Edition 1.1, 30th October 1998
Microsoft in the Dock As the second week of the legal action against Microsoft for monopolistic practices in the USA draws to a close, a lot of the industries dirty washing has been hung out to dry. It remains to be seen how the giant Microsoft is going to weather this. Whatever the outcome, it seems Windows and other Microsoft products are here to stay. Perhaps it's time to reflect on the road we and Microsoft have travelled.
Microsoft products have become the defacto standard on the Personal Computer desktop. Whether this is through good engineering, excellent marketing or traditionally advantaged positioning, is a matter of opinion. Perhaps the reality is a combination, in debateable proportions of course. Microsoft have delivered ease of use with a graphical interface and integration between Operating System and applications. But any Mac enthusiast will tell you that they had that way back in ‘85.
Their yellow brick road was the strategic partnership with IBM to provide the DOS 1.0 with the original IBM PC. This provided a cash cow for the years to come: however, little attention seem to be paid to improving the technology of this 1st generation PC operating system. The popular PC magazine John Dvorak once described DOS as ‘Brain Dead". If you ever had to waste hours tweaking DOS to maximise your 640K memory window, you will know the feeling. Opposition such as the innovative DR DOS never really seemed to take off, since the Microsoft brand dominated even then, and their alliances with the PC Manufacturers was strong.
An attempt to put this right with the development of a new operating system, OS/2, were scuttled with a clash of cultures that left IBM holding the baby and the rest of the world with that aesthetically pleasing, but unstable Windows 3. However, that did liberate us from having to install custom screen and printer drivers for every application.
It took five years before we saw a major revision of Windows: Windows 95. This still draws on a DOS heritage but offered improved configurability, networking as well as a great looking GUI. All information on programs could be stored in a central database file: the (flat file) registry. Whilst advances were made with this generation of Windows, it cannot be regarded as a stable and fault tolerant operating system.
Windows 98 offers minimal improvement. Microsoft's plan for all of us who love the constant cycle of upgrading, is that Windows NT Workstation is the product that you should be using. Presently on Version 4, Ver. 5 is just around the corner and it is to be called Windows 2000.
As far as networking goes, Microsoft has come to dominate the field as well. By using its muscle, it has all but flattened the opposition. While a lot can be said for NT as an application server, other network operating systems such as Novell have evolved to be sturdy and reliable platforms for most organisations needs of file and print services.
Microsoft have also taken on the mid-sized multiuser corporate computer systems, that have grown up with Unix as the core operating system. Besides concerns over scalability, NT has made inroads into this market as well. However, this has pressed the wake-up call button in the rest of the industry, who are now marketing much more actively now.
On the desktop application front, there is no doubt that Microsoft has become the defacto standard and MS Office rules supreme. But once again, there are many other products (Lotus SmartSuite, Corel WordPerfect Suite for example) that are equally functional. They are often a fraction of the price, yet find limited support in the market due to strong Microsoft branding and marketing.
In the corporate database world, giants like Oracle, Sybase and Informix have been hurt by Microsoft's forays with SQL server, which is now bundled with BackOffice. Though it is known to be sub-standard for any serious database work in comparison with the likes of Oracle, it is finding acceptance due, once again, to the rosy picture of integration provided by Microsoft marketing. Oracle, which is the second largest software company in the world, are not taking this lightly and are now giving away a five-user Oracle to Novell users.
But the real crunch of the legal action against Microsoft is it's attempts to move in on the Internet.
In 1994 or thereabouts, Microsoft was ignoring the Internet. In fact, it was trying to launch it's own on-line service, the Microsoft Network (MSN) to compete with the likes of Compuserve and America On Line. This has little significance to us here in South Africa, because these services were not used here much at all.
However, the Internet revolution was happening fast, largely thanks to the many small start-ups that were spinoffs from academic research such as Netscape, one of whose founders wrote one of the first public domain World Wide Web Internet browsers, Mosaic.
For the very first time, platform-independence content seemed a reality. An Internet browser running on any platform could see the same content in exactly the same way. It did not matter which PC or OS you were using.Things went a quite bit further with Java. This is a concept of a platform independent program or application, that could be run independent of the computer or operating system. This is much like the html information your Internet browser accesses. Most browser now can run Java programs that can be downloaded over the Internet. So in other words, we could start using the same application programs regardless of your PC: be it a Mac, a Windows 9x, a Sun Unix workstation or any other creature that supported Java by running a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
Whilst Java was a Sun Microsystems initiative, all of its specifications and code have been published in the public domain, and anyone can use it. The developers went to great lengths to ensure true platform independence.
These revolutionary developments awoke Microsoft giant, since they posed a significant threat to their dominance of the personal computer world that they have with their proprietary and architecturally-closed Windows OS. They moved swiftly with attempts to make Internet content Microsoft dependent, and derail Java with their own Windows-centric version of it. They have met with some success, though a number of developments lately have offered some hope to avoiding a total Microsoft eclipse.
Linux was developed by a University student as a public domain version of Unix, and it can be downloaded over the Internet for free. It is very comprehensive and reliable, and is used extensively by Internet Service Providers for several of the core Internet services. What's more important is that it's many thousands of lines of source code is in the public domain. This makes it easy to solve any problems, and improve or customise any features. There is extensive support in the form of newsgroups on the Internet. It offers true and reliable multi-tasking, as well as being multi-user. It's networking support is strong.
Several graphical user interfaces can run on top of it, including the classic Unix X-Windows as well as a Win 95-like user interface. But more significantly, the big players like Oracle and IBM have invested resources to developing products for it. This is a major boost, since the corporate world has long been skeptical about public domain software.
Corel have released a WordPerfect Office Suite for Linux, and others are following. How far this will go as to offering an alternative to Windows 95/98 and NT, remains to be seen, but at least there is an alternative on the horizon.
There is no doubt Microsoft rules supreme in the PC software industry. However, what does that spell for a culture that was spurned by diversity and small start ups ? IBM did not get their way when they tried to close in on the PC market by making the PC expansion bus their proprietary Micro Channel Architecture (MCA): they had to revert to industry standards. Remember that the Internet explosion was built on standards that anyone could participate and have a say in, and the engineers and computer scientists who participated in this do not look kindly at Microsoft's behavior. It has made a lot of enemies.
Perhaps we will see more and more support for alternatives and open solutions. But with Microsoft's marketing dollars, does anyone stand a chance ? Perhaps it's just a matter of time.
By Bruce Gillespie B.Sc. Elec Eng (Wits)
Director, PCB Technologies
See also:
MicroSoft side of the story:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/trial/default.htmWired News:
http://www.wired.com/news/news/email/explode-infobeat/politics/story/15714.htmlSun's Java 1.2 coming up:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-1998/jw-11-jdk12.htmlOracle for Linux:
http://www.oracle.com/linux/Corel WordPerfect for Linux downloadable for free
http://www.corel.com/news/1998/october/linux.htm
FootNote
PCB Technologies has always been committed to investigating all options for clients, and support most platforms, thereby offering the most appropriate solution. We have strong Microsoft skills, including several MCSE's, and are more that happy to supply and support all Microsoft products. The above article is the personal opinion of the author.
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