“So what if Gates is taking a lot of things off the table.
Who cares. OK, the lawyers care, and the plaintiffs. And, it may
make sense to consider that we, the suckers saddled with the
bloated junk of his, ought to care, too….”
Gates has already had his right-hand man trumpeting to the world
a new Microsoft mission, which essentially says that the
commodified PC is probably something that the shrewd college
drop-out suspects is beyond him, despite the original “Computer in
every home” mission. My sense is that here is someone who has been
abusing the consumers as a matter of program, much like the
Bolsheviks have abused millions of others, many of whom, too, were
suckers for the offerings. Just think of the non-Soviet millions,
who did not exactly suffer the gulags and the KGB, should the
comparison be too difficult to comprehend. And, if you are in
Western Europe, include in here the various armchair socialists,
and you have an easily comparable mass of suckers, easily
comparable to the millions of American home and small-business
users who have opted for Wintel machines as a result of the
undoubtedly successful propaganda and market manipulation emanating
from Redmond. It wasn’t too long ago when the “experts”, of whom I
relied for guidance, were telling me not to bother to look at the
Mac technology, because it would not survive. And, of course, now
the experts talk Linux and open systems in general, as if that
might be the way to reform uncle Bill’s empire.
However, this is no Gorbachev. Gates is clever like a
street-smart business success better be, and he now intuits that
his empire cannot handle the reformation of Windows. His thinking
is completely different from that of the politruk who was driven by
ideological beliefs rather than by pragmatic street smarts. So his
business acumen tells him to prospectively abandon the W stuff for
every home, and instead to latch onto the big business users where
the infrastructure is probably not only ready to, but in fact keen
to, continue dealing with Microsoft output. After all, that’s how
many make a living. And much like with the old aparatchiks of the
post-communist countries, the human infrastructure does not go away
whether the millions are happy or not. Many have been making a
living by trying to help people deal with Gates’ wares, having
accepted the M$ supremacy as near absence of practical
alternatives. Some of that camp may be reading this verbiage and
resent me for it.