How Microsoft has Harmed the Consumer

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How Microsoft has Harmed the Consumer

A brief account of an injured consumer.

by Dan Peterson

Those who say that Microsoft has only competed in an open market and has not directly harmed the consumer, are very wrong. The consumer is being injured constantly by the behavior of Microsoft and its chairman, Bill Gates. The following is an account of how I, as a consumer and as an information technology professional, and companies for whom I have worked have been injured by Microsoft and Bill Gates.

First I will address the software and hardware bundling racket of Microsoft and Bill Gates.

In my work as the MIS Director of a company, I deployed a point of sale system to almost 50 sites. When I ordered the Intel based computers that would be placed in each site to run the system, I stated on the purchase order that I would be using UNIX and therefore did not want any operating system to be included with the computers.

When the 50 computers arrived, each came pre-loaded with Microsoft's operating system and the corresponding manuals. When I spoke with the vendor of the systems, I was told that all of the Intel based computers came with the Microsoft software since the manufacturer of the equipment had an agreement with Microsoft which stated that all machines must be pre-loaded if the manufacturer wanted to be able to load any of its machines with Microsoft's software.

The injury to my company was the cost of the bundled Microsoft software, on 50 computers, for which we had no use. The injury to society was the extra cost of doing business as well as the waste of natural resources which was caused by the packaging, printing and distribution of the manuals and diskettes of software which had no value to the consumer.

The above is an example of financial injury to the consumer by Microsoft and Bill Gates. Now I will describe professional injury which I have received as a result of the activities of Microsoft and Bill Gates.

While working for the same company, as in the above account, I started evaluating graphical user interfaces of several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, X-terminals, Apple Macintosh and NeXTStep. The result of my evaluation was that NeXTStep was far superior to the others and the easiest to use. I made a presentation to the top executives of the company and I was given the go ahead to deploy three systems, running NeXTStep, into the office environment. The trial went very well and I was given the go ahead to deploy the systems to the entire corporate office.

I went on a three week vacation, and when I returned I was told that the order for the additional machines was canceled and that we must deploy Microsoft based systems since "everyone else was". I did not understand what had happened. We performed a proper evaluation of the competing technologies. We chose to run a trial of our number one choice. The trial went well and everyone was pleased.

And now, out of the blue, we were going to adopt the number three platform in a group of four contenders. When news of this decision reached everyone in the office, one administrative assistant asked why we were going backwards and another person, in the franchise department, who was one of the early users in the trial, started to cry.

Here I was, the MIS Director of the company, being forced to adopt inferior technology because, as I found out, a friend of the CFO told him that Microsoft was the only way to go. I was made to look like a person who did not do a proper analysis of the use of technology, and I was told that I displayed prejudice against Microsoft. I could not change anyone's minds.

I pointed out that companies such as Swiss Bank and Chrysler were using NeXTStep and claimed that it gave them an advantage over their competitors. I also pointed out that activities which we tried to perform on the Microsoft platform took over ten times as long as those similar activities on the NeXTStep platform. When I told one of the executive vice presidents of the company that the Microsoft based platform would cost considerably more than the UNIX based, NeXTStep, platform, I was told that I would loose my job if I mentioned this to anyone else.

I was personally and professionally injured. Microsoft and Bill gates had confused and bullied the marketplace. People who were deploying Microsoft products were doing so without looking at superior competing products. I decided to find another job.

Finally, I must relate my experiences with Microsoft products at my other places of work. I am now a consultant and, as a result, witness the use of Microsoft products in several companies. All of the places where I have been, where Microsoft products are used, experience reductions in productivity as a result of the shortcomings of Microsoft products. The most frequent productivity drainer is the common gray box which announces an error or the "Dr. Watson" fatal error in Windows NT.

Another feature of the Microsoft products, which reduces productivity, is what Microsoft refers to as OLE, or object link embedding. OLE is not a complete object oriented entity. OLE is used to embed items from other applications into the current application. If OLE were truly object oriented, like NeXTStep was, then everything would be fine. But since OLE is not truly object oriented, the user spends additional time to make things work, if at all possible.

Microsoft claims that OLE is object oriented, and the average user believes that this is as good as it gets. For a good example of how OLE reduces productivity, try this little experiment. Create a table in a Microsoft Word document. Now create a Microsoft Power Point document and insert the Word document, which has the table, into the Power Point document. The result is a mess. The Word table does not fit the Power Point slide. The user is forced to recreate the table by hand in the Power Point document. The purpose of OLE was that you could reuse objects which were created in other applications. NeXTStep allowed this, Microsoft does not.

In summary, from my personal experience, Microsoft and Bill Gates have injured the consumer by forcing the consumer to purchase Microsoft products with the computer even when another operating system is intended for that computer, by creating an environment in the marketplace where professional people are forced to deploy inferior solutions or risk ridicule, and by reducing productivity in the use of technology by virtually eliminating competition.

Were a study performed to determine the total cost, to just the consumers in the United States of America, of the behavior of Microsoft and Bill Gates, the findings may be staggering. I believe that Microsoft and Bill gates have inhibited innovation in the information technology field by providing mediocre software and preventing competition even though that competition had superior products. This is not an environment of a free marketplace but rather one dominated by a ruthless monopoly.

Published: 2 November 1998

Some weeks it looks like Redmond feels entitled to capture not just part of what we save, but all of it. That just isn't going to fly with corporate America forever. When your margins are more sensitive to Bill Gates' pricing whims than they are [to] the price of oil, that's an untenable position for a large company to be in.

