“Now, I didn’t make the decision to join the boycott lightly.
Even as I was researching my column, I was watching the Kerberos
saga, in the course of which Microsoft misappropriated that open
standard for its own nefarious purposes, unfold. I was really
appalled — and not only because it showed such a genuine lack of
respect for law for Microsoft to attempt to leverage its desktop
monopoly to capture the server market even as it was on trial for
trying to leverage its desktop monopoly to capture the browser
market. No, the thing that bugged me even more than that was
that Microsoft was doing this to Kerberos. Ironically, it was at
exactly this moment in time that Bill Gates wrote an editorial in
Time magazine in which he claimed to be a champion of open
standards. As if.“
“I have always supported open standards. How would these words
get from my computer to my editor’s to yours if not thanks to the
open standards which allow each of our programs on each of our
computers to share information — so that we can share
information?”
“The only other way to share information so seamlessly would be
a monoculture such as that envisioned by Gates. A computer on every
desktop, and a computer in every home, all running Microsoft
software — or else they don’t communicate with each other. And
indeed, Microsoft likes to take credit for standardizing what had
previously been a woolly landscape of wildly incompatible formats,
in the days when most people shared files with diskettes instead of
with modems.”