Wednesday, January 28, 2004

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Microsoft OS Strategy Price Discrimination Dvorak is often an interesting read (is DVORAK a perfect name for an iconoclastic computer columnist, or what?). The price of Windows does anger me. It used to be < $100. The only saving grace is that hardware has gotten so cheap and it is bundled with it. So I got a new PC AND Windows XP for my $200 (or $375 at the non-Thanksgiving price). I actually think their strategy is to price-discriminate between businesses and consumers. Consumers will only get a new OS when they buy a new PC (even if the OS were cheap, the pain, risk and complexity of upgrading OS would deter most people). So, in practice, it is mostly businesses that pay the high upgrade price. It is especially irritating since Microsoft's traditional strategy has been low prices, high volume. I think their vision is slowly shifting in that regard (their photo software is more expensive than many competitors). 9:49:13 PM    comment []

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Microsoft Never Invented a Computer Language Microsoft is widely accused of never inventing anything themselves, but rather merely acquiring and extending other people's inventions. In stark contrast to, say, Apple. I don’t recall languages being cited as a prime example of this syndrome, but it occurred to me it is. From its very early days, Microsoft has always been a strong vendor of programming languages. But until the very recent example of C#, AFAIK, they never developed a programming language of their own. Had Microsoft been truly imaginative, sometime around the time Windows 3.0 was gaining massive popularity, they would have developed a shiny, new, clean-sheet language offering. Of course, it goes without saying that this imagined product would have been very Windows-centric (i.e., paid the Windows "strategy tax"). That last part, however, provides a partial explanation of why no such thing occurred. At that very juncture, Microsoft was already incubating a new Windows-centric language product: Visual Basic. In one sense, VB was radical: the degree to which it simplified the task of creating a GUI through “visual programming” of the UI elements (I know, even in this category, there were other products that preceded VB, but never achieved market acceptance). But from a language perspective, VB was just a new dialect of a language that was already considered old and weak: Basic. Its roots were not in anything approaching cutting-edge language research, they were in the noble but pedestrian goal of a common macro language across MicroSoft, and perhaps third-party, products (this initiative started in the DOS days, when every product was an idiosyncratic platform unto itself). Even C# is not a very compelling case for imaginative language invention from Microsoft. One, because it is built on C-compatibility. Two, because a lot of its "new" features are borrowed very directly from Java. Three, it appears to have been developed solely as a "Java-killer", not out of any native creative urge within MicroSoft. Of course, none of the foregoing is to say that C# is not a good, or even great, language (I don't know enough to comment). In fact, if it were a pretty good product, that would just reinforce the classis Microsoft pattern of "embrace and extend". 11:10:55 AM    comment []