Microsoft hits new ethical low point?
John Chambers
jc at trillian.mit.edu
Fri Feb 16 12:15:49 EST 2001
| 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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