Re: FW: Bill Gate$.

[Pete Hall <pbhall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 20:42 11/10/1999 , Karen Summers wrote:
>At least Microsoft has decent FREE online help.  You can't
>imagine what I had to go through just to get a password to look up any
>possible assistance that doesn't cost $285/hour to figure out why I have 5
>minute response time after upgrading my operating system (I am not
>exagerating and it's still not fixed 72 days later!  The development machine
>is unusable.).

I'd suggest hiring a consultant to look at your system. It'll probably not 
cost you $285/hour, and the results should be quick. There's no way you 
can't improve on that performance.

BTW, as I see it, the issue with Microsoft is not the fact that the 
software is ubiquitous. It's the way MS does business. If you read the 
finding, the biggest issue is the treatment of middleware. If it threatens 
to make anything run on a non-Wintel platform, it must be quashed. This, in 
the judge's opinion is a monopolistic practice which raises the cost of 
market entry to prohibitive levels, thereby making it impossible for anyone 
to compete. IBM was victimized, as were Netscape, Sun, Real, Apple, Intel 
and others. The issue is not the cost to the consumer. Do you remember back 
in the fall of 1995, when we were all bitching about how IBM had blown it 
with 32 bit client access? Turns out that IBM didn't get access to the 
golden Win95 until 15 minutes before general availability. It wasn't IBM 
that was at fault at all. IBM played by the rules. Microsoft's behavior on 
the other hand, looks pretty shabby in the light of day.


Pete Hall
pbhall@execpc.com
http://www.execpc.com/~pbhall
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