Why Should I Boycott Microsoft?      Until recently I never cared about Microsoft. I was never all that crazy about DOS or Windows; but since it was the dominant environment, I went with it so that I could have access to a wider selection of software and games and such. But since then, Microsoft has gone from being “dominant” to being “dictatorial.”      People are acting like lemmings at a cliff’s edge, throwing away superior products made by MS competitors and switching to third-rate MS software for everything from word processing to money management, on the grounds that it’s somehow “more integrated” with Windows and therefore less likely to hang, crash, lose data, etc. Then, when the MS stuff keeps on doing all the stuff they were trying to avoid, they tell themselves, “Maybe the upgrade will be better,” and buy the next version, because they’ve already committed to using the MS product. Through this strange bit of circular logic, MS products get worse and worse, but people buy them more and more! Meanwhile, the people who are working hard to create high-quality products go bankrupt, and soon MS owns the entire computer industry.      It’s already a cliché that the day will soon come when nothing is done without a computer, and if MS owns the computer industry, that means that nothing will be done without third-rate products infecting everything with a kind of “incompetence as usual” mindset. Already, for example, UPS does all of its shipping, receiving, and tracking with MS software. And if you’ve ever had UPS lose one of your packages, you can relate to just how bad that is for consumers.      There are 4 good reasons to boycott MS now, while it’s still possible to stop them: 1.) Microsoft products are just plain shoddy workmanship      This is the least “philisophical” and most “practical” reason.      Recently at work, I got a new, super-duper desktop computer. Its operating system is Windows NT 4.0, the current “great hope” of the MS Empire, the operating system that was supposed to plug the holes and fix the bugs in Windows 95 (which was supposed to plug the holes and fix the bugs in Windows 3.x, which was supposed to plug the holes and expand the features of DOS).      Guess what? It doesn’t work any better than its predecessors did. Until recently, every time I started my computer, I got the message: “At least one piece of hardware failed at startup. [OK]” I am not exaggerating. The computer people at my office knew about the error (everyone in the office with NT got it). Until somebody finally sat down and spent several hours tracking it down and figuring out how to fix it, they just shrugged and said, “Well, the computer seems to work, so just click ‘OK’ and ignore it.” That may be fixed, but the video card still occasionally resets itself at random, and the printer driver often decides that, what the heck, it doesn’t want to work just now. I tell people that my new computer’s speedy chip enables it crash faster than any other computer in the building.      As part of my job, I’m forced to use MS Powerpoint, a “presentation/slide show” application designed to make briefings and reports for the people at my office. This piece of software is so bad, it gives me stomach aches. It crashes regularly. It eats system resources, making my 250 MHz Pentium with 132 MB RAM crawl like a 486 running other software. It scrambles fonts at random. It doesn’t interact well with other programs (usually crashing if you try to make them interact, making the much-hyped multitasking environment—and the ability to cut-and-paste from one program to another—completely worthless). Many’s the time I’ve contemplated bringing my copy of WordPerfect Suite 8 from home to work so I could use WordPerfect Presentations; but I’m afraid the tech services people there would have kittens.      Furthermore, my company has decided to abandon WordPerfect and switch to MS Word. MS Word may be fine for writing letters or simple layouts, but for someone like me, who does a lot of heavy-duty document formatting, this is like being forced to dig the Holland Tunnel with a bent spoon. WordPerfect is more flexible, more sophisticated, and more elegant, not to mention simply being more reliable and not using so much memory that no other program can run while you’ve got it open. So why the switch? First, because MS Word comes with MS Office 97 and is therefore included “free” with Excel, Powerpoint, and Access, and second, because it’s made by Micro$oft and is therefore percieved to be “more integrated with Windows.” It isn’t; but the commercials say it is, and for some reason, the managers believed the commercials instead of the people who use the software every day (who they either didn’t ask, asked then ignored the response, or, as in my case, asked after the decision had already made in a lame attempt to look like they’d thought about what they were doing). 2.) Microsoft is deliberately trying to destroy its competition      I don’t mean this in the sense of marketing hype. MS isn’t trying to dominate the market by offering superior products at great prices; MS is trying to be the only market in town by driving everyone else out of business. Their preferred method is to copy someone else’s invention (in the case of Excel and the graphic-user-interface) then flood the market with their own version so that other versions don’t get used and eventually fall by the wayside. Their next-preferred method is to buy a product that does the desired thing, put their own name and a face-lift onto it and sell it cheap as their own product (in the case of MS-DOS, which was originally QDOS, or MS Internet Exploiter, which was originally Mosaic). They bought WebTV for just this purpose, and tried to buy Intuit, the people who make Quicken (which is an excellent product and the only competition for “MS Money”).      However you may happen to stand on the virtues of a free market versus a regulated one, in America right now, it’s theoretically illegal for a single company to have a monopoly. That’s why AT&T was broken up, and part of the reason that the Department of Justice keeps investigating MS. My personal theory is that MS did its recent “bailout” deal with Apple to keep the DOJ off of its back (so they can say “Look, we got competition: Apple!”), and also to further its current cause, which is to take over the Internet — or at least keep it starved and inoffensive until they own the cable industry. (Why do you think MSNBC and the incredible WebTV buyout occurred?) 3.) Microsoft wants to dominate everything it touches (actually an extension of no. 2)      JAVA is a language being developed for Web applications that will run programs on any system, be it DOS, Win95, Mac, OS/2, Unix, etc., etc. This scares the heebie-jeebies out of MS, because it means that there’s software out there that isn’t dependent on them any more! So they tried to “co-opt” JAVA by creating their own set of “Windows-specific extensions” and incorporating them directly into development packages. In other words, these are parts of JAVA that only run in Windows—which is exactly opposite of the whole point of JAVA in the first place! When that didn’t work, they started trying to pressure Sun (the makers of JAVA) to release it to the public domain, claiming that to be the only way JAVA could really be an “open” standard. (They want Windows to be considered the “standard” operating system, but you don’t see them offering to release that, do you?)      Keep in mind that other companies (such as Apple) do this same thing with JAVA; it’s one of the basic ideas that JAVA was based on. Sun sets the basic architecture, and other companies come up with innovative ways to use it. What’s different about Micro$oft is that (A) they’re so market-dominant that their changes overwhelm everyone else, and (B) they don’t point out Micro$oft-specific functions as being just that. Thus, somebody writing a program with “Micro$oft JAVA” might incude a M$-only feature, thinking that it was a cross-platform feature.      America Online was once a staunch enemy of MS; now suddenly, Internet Exploiter is their built-in browser, and AOL shoves it down your throat. If you try to use Netscape, AOL punishes you by not letting you use the MAILTO: HTML tag, and by not letting you use Netscape to access Newsgroups.      There are plenty more examples, but I don’t want to belabor the point. I’ll just add one little thing: Do you find the little “talking paperclip” in Office 97 as insulting and vaguely creepy as I do? Well this is what MS thinks of its customers: dim-witted children who want to have cartoon characters tell them what to do. I used to think the MacOS smiley face was smarmy, but compared with Microsoft’s patronizing attitudes, MacOS seems very reasonable. 4.) Bill Gates is doing evil things with money I helped him get!      This is the most philosophical arguement, but really this is the one that most pisses me off.      Bill Gates is buying “the exclusive electronic rights” to museum collections, and buying up all the pieces of our culture that he can get. That means, for example, if you want to view a great piece of Russian art or one of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches on the web, or display it in a computer program, you have to pay a fee to Bill, because he bought them all! Can you believe it? Never mind the question of how did they come to be “for sale,” which is a whole other ten-page rant: how can any single person claim to “own” these things?      Note here, that I’m not objecting to his buying the actual, physical artworks in question. If the current owner of the art wants to sell and Bill wants to buy, that’s their business. I am objecting to the idea that he wants “exclusive” ownership of all electronic copies, even (for example) scanned tourists’ photos. I object to this in the same way I object to the laws against recording your favorite TV shows with your VCR.      What’s next? Buying the “exclusive electronic rights” to the Bible? Maybe he’ll pay off the government debt—in return for the original manuscript of the Declaration of Independence. I don’t think Bill has political aspirations in any specific way—I think he just wants to own everything and everybody. And people are just rolling over and letting him get away with it!      Well not me. And I hope, not you either. There is no legal or ethical way to prevent him from spending his own money as he chooses—but he’s certainly not getting any more of my money to choose to spend that way!

