Re: SQL Server Worm devastates Microsoft Corporate networks!

Erland Sommarskog <sommar_at_algonet.se> wrote in message news:<Xns93125F2A8EF0Yazorman_at_127.0.0.1>... > Kent Paul Dolan (xanthian_at_well.com) writes:

>> Which, of course, is the strongest possible argument against
letting a
>> monopolist like Microsoft continue to exist _at all_. If the
market
>> were divided up among the twenty or so competing OS vendors that a
>> non-monopolistic market would engender, every link that crossed an
OS
>> boundary would be another natural stagnation point for virii; it is
>> the ubiquitousness of "M$ at the other end" that makes messes like
the
>> current one possible.

> And had the market thought that it was a good idea to have 20 different
> OSs with equal share, with all that means in porting and compabitibility
> problems, that is how world would have looked like.

Except, of course, that "the market" didn't create the present mess, M$ feedback-looping monopoly-power-enabled unlawful business practices did.

And since then, we've added a much more robust standards process, and POSIX, and the problems are less now than then; we've also moved to higher level programming, much of it based around markup languages that are portable from their inception. None of this depends on M$ OSen, almost all of it has been viciously fought and whenever possible sabotaged by M$ as a danger to its monopoly, yet still it succeeded, because the software community is smarter than its management is.

> Indeed, that is how the world looked like 20 years ago.

About half my programming career back, yes, and it was a much better place to be a programmer than what we have today. C and PFORT were already in place, so writing for a slew of different environments wasn't particularly painful, not so painful, say, as learning to program all of Microsoft's poorly written, closed source, badly documented, bug rife "tools" is today.

Then Bill Gates decided to cut classes, mostly, apparently, the ones on business ethics, and the mess is history.

xanthian. Received on Wed Jan 29 2003 - 14:06:09 CST