IP: Microsoft: the Noam Chomsky Interview and a view fro farber

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

[ First some private comments from me. Noam is a smart person and his work
was seminal BUT that does not make him the guru of all things. He has a lot
of factual errors in his full interview.


I have been around this field for many many years. I have used every
operating system made available and have had a hand in designing several,
of them. For years I was a Mac fan. I used to carry my Mac Duo into Intel
Hdq. I suffered as a Beta for Windows and "appreciated" it's limitations.
Why did I switch to the PC and Windows  95. Two reasons, the first is that
Apple sat on its laurels and did little or no innovative improvements, the
system was buggy and not fixed very often. It ran initially on innovative
hardware especially the Duo and then Apple sat and did nothing to improve it.


Along came MS and Intel who took (some say stole -- but so did Apple) ideas
from others and created an OS that was at least as good and it ran on
hardware that kept improving in speed and capability. On the Intel side at
least that was matched by a large budget devoted to improvement of the X86
line. (side bar -- they also invested in non X86 compatible architectures
with less market acceptance -- an understatement).


Better yet other companies sprang up to utilize the utility
hardware/software that MS and Intel provided and gave us machines like the
Sony I type on and Compaq/Dell/etc. It more than any other event triggered
the Internet boom -- cheap ubiquitous network enabled computers. And it
triggered the incredible growth in the software industry


There were lots of opportunities to compete in the early days and still are
. IBM, HP, Xerox etc all fluffed the future. 


So now we hang MS. Maybe they deserve to be slapped and slapped hard if
they have done anti-competitive things . In my mind anti-competitive does
not include being successful -- it means making sure others can not compete
with you by illegal marketing techniques and other things (I AM NOT A LAWYER).


Most of the "hang them" talk seems to say success is bad and opportunities
should be given to less competent companies to mess things up. If someone
has a great idea, and great implementations and cannot market it due to MS
behavior that is another thing .


Dave


ps I use only Netscape Navigator on Win 95 and 98 and NT}








Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 12:01:33 -0400
From: James Love <love () cptech org>




I just ran across this interesting bit.  It is an interview with Noam
Chomsky, discussing the debate over the Microsoft monopoly.   jl


----------
A CORPORATE WATCH INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY


Corporate Watch's Anna Couey and Joshua Karliner caught up with Noam
Chomsky by telephone at his home in the Boston area to ask him about
Microsoft and Bill Gates. The following is a transcript of our far
ranging conversation.




CW: So our first question is, how significant do you 
    see the recent skirmishes between the Department 
    of Justice and Microsoft? Do you see it as an 
    important turn of events? 


NC: There's some significance. We shouldn't exaggerate it. 
    If there are three major corporations controlling what
    is essentially public property and a public creation, 
    namely the Internet, telecommunications, and so on, 
    that's not a whole lot better than one corporation 
    controlling, but it's maybe a minor difference. The 
    question is to what extent parasites like Microsoft 
    should be parasites off the public system, or should 
    be granted any rights at all. 


  [snip]


http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/feature/microsoft/chomsky.html



-- 
James Love
Consumer Project on Technology
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
love () cptech org | http://www.cptech.org
202.387.8030, fax 202.234.5176