PC Magazine:  John Dvorak's Inside Track
PC Magazine -- April 25, 1995

John C. Dvorak

Inside Track


A judge has thrown back the Justice Department's settlement with
Microsoft concerning the company's business practices and told
the Justice Department to start over. This edict may signal the
end of Microsoft as we know it. Bill Gates has confided to people
over the years that he's having fun riding roughshod over the
industry. He has indicated to at least one person that if the
government makes his life miserable by turning the company's
Redmond, Washington, headquarters into the center of a paperwork
blizzard unrivaled since the days of the IBM antitrust suit, then
he'll possibly retire.  Let's look at some of the possible
outcomes that can result from the situation.  While Microsoft
could be easily busted up into two, three, or four entities, the
most likely scenario is the company could end up as four separate
Microsofts. This should make everyone happy and punch up the
competition. The new companies would be Operating Systems,
Applications, Publishing, and Research. Separately they would
quickly become much more valuable than the current company. 
While nobody likes to admit it, Microsoft is suffering from many
of the same growing pangs found at IBM. I get more and more
reports about odd layers of Microsoft management mucking up deals
in ways that never before existed. In other words, a bureaucracy
is settling in at Microsoft as it does at every large
organization.  To see how a forced bust-up would work, look at
AT&T and compare it with IBM. IBM successfully fought off being
busted up, while AT&T got hacked to pieces.  Since then the
telecom scene in the U.S. has never been better, and the Baby
Bells are a hotbed of business activities. IBM, meanwhile, has
changed from a kick-ass tough guy, setting standards left and
right, to a comparatively meek, weakened bully that is now
bullied by Microsoft!  If Microsoft isn't busted up, the same
fate awaits it.  This is because winning isn't enough. As IBM
learned, the court system itself is to be avoided. Bill Gates and
Steve Ballmer don't have the time to sit twiddling their thumbs
while the sluggish judicial process grinds away toward a result.
Most have witnessed the wheels of justice slowly turning at the
O.J. Simpson trial. This trial is being expedited! Few people in
this active age can tolerate endless judicial exercise.  I have a
personal anecdote.  I was working for a newspaper and was called
to jury duty. Nobody wants a writer on the jury, and I was
confident I'd be bumped. But first I went to meetings and got
lectured about how to be a juror. A week went by. No case, but I
had to come in each and every day to check in. Another week,
still no case. Finally a case, which resulted in jury selection.
I was called up, bumped as expected, and told to go home for
good. It was a complete waste of time.  This futility (increased
by magnitudes) awaits many Microsoft executives. 
Mea Culpa DOOM Watch: I made the error of not trying hard enough
to get DOOM running on my OS/2 machine and got nailed by an army
of OS/2 users for being a hopeless dweeb.  I generalized and
mistakenly said DOOM doesn't run under Warp. Who says games
aren't played on high-end machines? In fact OS/2 plays more games
by far in its DOS session than Windows does and surely more than
Windows 95 ever will. This was largely the result of the efforts
of Dave Whittle at IBM, who was in charge of making games work
under Warp. In fact Warp has a database that sets the session
parameters for most of the games, and this database is updated by
user groups for newer games. Cool idea.  One trend you'll start
to see in the gaming world is DOOM clones. Later this year most
of the DOOM clone games will use real video as various MPEG
compression schemes come into play. Real actors and elaborate
video images will replace the cartoonish animations we're
accustomed to. I will assume that Warp will run them all. What's
interesting from my experience is that few if any of these
gamemakers know whether OS/2 will run their games.  Let me
reiterate the OS/2 situation for those wanting to take a look at
Warp. 

Advantages of OS/2 from my experience: 
(1) It has a superb upgrade to DOS;
(2) it doesn't need memory managers and other pricey utilities to 
    work better;
(3) it crashes less often than Windows;
(4) it's fast;
(5) it has a terrific ensemble of applications bundled.

Disadvantages of OS/2 from my experience:
(1) Sound card support is minimal;
(2) video card drivers can be flaky, thanks to mediocre code from 
    card makers;
(3) the code is still bulky and requires a CD-ROM to install;
(4) you run mostly Windows and DOS programs, because the          
    third-party OS/2 native applications available are not        
    mainstream and few are better than the best Windows           
    applications;
(5) some poorly coded Windows applications will not work.

Yes, I use Warp on all my machines except my Toshiba Portege, and
I'll probably put it there when I get it hooked to a CD-ROM. So
there!


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