Nov 27
My anti-Microsoft week
It’s been an odd week-or-so. (In reality, it’s probably more than that, but bear with me.) It started out with a two-plus hour discussion between RD and I, which involved me trying to detail why I think Microsoft is evil. I did a crappy job of it and really need to work on that in the future.
Later, I tried once again to make Vista work with my modded XBOX, only to once again fail miserably. I thought of all the ways the OS is restricted and how much of a hassle running Windows has become in the last two years, and I can’t bear to do it anymore. Even XP is a pain in the ass. My Windows box has been permanently relegated to third fiddle.
I discussed with a few people the possibility of using an XBOX 360 (with a MCE backend) as a replacement for XBMC, but its limitations are too severe. It won’t really play anything that’s not WMV, and I refuse for both technical and political reasons to reencode all my crap into wmv. As far as time-shifting goes, Myth and its xbox frontend seem to be a far superior solution.
Then on Thanksgiving, I had a two-hour discussion with my cousin - a guy that once said he wouldn’t be happy until his entire network was authenticating through Active Directory - about how happy he is that he never went with AD and stuck it out with NDS, and how he would love to see all of his systems (desktop and server) running Linux. We also discussed the Microsoft versus the Linux community issue - I am firmly convinced that if Microsoft would come out and indicate exactly what parts of the Linux kernel are infringing, they could be replaced outright in a matter of days. It’s a scare tactic, and he seemed to agree with that.
I read a wonderful article by Andy Ihnatko in the Chicago Sun-Times about why Microsoft’s music player is a galactically bad idea. It eloquently sums up the situation without resorting to nerd rage (well, at least not so much.) Over here at ZDNet, Microsoft’s position on virtualization in Vista licensing is made more clear: virtualization is not mature enough to allow consumers to run it - apparently nobody at Microsoft has ever used Parallels, because it’s the best VM tech I have ever seen, anywhere, and I’ve got a VMware Infrastructure 4-proc server at work. At the same time, Business 2.0 describes the attempt to make Microsoft a little more light on its feet and less dependent on Windows. Products like the Zune are supposed to do that. How we’re not sure.
I still don’t have an eloquent answer for RD. One of the core pieces, though, defining whether Microsoft is evil or not has to do with the amount of FUD they produce. In the last two years, the message has been clear: we control the horizontal, we control the vertical, we control your updates if you pirate Windows (fucking not only you, but everyone who happens to be unlucky enough to share a network with you - like all the people on your cable loop, or in your dorm.) But in the last month or so, Microsoft has been kicking the FUD into overdrive: Open source is piracy, and Novell admitted it. MP3 players are piracy, because every time you buy one you pay the record industry a fine. Virtualization is bad and scary because it abstracts control away from Microsoft. If it’s good enough for President Bush, it’s good enough for Microsoft.
All of these things have one defining message: Microsoft is all about control. They are not about open standards. They are the epitome of the DRM world: take away this privilege you used to call fair use, and sell it back to you for a few dollars more. Any technology that would get in the way of this goal has to be crushed via any means necessary: legal attack, PR campaigns, stealthily taking away features and seeing if anybody notices. They are leading the charge. Vista is Microsoft’s attempt to become that pale horse. And that’s why, today, Microsoft is evil.
I’m sure tomorrow I’ll have yet another reason, but today this is enough.
I’ve contributed to the EFF this month; how about you?