Okay, How Do I Boycott Microsoft?      Well, the obvious answer is don’t buy or use Microsoft products, and make a point of seeking out and using competitors’ products. Take it from somebody who’s been using desktop machines for several years now (namely me): there may be some additional up-front expense, but the amount of time, effort, and money you’ll save in the long run from not constantly crashing, not having to use counter-intuitive, memory-hogging, production-slowing products, and not being forced to upgrade every year chasing vaporware “fixes” to problems that should never have happened in the first place will more than make up the difference. To coin a phrase, not using MS products pays for itself in just a few short weeks!      A very important corollary is: don’t take anything that Microsoft offers you for free! Most companies give out free samples of their products to demonstrate how good their product is. MS gives out free software to get people to feel “I’m getting a browser (word processor, spreadsheet, whatever) for free, why should I buy one from someone else?” Then, one or two “upgrades” down the road, when there are no competing companies to switch to, you find that your Office97 won’t work with Windows99; you’ll either have to buy the $300 upgrade or toss all the work you did in your “free” older version.      Of course, you (and a lot of people you know) may be firmly squeezed in Microsoft’s grip, due to “compatibility” issues or other such phantoms. Getting Microsoft’s fingers off of your throat probably seems like an insurmountable goal. But before you throw up your hands and say, “it can't be done,” take a look at the following points: Point No. 1: There isn’t a MS program out there that doesn’t have a competing product, which is usually superior      I’m not exaggerating about this. “WordPerfect vs. Word,” for example, is an old debate in the word-processing world, and despite the claims of Microsoft’s marketing machine (which doesn’t admit that there was ever a version of WordPerfect after 5.2 for DOS), WordPerfect, now owned by Corel and on a hearty version 8, is still better.      This fact does seem to contradict the idea of Micro$oft as a monopoly power; after all, if there are competing products, they aren’t a monopoly, right?      The answer, of course, is that if the competing products are kept out of the market by exclusionary deals, shady or outright fraudulent marketing, and deliberate blockading, then you might as well call Micro$oft a monopoly, regardless of how many competing products there are.      Did you know that Macs can run Windows software? For about $150 you can buy VirtualPC, which is a “Windows emulator” for the Macintosh. If you switch to a Mac, you don’t have to give up any of your Windows programs. (Although, most programs worth having exist in a Mac-native version which is usually superior to the PC version anyway.) PCs, as far as I know, don’t have any software that allows them to run Mac software, and there are thousands of Mac titles not available in a PC version!      Here’s a small list of alternatives to use instead of Microsoft products:

