by Brian Grainger: brian@grainger1.freeserve.co.uk

With the on-going court case between the Department of Justice and Microsoft I thought it might be appropriate to review the current status of the software giant and how it has been viewed recently. I also want to suggest some possible changes in the future and how it might affect PC computer users.

For those who have been regular readers of my articles in the past it is no secret that I have admired Bill Gates and been deeply grateful for the products of the company. He produced the BASIC for the Commodore PETs and 64 and when we finally arrived at the PC it is MSDOS, Windows and Office that have been the core systems for the majority of users. However, despite the fact that Microsoft products have enabled the man in the street to use computers to his advantage there are many rumblings of discontent from all quarters. I have even started to waiver from total praise and, of course, the most high profile example is the court case.

Let us start with the court case. Do you know what it is about exactly? So far it has swung between a number of different issues:

Whether IE should be integrated into the operating system

Whether Microsoft Business practices are anti competitive and illegal

The Sun versus Microsoft argument concerning Java.

Back in May 1998 it appeared the only issue was whether IE was integrated with Windows 98 or not and whether this destroyed competition, i.e. Netscape. The first week of the trial concentrated on whether Microsoft orchestrated a campaign to destroy Netscape. My personal view aligns with that of Bill Gates when he said, 'We simply don't think that the Government should get involved with product design.' I still maintain that if you do not like IE there are a number of options. Do not upgrade to Windows 98, or if you do remove IE. (Yes it can be done, apparently. I have not checked it out but Shane Brooks method deletes 32Mb of Windows 98 without jeopardising operability - see www.wam.umd.edu/~ssbrooks/98lite/. The ultimate is to choose a different operating system and browser. There are a number of them. My view is that competition is there if you look for it.

The next couple of weeks of the trial concentrated on whether Microsoft held guns to the head of first Apple, and then AOL, so that they were forced to choose IE over Netscape. At this point Intel entered the fray. Intel accused Microsoft of threatening to cut off support to the next generation of processors unless Intel stopped plans to develop multimedia and Internet software. A week later IBM accused Microsoft of killing OS/2 by Microsoft forbidding developers to use Microsoft programming tools to write software for other operating systems. My personal view is this is a bit of sour grapes. First, I doubt if developers would take much notice of such an unenforceable threat. Second, they could use other tools. If it was so important why didn't IBM supply the tools at nil cost. At this point Sun won its separate injunction to ensure Microsoft complied with its native Java implementation. This means Microsoft has to alter IE4 and Windows 98 to comply. There is a common thread with all these issues. All of Microsoft's competitors are coming out of the woodwork to attack them. They appear to have given up trying to compete and think their best option is to gang up collectively and, with the help of the government, destroy Microsoft's ability to function so successfully.

At this point, late November 1998, AOL took over Netscape and made agreements with Sun to share Internet business. If Microsoft had a monopoly why did AOL think Netscape was good to buy. Why did they not wait till it was dead and get the business for nothing. To its credit South Carolina, one of the 20 states involved with the government in bringing the court case, pulled out of the action stating that the AOL take over of Netscape proved that there was plenty of competition. So far, although news of the trial has quietened down, the US government have not followed South Carolina's lead. My personal view is that the market has proved that competition exists. The original issue of IE integration is now irrelevant since Netscape no longer exists. The market finds in favour of Microsoft. Case closed. However, the apparent vendetta by competitors and government against Microsoft continues.

Despite my views on the court case it has thrown up some side issues which, if true, discredit Microsoft in my view. On a number of occasions, within the trial and outside, it has been claimed that Microsoft have altered Windows code to ensure applications that compete with Microsoft products do not work. This is patently not true with Netscape Navigator. In court a Princeton University professor claimed that Microsoft altered Windows 98 after he gave his code to separate IE from Windows 98 to Microsoft. Recently, after a spat between Microsoft and the company behind Real Video, it would appear that Windows does not support their latest initiatives by default. I have read elsewhere that an image viewing technology which used to work with Windows mysteriously stopped when Microsoft brought out a competing technology. It is very difficult to justify these claims. There could be perfectly valid reasons such as the competitors not keeping up with Windows upgrades. Nevertheless, it is suspicious and something I would not condone.

