Microsoft

A bunch of players were sitting around talking in one of my games the other day when the subject inevitably came round to Microsoft and its current legal troubles. Most of the non-US people found the legal action completely incomprehensible. Even leaving that aside, there seemed to be a consensus that inviting the US government in was very much the thin end of the wedge.

Lets face it, no one likes Microsoft all that much, they've irritated too many people over the years. None the less there was a feeling that on the whole the US government is acting on behalf of a bunch of losers who screwed up competing with Microsoft in the market place.

The truth is that at most of the critical junctures, going right back to the adoption of MS-DOS by IBM, Microsoft delivered by one means or another and its opponents screwed up. Sometimes what they delivered was dire, but none-the-less they delivered.

The feeling was summed up by a programmer who said, "At least Bill Gates is one of us...". There is some truth in that - I suspect if Oracle, for instance, had been in Microsoft's position we would probably all be renting our software and paying for how many times a day we use it!

Not that people didn't have some interesting ideas for what Microsoft's punishment should be. The one I really liked was the suggestion that Microsoft should not be allowed to release any new software until all the bugs are out of their current products!

Pretty neat I thought.

Alan Lenton

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