JOHN CHAPMAN, Sr. Technology Executive, Amaco

©1999 Moral Highground Productions

Boycott Microsoft

> Home
> Keynote
> Manifesto
> Lead Article
> Site News
> Bookstore
> BMS Forum
> Bumper Stickers
> NT Files
> Dirty Tricks
> Feature Articles
> Departments
> Site Credits

How Microsoft has Harmed the Consumer

A brief account of an injured consumer.

by Dan Peterson

Those who say that Microsoft has only competed in an open market and has not directly harmed the consumer, are very wrong. The consumer is being injured constantly by the behavior of Microsoft and its chairman, Bill Gates. The following is an account of how I, as a consumer and as an information technology professional, and companies for whom I have worked have been injured by Microsoft and Bill Gates.

First I will address the software and hardware bundling racket of Microsoft and Bill Gates.

In my work as the MIS Director of a company, I deployed a point of sale system to almost 50 sites. When I ordered the Intel based computers that would be placed in each site to run the system, I stated on the purchase order that I would be using UNIX and therefore did not want any operating system to be included with the computers.

When the 50 computers arrived, each came pre-loaded with Microsoft's operating system and the corresponding manuals. When I spoke with the vendor of the systems, I was told that all of the Intel based computers came with the Microsoft software since the manufacturer of the equipment had an agreement with Microsoft which stated that all machines must be pre-loaded if the manufacturer wanted to be able to load any of its machines with Microsoft's software.

The injury to my company was the cost of the bundled Microsoft software, on 50 computers, for which we had no use. The injury to society was the extra cost of doing business as well as the waste of natural resources which was caused by the packaging, printing and distribution of the manuals and diskettes of software which had no value to the consumer.

The above is an example of financial injury to the consumer by Microsoft and Bill Gates. Now I will describe professional injury which I have received as a result of the activities of Microsoft and Bill Gates.

While working for the same company, as in the above account, I started evaluating graphical user interfaces of several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, X-terminals, Apple Macintosh and NeXTStep. The result of my evaluation was that NeXTStep was far superior to the others and the easiest to use. I made a presentation to the top executives of the company and I was given the go ahead to deploy three systems, running NeXTStep, into the office environment. The trial went very well and I was given the go ahead to deploy the systems to the entire corporate office.

I went on a three week vacation, and when I returned I was told that the order for the additional machines was canceled and that we must deploy Microsoft based systems since "everyone else was". I did not understand what had happened. We performed a proper evaluation of the competing technologies. We chose to run a trial of our number one choice. The trial went well and everyone was pleased.

And now, out of the blue, we were going to adopt the number three platform in a group of four contenders. When news of this decision reached everyone in the office, one administrative assistant asked why we were going backwards and another person, in the franchise department, who was one of the early users in the trial, started to cry.

Here I was, the MIS Director of the company, being forced to adopt inferior technology because, as I found out, a friend of the CFO told him that Microsoft was the only way to go. I was made to look like a person who did not do a proper analysis of the use of technology, and I was told that I displayed prejudice against Microsoft. I could not change anyone's minds.

I pointed out that companies such as Swiss Bank and Chrysler were using NeXTStep and claimed that it gave them an advantage over their competitors. I also pointed out that activities which we tried to perform on the Microsoft platform took over ten times as long as those similar activities on the NeXTStep platform. When I told one of the executive vice presidents of the company that the Microsoft based platform would cost considerably more than the UNIX based, NeXTStep, platform, I was told that I would loose my job if I mentioned this to anyone else.

I was personally and professionally injured. Microsoft and Bill gates had confused and bullied the marketplace. People who were deploying Microsoft products were doing so without looking at superior competing products. I decided to find another job.

Finally, I must relate my experiences with Microsoft products at my other places of work. I am now a consultant and, as a result, witness the use of Microsoft products in several companies. All of the places where I have been, where Microsoft products are used, experience reductions in productivity as a result of the shortcomings of Microsoft products. The most frequent productivity drainer is the common gray box which announces an error or the "Dr. Watson" fatal error in Windows NT.

Another feature of the Microsoft products, which reduces productivity, is what Microsoft refers to as OLE, or object link embedding. OLE is not a complete object oriented entity. OLE is used to embed items from other applications into the current application. If OLE were truly object oriented, like NeXTStep was, then everything would be fine. But since OLE is not truly object oriented, the user spends additional time to make things work, if at all possible.

Microsoft claims that OLE is object oriented, and the average user believes that this is as good as it gets. For a good example of how OLE reduces productivity, try this little experiment. Create a table in a Microsoft Word document. Now create a Microsoft Power Point document and insert the Word document, which has the table, into the Power Point document. The result is a mess. The Word table does not fit the Power Point slide. The user is forced to recreate the table by hand in the Power Point document. The purpose of OLE was that you could reuse objects which were created in other applications. NeXTStep allowed this, Microsoft does not.

In summary, from my personal experience, Microsoft and Bill Gates have injured the consumer by forcing the consumer to purchase Microsoft products with the computer even when another operating system is intended for that computer, by creating an environment in the marketplace where professional people are forced to deploy inferior solutions or risk ridicule, and by reducing productivity in the use of technology by virtually eliminating competition.

Were a study performed to determine the total cost, to just the consumers in the United States of America, of the behavior of Microsoft and Bill Gates, the findings may be staggering. I believe that Microsoft and Bill gates have inhibited innovation in the information technology field by providing mediocre software and preventing competition even though that competition had superior products. This is not an environment of a free marketplace but rather one dominated by a ruthless monopoly.

Published: 2 November 1998

Some weeks it looks like Redmond feels entitled to capture not just part of what we save, but all of it. That just isn't going to fly with corporate America forever. When your margins are more sensitive to Bill Gates' pricing whims than they are [to] the price of oil, that's an untenable position for a large company to be in.

JOHN CHAPMAN, Sr. Technology Executive, Amaco

©1999 Moral Highground Productions