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That is enough of what the government and competitors think of Microsoft. What do the general public think. I can only reflect what I have read in the press and my own personal views but they should be sufficient to see how things have changed.

There are three main types of user in the real world.

• The technical user/hobbyist who knows something about computers and enjoys hacking his way about.
• The enterprise user where the purchaser and user may be different and where machines are likely to be on local area networks.
• The home user who knows nothing about computers but knows they want to use one.

The small office user will vary between type 1 and 3 depending on expertise.

When PCs first started it was the technical user that started using them. The home user, as defined above, did not exist. The enterprise user were much fewer in number and stuck in front of a dumb terminal. PCs were frowned upon in the enterprise. However the techie found how to use PCs to the full and because they were cheap he brought them into the enterprise to make him more efficient at work. Microsoft started to produce application software. Like all software it had bugs, or features, depending on how you view such things. However Microsoft applications did what the techie wanted and were well supported with good manuals and lots of free stuff. I still have on my shelf a complete set of manuals for Microsoft Office 4.3, as well as an inch thick collection of useful papers from the Developers' Tool Forum for Word version 2. I got the latter, at no cost, from Microsoft. Because of this information the techie got highly knowledgeable about these products. Consequently the techie became a free marketing man for Microsoft and as the products entered the enterprise or developing home market the techies provided a free technical support service as well. As time went on Microsoft developed their products with the aim of making them easy to use. They developed the user interface for this purpose and they added new features. However, nothing was ever taken out and the size of the applications steadily rose. I gleaned the following information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Word Version	Min Processor	OS	RAM (Mb)	Hard Disk (Mb)
2	286	Win 3.0	2	?
6	286	Win 3.1	4	5-24
95	386DX(1)	Win 95	6	8-35
97	486	Win 95	8	20-60

Apart from the fact that Microsoft thinks you can run Windows 95 on a 386DX the most telling point in the above table is the exponential growth on hard disk requirements. Now growth in itself is not a bad thing, provided it is justified by the features that are added. My own feeling is that up to Word 6 the features added justified the larger footprints. The features added to Windows 95 were nice and the size increase was not too great considering the price of hard disk space was plummeting. I find it much harder to justify the size of Word 97. The basic features added are the ability to create HTML formatted documents and wizards and dancing paper clips to help users understand the extensive features. For this the footprint is more than doubled. In Office 2000 we are promised web enabling of the applications. How many users will actually need to web enable their documents? [Me please! see my comments below. Bill] I hope we do not all have to suffer a further loss of disk space. Something called install on demand is in Office 2000 so maybe not.

I mentioned earlier the extensive documentation provided with early Microsoft software. Microsoft now thinks their software is so easy to use it does not need documentation. All it needs is dancing paper clips! They are wrong. Paper is a very useful medium with a serendipity effect. If you want to browse you can find things you do not know and when read you may subsequently use the features to advantage. Dancing paper clips do not do this because they get turned off due to irritation. Another effect of no documentation is that the techie finds it much harder to solve problems that arise. They in turn cannot provide as good a support service to the non technical user, who now gets more irritated because their software now appears to cause them aggravation. I once read that after one of Bill's yearly retreats he decided one of the aims of Microsoft software was to remove the need for technical support and the subsequent high cost of providing it. The methods used to try and achieve this aim have failed. The user is more irritated with the software. The techie is irritated because it takes him time, which he hasn't got, to understand the software and he can no longer help his co-workers. In short he feels left out. Microsoft has treated their free marketing and technical personnel badly.

There is another trait of techies. They like to experiment and play with the software and put their own identity into it. It has now become very difficult to do this with Microsoft software.

I would finally like to identify a few other traits of Microsoft products that are beginning to get up my nose. First they keep changing the base format of their files so the ability to transfer documents between versions is lost. I know file converters appear on the web site but it takes a lot of effort in the enterprise to get them installed on all PCs. You would have thought by now with all the versions of Word they would have got the format right and it would not need changing.

