Bill Gates is being pursued by Bill Clinton's Justice Department for possible anti-trust actions. There's a certain amount of irony in this, but I'll leave to your own imagination. What I would like to review are a few myths concerning Microsoft.

Myth Number 1: Microsoft's dominant position is an example of the free market not working.

Baloney! Since the very beginnings of the PC, consumers and developers alike have wanted a standard. (Remember Sony's Beta VCR format?) Consumers want to buy computers which will run any and all software. They do not want their choice of computer or operating system to limit their choice of software in any way. Software developers also want a standard. Developers want the largest possible market for their products, and being able to address this huge market with a single version of any product is invaluable. For example, Mentor Software's Tralaine is a Windows 95/98/NT product; a single version will operate successfully on more than 20+ million PC's around the world. What type of software/hardware any specific customer has is rarely ever considered. Microsoft's dominance is what consumers and developers alike wanted, demanded, and got.

Myth Number 2: Microsoft is a hotbed of ingenuity.

Baloney! At exactly the same time Bill Gates was selling MS-DOS to IBM on the east coast, his partner, Paul Allen, was buying it from someone else on the west coast. Since that time, MS-DOS enhancements were largely mimics of UNIX. Stacker made disk compression popular and Microsoft ripped it off (even though Microsoft could never get it to work). It took Microsoft 5 years to put together a version of Windows, its look-a-like to Apple's interface, that would stay up for more than 10 minutes. Bill Gates panned the Internet until Netscape made it very popular. COM, ActiveX, and OLE are generally implementations of designs promoted by the Open Software Foundation. Microsoft invents very little; it mostly copies stuff.

Myth Number 3: Microsoft is invincible

Baloney! They said this about Xerox, Kodak, IBM, and others. (These used to be called the Nifty Fifty. Few, if any, rate the name Nifty anymore.) Microsoft will be around for some time, but its absolute dominance may not be. The recent alliance between America On Line, Netscape, and Sun will represent a formidable competitor to Microsoft and others will surely follow. The Internet browser product itself is not all that crucial to Microsoft's dominance of the PC market place. What is important to Bill Gates is that there not be another software firm with a customer base of millions of PC users and with a significant cash flow. That is the real threat AOL/Netscape/Sun present to Microsoft. It is Microsoft's enormous cash flow which enables it to be successful and dominant in all areas. Consider, it was not until Microsoft introduced version 4 of its Internet Explorer that it had something truly competitive with Netscape Navigator. How many companies are there that could introduce three Edsels and yet have the resources to try yet again.

Myth Number 4: The number of Microsoft users substantiates Microsoft's high quality.

Baloney! We have to restart our Windows 98 system two or three times a day. (Admittedly, Windows NT 4.0 is quite reliable and stable. I can work for days without having to restart it. My compliments to David Cutler and his buddies from DEC.) We couldn't use Microsoft Visual C++ Version 5.0 until Service Pack 3 was available, one year after we paid for the original product. Do you know of anybody who used Windows 2.0? Ever used Internet Explorer 3.0? Microsoft Word 5.0? Not likely. Microsoft continues to devote resources to developing new features which require users to purchase upgrades while paying limited attention to hundreds (if not thousands) of problems with its existing products. There are millions of users of these products, but only because there is little else to choose from. The number of users of Microsoft products is simply an indication of Microsoft's dominance, not an indication of product quality.

Epilogue

Can I really be so critical about Microsoft's quality? After all, Olsen, you're responsible for some pretty ugly buggers yourself, you know!!! How true!!! But Mentor Software takes its mistakes seriously. Mentor Software fixes them as soon as it can, given its limited resources. Mentor Software provides updates with the corrections at no charge. Mentor Software provides free technical support, for an unlimited time, and even pays for the phone call (1-888-275-6676). At Mentor Software, if we screw up and cause any of our clients some pain, we also expect to experience some of the pain.

Now that the standard, such as it is, has been established, how about if Microsoft, the AOL alliance, and anyone else who chooses to jump in, square off and compete on product quality. How about a world where every product doesn't have to have an automatic save feature built in. How about a world where you can work all day without restarting your system. How about a world where an error message gives you a reasonable clue as to what is really wrong. How about a world where updating your system does not require a loss of a whole week's productivity to get things working again. If market dominance was based primarily on quality, would anybody complain if one supplier became dominant?