Microsoft Product	Some Big-Name Competitor(s)
Windows 95/Windows NT	MacOS (with VirtualPC or an emulation card if you must run Windows apps) OS 2/Warp Unix Novell Netware/IntranetWare Linux
Office 97	Corel WordPerfect Suite Lotus SmartSuite 97 ClarisWorks 4.0
MS Word	Corel WordPerfect 8.0/WordPerfect Mac 3.2 (Note: as terrific as WordPerfect 8 for Windows is compared to MS Word, WordPerfect Mac is rather weak. Hopefully Corel will fix this soon.) Lotus Word Pro ClarisWorks
MS Powerpoint	Corel WordPerfect Presentations Lotus Freelance Presentations (I’ve heard ClarisWorks has one, too, but I’ve never used it.)
MS Excel	Corel Quattro Pro Lotus 1-2-3 ClarisWorks Spreadsheet
MS Access	Corel Paradox Claris FileMaker Pro
MS Internet Explorer	Netscape Navigator/Communicator HotJava Lynx Cyberdog Cyberjack Galahad InterGo (Lotus) Notes Web Navigator tcpCONNECT4
MS Frontpage	Adobe Pagemill Allaire Home Site Netscape Communicator Hot Dog dozens of shareware products
MS Visual C++	Codewarrior (also does JAVA, cross-platform, etc.) Symantec C++ Borland C++ Builder