Second is the way the user interface keeps changing. In the old days it used to be the way some items moved onto different menus in updated versions of software. Now the whole interface changes. Windows 95 user interface was introduced because it was supposed to be more understandable than Windows 3.x. However, 3 years later it is decided it isn't and Active Desktop is the pukka article. Well, I have got news for Microsoft. It isn't only me that still prefers File Manager to Explorer [See my comments below - Bill]. Non technical users where I work find it easier to understand as well. Every time the interface changes a new learning curve starts. All we want to do is type documents and prepare spreadsheets. Why do we have to keep relearning things, at enormous expense of wasted time, every three years. I have read that Office 2000 removes the multi document interface in Word. This is the ability to load more than one document into Word at a time. In Office you will appear to have two instances of Word running, (although you don't), each complete with menus and tool bars. What a waste of screen space and why does it need to be different. We have all got used to the old way. It is change for the sake of it. Even more ludicrous is that this new idea is not common across the whole Office suite. Excel still works the old way. Microsoft is going mad.

A final gripe. Sometimes Microsoft admits it has made a mistake. Does it release a service pack to resolve it? Not when the release has been superceded. A number of times now I have found on the Knowledge base Microsoft admitting a problem with Word 6. They provide a workaround, if there is one, but then say the problem is solved in Word 95. Great. I do not want to upgrade my hardware and buy a new version of software to resolve a bug.

What does all this bad feeling that Microsoft is generating mean for the future.

I do not think it a coincidence that over the last year there has been more talk of non Microsoft software and favourable talk at that. In particular, on the OS front, Linux has certainly got some momentum. I myself am intrigued. Open source software, such as Linux, gives techies the chance to play again and even develop the software if they wish. It also gives them the chance to share the workload when resolving problems.

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In the enterprise Microsoft has a major grip. However, it is not easy to upgrade software in the enterprise. There has to be a good reason for it. The software has now got all the features it needs. The law of diminishing returns kicks in and business will not buy further upgrades. Microsoft software may be ubiquitous but it will not be generating revenue. Microsoft have still got some revenue to come as Windows 2000 and supporting software kicks in but after that? If any new types of software come into play then Microsoft will be competing with other players. They have no longer got their free marketing personnel and will find it more difficult to compete.

In the home market Microsoft has nearly 100% ownership of the operating system market. However, on new machines they have very little of the application side. How many PCs do you see advertised with Microsoft Office bundled. There used to be a few makes but now it is only Dell. Lotus SmartSuite is bundled with everything! This assumes that PCs will continue to sell to the home user. I have my doubts. PCs cause them too many problems. It would be less hassle to them if they had a box to type on, a box to play games on and a box to access the Internet. It costs more in the long run but they work! Where the techies can happily get their PCs to multitask your home user seems incapable. It is just too complicated. If separate boxes come into play the operating system for them is up for grabs. Microsoft think that is where Windows CE comes in. However, it could be Java; or even Amiga OS if someone pulled their finger out. For your office bundle box you could even go the Linux, KDE ( a GUI for Linux), Star Office route and ditch Microsoft altogether! Now, that is a project I would like to see. Who can get the cheapest office bundle box with no Microsoft software!

The next millennium is going to be interesting. The sands of time are shifting under Microsoft. Perhaps they should start making some friends again!

[Webmaster's Comments: I hope Brian won't mind me putting my oar in with some comments. I actually agree with the bulk of what he is saying. There appear to be three general views about Microsoft:

• People hate them - and in part some of that hate is based around professional jealousy.

• People love them.

• People have a love hate relationship - whereby they have a healthy respect for lots of their software, and continue to use it, but at the same don't want to see them completely rule the world. That's probably where I fit in!

Things are now changing, however, and after years of hardware trying to catch up with software just to run it we are now at a stage where people no longer need top of the range machines - like P400s for example. A reasonable mid range machine like a P200 or P233 will eat most applications these days. I am currently running a P166 with a 3.5 GB Hard drive and 32 Mb of RAM - and have no problems running Windows 95 along with Office 97. So software is not longer driving hardware anywhere near as much as it used to: and that presents a problem not just for the hardware vendors, but for Microsoft as well - because:

• There is no need for users to constantly be up-gunning their machines as they used to have to do.

