends.

– Mike

CNN Opinion on MS Ruling