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Robert W. Tracinski at The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism - Microsoft Breakup is a Throwback to Socialism: A good statement of why the government should get its nose out of our business. "The government wants to split the company into two pieces, one to make the Windows operating system, the other to develop the specific software applications that run on that system. What this means is that the federal government is taking it upon itself to seize one of the world's largest corporations and to restructure the entire computer industry. It amounts to the declaration that Microsoft, and any other successful company, is state property, to be carved up and disposed of at the whim of bureaucrats and judges." I signed their petition, which sums it up very nicely, indeed:
The Justice Department's case--and indeed the entire edifice of antitrust law--is based on the bizarrely inverted notion that the productive actions of individuals in the free market can somehow constitute "force," while the coercive actions of government regulators can somehow secure "freedom."In his commentary on this debacle, Angus Glashier asks for a list of Microsoft's questionable business practices. I can name a few that leave a bad taste in my mouth. In every case, however, I believe that Microsoft is really hurting noone but themselves.
- Exclusive contracts. Microsoft had (still has?) a practice of requiring its PC hardware vendors to ship no pre-installed operating system but Windows. It worked for a while, but now you can buy machines from Dell with Linux pre-installed. And noone was forced into these contracts. They made a business decision that signing the contract with Microsoft was the most profitable choice for their companies.
- Vaporware. Microsoft tends to jump on a good idea from a small company, announce that it will be making a product, then not follow through. The small company goes out of business because of it. Of course for really good ideas, Microsoft buys the small company and uses its technology, exactly what the small company's investors want, or they wouldn't sell.
- Embrace and extend, incompatibly. Microsoft takes an industry standard, like a browser or Java, builds an implementation, then slightly changes it, so that if you depend on the Microsoft implementation, noone else's will work. Of course Netscape led the way with this practice in the browser market. And in the Java case, I think Microsoft would have profited much more by remaining compatible; they have a good VM, but I won't use it because it isn't compatible with Sun's standard, and this is a technical, not political, decision.
Cal Evans at freshmeat.net - nerdherding: "5 secrets that I've learned over the years for managing Nerds." Witty and likely useful. I'll give it to my manager, in sha' allah. [meat]
I especially like Cal's byline:
Cal Evans is probably the luckiest man on the face of the earth. In addition to being able to work with groups of highly talented developers, he also gets to pretend he's in charge of them. Cal daily practices the fine art of MBWA ("Managing By Wandering Around"). In his spare time at work, he's either scouring the net looking for talented individuals to invite into the club or playing Team Fortress Classic. (Officially, it's called network load testing.) All of this, and they insist on paying him. To show that his luck never runs out, in real life he is the husband of Kathy, Web designer extraordinaire, and the father of two wonderful children.
"JConfig is a cross-platform library which supplements the core Java API." They recently released version 2.0.0. I haven't tried it. [meat]
Libertarianz is the web site of a libertarian movement in New Zealand. They appear to have some connection with Lindsay Perigo's Free Radical. I especially like their principles page.
David Bertelsen at the Free Radical - Seatbelt, Senor? Introduces "The Seat-belt Index" for assessing how libertarian a country is. Based on the answer to the question, "Should you wear a seatbelt, and why?" His conclusion for the most liberatrian country is surprising. The article is fun.
I played with the search engines on J. Orlin Grabbe's links page, looking for "End the War on Freedom".
This dogpile search finds End the War on Freedom with the following comment:
Deals primarily with politcal issues and the government. Find important news events with the author's often seething commentary.Hehe. bottom