• Having broken out of the loop of up-gunning machines (and at the same time getting their hands on new pre-installed software), users find that they are actually comfortable with their current software load, and carry on using it for much longer. At work I sit on a Network which largely still runs of Windows for Workgroups - although it will change this year to NT in order to get itself fully millennium compliant (I don't think we can blame Uncle Bill for that one!) and begin to fully embrace Web Technology on our INTRANET.

If Microsoft want to win back friends, one of the mains things they should address is the ability of their software to share and exchange data with other respectable brand products - something which they have also not been particularly good at of late - even within their own software suites!

Moving onto Brian's comments about Explorer versus File Manager (and by the way, you can use File Manager on Windows 95 if you wish - see how to set it up below), and web enabling of documents. To get your head around this you need to look beyond your monitor (and desktop), and Internet connection - and begin to comprehend the longer term vision of Bill Gates.

Bill Gates is credited with coining the phrase "The Information Super Highway" about four for five years ago. About three to four years ago he announced that Microsoft would embrace HTML. At the same time, Windows for Workgroups appeared to fill a communications gap which existed with Windows 3.11, and Windows 95 was under development. All Microsoft Operating Systems (OS) are now communications platforms within themselves - from Windows 95 to Windows 98 and all the versions of NT. Following the release of Windows 95, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 4 which integrated into the desktop, and Office 95 and Office 97 allowed the web enabling of documents. Of course, Internet Explorer is now part of Windows 98.

Why is all this happening? Simple really, our friend Bill had the vision to see the sheer power of communications, and embrace it fully. I'm not just talking about the Internet here, but large bespoke networks as well. If you sit on a large network connected by a 100 Mbps Ethernet backbone, and start to surf a local INTRANET, you will quickly begin to appreciate the power behind an integrated desktop, along with web enabled documents. Let's take a simple example:

I receive a paper document with contains five References. Currently I have to ask the clerical staff to retrieve the five references for me, then flog through the files manually. If I had received that as a web enabled Word document with the References all hyperlinked I would be able to retrieve them in an instant from the server database.

I initially found Explorer strange, but having got used to it I can understand the concept behind it. File Manager is only good for local work on your desktop - although I do acknowledge the under Windows for Workgroups you can connect to network drives. Explorer is designed to operate as part of the functional desktop, and is more tuned to communications. If you have installed IE4 you will find   boundary between Explorer and Internet Explorer merges - something which can be a little confusing at first. You can actually surf using Explorer, and on some web sites see the actual directory structure you are dealing with. Explorer is, therefore, a much more powerful tool than file manager, hence the difference in the way it works.

Now you may be asking yourself why should all this be built into the OS - well why not? When you buy a car, you don't normally buy the engine at one garage, the body in another and the wheels somewhere else. No you buy a complete package, and that's what Microsoft is providing - love it or hate it.

Knowledge is power, and to get the knowledge you need to be able to manage and assess information quickly. Bill Gates understands that, and is giving us the ability to do it. Make no mistake: modem  connections to the Internet are just the tip of the iceberg - there is much more to come with DSLs (Already available in the form of ISDN), ADSLs, HDSLs and the like. This is important not just for Joe Public to appreciate, but more importantly large Companies. It's not just a question of cobbling some computers together on a network; a strategy for maximising their use along with a policy for information flow and management is essential. The tools are already there, and they continue to develop. Those who can exploit their use and adapt will succeed. Those who can't will surely die! I could go on and on . . . . but I won't - Bill.

USING FILE MANAGER UNDER WINDOWS 95

File Manager still exists in Windows 95. Your will find the exe file under:

windows\winfile.exe having scrolled well down to get to it.

To get it onto your desktop right click on winfile.exe then create a shortcut. Simply drag the shortcut onto your desktop, and he presto you will see the familiar File Manager icon. Just go ahead and fire it up, and use it as you used to under Windows 3.1. You are, of course, limited to eight letter file name conventions and will find some of the longer ones appearing like this - for example: submis~1.doc. Enjoy using File Manager, although if I were you I would put more time into learning how to properly use Explorer! Bill

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