What it amounts to these days is that Microsoft bashing has suddenly become the popular thing to do in the computer industry. It seems as if everyone has an excuse as to why Microsoft should be wiped off the face of the earth, and even those that don't are striving to make a convincing one up. I can picture the conversation going on in a board meeting of yet another Silicon Valley startup heading rapidly down the proverbial potty:
CEO: Ok, as you may know, it turns out that it's going to take our entire R&D budget to pay off the Learjet, we've got disgruntled employees with a battering ram outside the boardroom armed with staplers, rubber bands and paperclips, the secretaries are selling pictures of us to the tabloids for obscene amounts of cash, and there are already Lexuses filled with bankruptcy lawyers out in the parking lot waiting to pounce on us... Anyone here have any suggestions?
VP #1: Well, we could call in the National Guard...
VP #2: Don't be silly, they stopped coming after about the fifth time we called them in.
VP #3: What about the Emergency Executive Escape tunnel?
CEO: That won't work either... Some wiseguy decided that it would be a good place to store all the 60-pound Unix manuals we've got lying around, and now the place is blocked solid.
VP #2: WAIT A MINUTE HERE! I think I've got it!
CEO: What is it? a rescue helicopter to whisk us all away to somewhere the shareholders will never find us?
VP #2: Nope. Better than that.
VP #1: Application forms for the Witness Protection Program?
VP #2: Not that even. How about an excuse to get us out of this mess?
CEO: And that would be...?
VP #2: All we need to do is blame Microsoft for the whole thing, and the government will make them pay us billions of dollars for no apparent reason!
VP #3: I believe you are on to something there!
VP #1: Why didn't we think of it before?
CEO: Remind me to give you a raise when the SWAT teams outside disperse.
And so on and so forth, ad nauseam. This does, however, bring up an interesting point. How do we know that some of these startups do not merely exist for the sake of exploiting Microsoft as a scapegoat? Yes, that may sound like a somewhat ludicrous idea, but certainly the market for such a company does exist, and I'm sure that someone else out there, most likely sporting more dollars than sense, has thought of this very thing before.
Of course, as one might imagine, there are also other threats to Microsoft's plan to dominate the world and make us all slaves to Bob(tm)(R)(c)(you get the idea,) and try as they might, there really is nothing they would be able to do about such a threat, A typical Microsoft reaction to a situation such as this would be to throw a large number of lawyers at the threat and hope it runs in terror at the sheer amount of ego being hurled at it... The results of this are often mixed, as one may imagine. Of course, when you're dealing with the world's largest beauraucracy, a company as big as Microsoft may at least be able to make it look like they can do something about it, but there are threats to their dominance that no lawyer can do a blasted thing about, no matter how big an ego goes along with it. In fact, there is little that they can really even do about thisthreat, which is nothing new to the seasoned computer veteran. This threat against which there can be no competition is called freeware.
Yes, even a multi-billion dollar company such as Microsoft cannot compete against a product that has often just as many features as the one they're trying to charge for, ususally runs on a lesser system than their product, and obviously, when you're not charging for this software, nobody's going to beat the price. The best example of freeware dominating a market in such a way would be Apache, which has become the most popular web server software out there by a large margin, manly because it's free. Not only that, but the community of users on the net using free operating systems (mainly Unix-variants such as Unix and FreeBSD) is large and continues to grow (contrary to popular belief, it is in fact possible to run a whole system without using any MS products.) With the recent advances in emulation technology across the board, you can even run whole older computers without paying a cent (of course, if you're willing to do a little creative dumpster diving, you could do the same thing, but the costs these days would also be minimal if you would be willing to endure a thrift store or two and the complaining of your significant other.)
There are only currently limited areas where freeware can be construed as any sort of threat to the much-ballyhooed Wintel monopoly on the whole deal. If one considers some of the other recent threats to this (such as the thin client, WebTV and social lives for employees) that have largely fizzled out, one has to wonder what could come out of this. But such is the nature of freeware authors, sneaking up without warning and suddenly taking everyone by surprise, sucking the lifeblood out of the behemoths of the industry, leaving nothing but a drained shell of what was left (well OK, so maybe I'm getting just a tad carried away on the whole bit here...) but one of these days, we may find a scenario where suddenly there is a viable freeware alternative to Windows that everybody can use without reading 60 pounds of manuals first. There are people ingenious enough out there that it may even be possible to get Windows programs running at full speed without a single line of Microsoft code, and there will be nothing MS can do to compete with this except go redefine a few standards and hope nobody copies them for a while.
That day may be here sooner than you think.