Microsoft hits new ethical low point?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| It doesn't help matters to have a new assistant attorney general in the
| Justice Department's antitrust division (Charles James) who's
| understanding of the electronic age can be seen in statements like this:
...
| "If Microsoft were to be broken up, you would see divergence of the
| common platform and it's unclear that you would have as vigorous a
| competitive market...,"

Hmmm ... Does he imagine that it could be worse than the diversity of
Microsoft's  past and current platforms?  It seems like every year or
two there's a new one that  requires  a  major  rewrite  of  all  the
software. DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, ...

In comparison, I have Unix software that I wrote 15  years  ago  that
still compiles and runs without problems on any Unix-like system from
any vendor.

We really should be publicising things like this.  If  you  seriously
want  a  common platform, Microsoft flunks even the most basic tests,
while Unix, with all its warts, does a fairly decent job of providing
portability  across  years, hardware changes, and even major rewrites
of the kernel.

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