Point No. 2: Industry “standards” are illusions at best, traps at worst      At some point, some palooka is going to tell you that you should use MS products because they’re an “industry standard.” This is roughly equivalent to teenagers telling each other to smoke or do drugs because “everybody’s doing it.”      I also call this the “lemming argument.” You know the old cliché about “if all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do that too?” That’s basically what mindlessly purchasing what someone tells you is “the standard” is like. When you buy a product because someone tells you “it’s a standard,” rather than because it’s a superior product, you encourage laziness and shoddy workmanship. If you don’t seek out (nay, demand!) the highest quality, you won’t get it. It’s true of cars and telephone service, it’s true of computers and software. Shouldn’t you buy the best product, rather than the “default” product?      On the other hand, you might not be in control of what software you use. If you’re having MS products shoved down your throat in the workplace, for example, you’re in a trap that a lot of other people face. I’ve actually had the computer-services people where I work stand there and tell me that they hate MS products ... but they turn around, buy the software, and send big checks to M$ anyway. This is nuts!      Standards are a matter of perception. If I tell you that Product A is an industry standard, and you then tell your friends that Product A is a standard, and then they tell their friends, suddenly everyone will go out and buy Product A. Keeping that in mind, here’s an experiment: next time you talk to someone about software, say to them, “Why are you still using MS (fill-in-the-product)? That’s just about fallen by the wayside. I heard that (a competitor product) is becoming the industry standard now.” Stick to that point of view, even if they argue it. See how long it is until they’ll be saying the exact same thing.      Can you imagine what it would be like if, for example, company telephones were bought this way? “Well, the ExpensiveMate 3500 telephone cuts you off, occasionally dials the wrong number for no good reason, and won’t let you talk to anyone using an AT&T phone. Still, last month’s issue of ExpensiveMate Magazine said that it was a revolutionary product and rapidly being adopted as an industry standard. I guess I’d better switch our phone system over to it.” Point No. 3: Sooner or later, the Department of Justice will have to act      Janet Reno just slapped Micro$oft upside the head with charges that it is “violating terms of a 1995 court order barring it from imposing anticompetitive licensing terms on manufacturers of personal computers” and that “Microsoft is unlawfully taking advantage of its Windows monopoly to protect and extend that monopoly and undermine consumer choice.” Them’s fightin’ words! I don’t have any particular faith in the DOJ to do any real damage to M$ any more than I think that the “tobacco settlement” will get people to stop smoking, but at the very least it’s an indicator of public opinion.      This is my opinion, not a documentable fact, but I can’t see any way to avoid it: sooner or later, public outcry will cause the DOJ to take action. They might force MS to break into two companies, one for operating systems and one for applications, for example. When that happens, you can bet that all the MS software that companies are willfully trapping themselves into being dependent on will go up in a cloud of red tape. If you don’t let yourself get into the trap, you won’t be caught when it snaps shut. Point No. 4: Macintosh is still the preferred platform for graphics, proving that MS can be opposed!      Windows PCs can do all of the graphics work that Macs can do, but they do it slower, with more hangs, crashes, and stupid system errors. Most of those newspapers, magazines, trade journals, and other people who have been claiming that Apple is at death’s door for the past 15 years, use Macintosh computers to do their layout. Go figure. Adobe and Macromedia and Claris employees make a good, solid living by marketing largely to Mac users, and Adobe’s recent strong earnings were due to “surprisingly strong” Mac sales, which means that a non-Microsoft market has to be out there!      Well, if the graphics community, as fractious, anarchic, and disorganized a group as ever there was, can all agree not to use MS, why can’t everyone else? Is it just that graphic artists are inherently more painstaking than other types of users, and therefore have higher standards? I find that hard to believe.      Is it any coincidence that a month and a half after Steve Jobs at Apple announced at Macworld Expo that Apple was going to work on renewing and strengthening its position in the graphics market, that Bill Gates announced at the Seybold conference that Windows NT was going to aggressively enter that market? If Steve Jobs had announced that Apple was going to strengthen its position in the Raw Sewage market, what do you want to bet that three weeks later Microsoft would be announcing “Plumbing98?” Other Ways to Help      If you’re already “Microsoft-free,” or as much so as you can get, there are other ways you can help the boycott effort as well. The best way, of course, is to come up with a product so superior that it’ll blow Wintel right outa the water despite the inertia of corporate IT! :) But since we can’t all be computer geniuses, there are other ways to fight back.      There are plenty of Boycott sites, of which the best is Boycott Micro$oft. Visit these sites, make links to them on your own web page if you have one, tell your friends about them. Nominate them as “cool sites” and “best of the web” locations.      Another way is to just plain tell people about how bad MS is, and point out the alternatives. A lot of people think there are no alternatives; I’ve had more than one person look me straight in the eye and say, “It’s too late to stop Microsoft now.” But as I pointed out with the list above, there are still alternatives, and these must be used. You don’t have to be a pest, or scream and yell and rant; in fact, it’s better if you don’t. Just reiterate your position, firmly and calmly. And don’t let anyone tell you you’re wrong, unless they have something more substantial than hearsay to back it up with.

Who Else is Boycotting Microsoft?
	Boycott Micro$oft This is by far the best of the “anti-Micro$oft” pages; it doesn’t resort to vulgarity or baseless personal attacks on Bill. It simply states its case in a reasonable (and devastating) fashion. It was largely the inspiration for my own boycott page.
	Sun Microsystems One of the giants of network server manufacturers, and developer of JAVA, Sun Microsystems refuses to support Windows NT. Sun’s machines run Unix only. “If you want a computer that supports NT, go to Hewlett Packard.” Now that’s impressive! Now they’re suing MS over JAVA, and more power to ’em, I say!
	Jason’s Boycott Micro$oft Page Jason probably wouldn’t approve of my pages, seeing as how they reside on AOL (currently considered by many to be a M$ ally), but it’s still a nice page. (For the record, I’m trying to fight back against Microsoft’s slowly-gathering strangehold on AOL before just abandoning them all together. When I leave AOL, it’ll be for their lousy mail service and slow web access...)
	The Boycott Microsoft Campaign Includes “the Superlist of Anti-Microsoft sites.”
	The Green Ribbon Campaign Not a terribly pretty page, but his heart is in the right place.

What’s New? (Updated October 21st, 1997)      There are some new developments of interest to anti-M$ folks in general, and readers of this page in particular.      Janet Reno just slapped Micro$oft upside the head with charges that it is “violating terms of a 1995 court order barring it from imposing anticompetitive licensing terms on manufacturers of personal computers” and that “Microsoft is unlawfully taking advantage of its Windows monopoly to protect and extend that monopoly and undermine consumer choice.” Them’s fightin’ words! Microsoft is now under a court order to stop forcing companies to bundle Windows and Exploiter, until the case is settled.      Sun Microsystems is suing Micro$oft for their attempt to cripple JAVA—and more power to ’em! This may be a case of Goliath vs. Goliath, but every little bit helps.      Ralph Nader, consumer-advocate-at-large, is organizing a conference in Washington, DC to discuss Micro$oft’s anticompetitive and generally monolithic behavior. “First of all, apart from antitrust considerations, it’s just not healthy for any economy and society to have one company play such a dominant role in even one field. It’s even less healthy if that company has a dominant role in all kinds of commercial and industrial sectors. This isn’t just John D. Rockefeller trying to dominate the oil industry. This is a company trying to be the toll collector at gateway after gateway on the information superhighway, using, in effect, a closed-door business strategy. The result is, innovation suffers. Venture capital for potential competitors dries up. Venture capitalists will say, ‘Why bother? Even if company X comes up with something that’s good, it’s not going to be able to deal with Microsoft’s power.’” You tell ’em, Ralph!      Finally, I’ve been asked by a visitor to create a banner for links to this page. Ever the opportunist, I whipped one out almost immediately! :) Here it is:      It’s 400x40, the standard size of “Link Exchange” and other popular banners. As long as it links to this page, you’re free to download it, post it on your own page, put it on T-shirts, or whatever! :)

Some Fun Stuff      I don’t generally go for “Bill Gates is Satan” or “Kill Bill!” pages, so I haven’t included any of that crud here. But here are some fun things I’ve created, found, or snagged for your enjoyment... My own creation ... anti-M$ wallpaper.      If you’re forced to use M$ Windows, NT, or other crud at work, protest! Just convert this from .GIF to .BMP format (or use the “Save As Wallpaper” feature if your browser has it) to annoy the help desk folks. It’s most effective if you set your Desktop color to white and your Desktop pattern to [none].

Separated at birth? You decide!
The famous “1984” ad for Apple.	Bill Gates, 1 year after the release of Win95.

So Sue Me, It’s Cute Assistant inspector Gracie examining the back of a Boycott Micro$oft bumper sticker to ensure the glue is up to their demanding standards.

Mac Today Magazine      As the splash page says: It’s a PC-slammin’, butt-kickin’, Windows trashin’, totally biased look at the Macintosh for the “I’m sick of the Apple bashing” Mac fanatic deep inside us all!      MacEvangelism tends to leave me cold, but Mac Today is so well-written and so damn funny that I’d read it even if it wasn’t bashing Micro$oft. Also provides lots of cold, hard facts about why Macs are better than PCs, and shows how they’re not quite so dead as the news media would have you believe. Even dedicated Mac-bashers would have a hard time giving an intelligent rebuttal to these folks.

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