Seriously, quit bashing Microsoft for being successful.

March 14, 2008 on 11:58 pm | In Uncategorized |

Before I begin, I’d like to point out that I like open source. I use it and I contribute to it. I think the educational value, and the practicality of it in lots of situations warrants its existence, as we can see because it still exists. I relish the fact that both open source is here and helps me to learn and diffuse essential knowledge, and yet there is still a thriving market for proprietary software that makes ones skills profitable. But the bashing of software for profit, it’s senseless. I can’t stand it any more. What is the whole idea here? I’m a regular reader of Slashdot.org, an occasional reader of Digg.com, and various other news sites, and I’ve come across such an endless stream of anti-Microsoft and closed minded jealous raging rants against large companies that I just can’t stay silent on the issue any more. It makes my blood boil. I have so little respect for the ignorance of folks who can’t see their nose in front of their own green clouded eyeballs that I’m going to do some ranting of my own. Are these people really seeking the destruction of our economy? When did profit become a dirty word?

I’ll start with the obvious. What is the point of a for profit corporation? A for profit corporation is an entity which exists to make money. That’s why they call them “For-Profit.” It’s very subtle I know, but if you can’t fathom that, bear with me. I have heard it said that the government only allows for the establishment of such entities as corporations so that the public interest is served. This is true. However, this service of the public good isn’t what one might expect at first. I’d venture that the average American imagines that the public good is best served by creating a company that doles out employment and benefits, and that’s the best way to serve the public good. It isn’t. The best way for a business to serve the public good is to drag as much money from outside the economy into it. Wherever you put it, be it in the pockets of the higher ups, in the concrete that the buildings are built on, in the shops surrounding the offices, in the gas tanks of the employees as they drive to work. You can put it in the supply chain, in the pockets of the ISPs that host the traffic for their enormous websites, in the hands of the developers who use their platforms to generate their own Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and sell their own minor empires worth of software halfway across the country or indeed the world. Stash away cash in the refrigerators of the caterers who bring in executive lunches, or the company that handles the accounting and payroll transfer. Give it to the advertisers who make money on the fact that there is a reputable publication carried on the shoulders of giant companies, whose every word is read by scores of thousands of people all across the globe, and as a result of this exposure now have the opportunity to benefit the public good themselves. This giant corporation has given them a forum for their own little voice to be heard. In pursuing its own self-interests, the coattails of a large corporation become very long, and allow for countless other entities to hitch a ride around the entire globe on them. What the hell is wrong with that?

If you’re a tiny little ISV trying to start up your own business, it’s up to you to pick a good and viable business model that suits your target industry and market space well. If you’re attempting to fill a need that has already been filled by a dominant force and you do not have the clever product or wear-with-all, or business structure to support a takeover of that industry space, then you’re the one making bad decisions. You don’t have the ‘right’ to be successful, you have the right to try. If you can’t push the leader off his pedestal then you have chosen the wrong field. If you can’t establish a sufficient specialty niche for yourself, your business model is wrong. Equal opportunity is not the same as equal results. More generally, fairness and justice are two totally different things. Justice is a right which should be enforced, but fairness is not. It is just for the best product or marketing to prevail in an open competition scenario. It is not fair that it’s tough for a little guy to break in. Ultimately, and over time, the results become more pronounced than in any one decade or small years span — the customers vote for the winner with their dollars. The fact that a person decides they should be able to compete in the web browser market, for example, does not mean that he should automatically inherit an equal slice of the market share just for having laid a public claim to it. In the case of Firefox, for example, they give away the product for free, and still, they have a smaller market share. Does that mean that some government somewhere should come in now and mandate that X% of all people in the world now need to use Firefox? No, that’s silly, and we all know it is. IF Firefox really fills a glaring need that cannot be so filled by Internet Explorer, then it will be taken up by the section of the market that has this need. People aren’t the idiots that some would have you would believe they are. Users and developers of software don’t choose Internet Explorer because they ‘want evil to win.’ They do it because it’s more practical for whatever situation they are in. This practicality comes from two factors, one: they don’t know about the other one, and don’t see a need to look for a new solution to a problem they’ve solved, and two: perhaps there is some feature of IE, however ill-advised it may be to use it, in whatever situation that they perceive as being necessary (this might include Microsoft investment in their company.) That perception is theirs to have. It isn’t some governments to give or demand. Eventually even super-dominant industries fade and fail giving way to new and better ones. Sometimes large companies survive the evolution of disruptive technologies, sometimes they don’t. Nobody makes horse and buggey whips anymore. Should that have been protected on the grounds that it might not have been fair to let the auto makers have their run of the economy? It’s the way of the world, and the truth is that it works. Look at where we are now. We got here because it works. It’s not nice in some small, short term, slice of life views, where large swaths of workers are laid off or have to take pay cuts, but eventually these things correct themselves. Whole towns spring up and die around industries and it’s always been that way. Walmart and Microsoft didn’t invent the idea of inequity. Inequity is the driving force behind progress. It’s the inspiration for ambition. It drives those who have the will and the knowledge, and especially those with the will to develop the knowledge, to do ever better and be steadily more useful and more productive. It forces those who are on the losing side, who will not give up, to try harder to get on the winning side. In the process, the stuff you can find on the shelves at the super market grows in variety, and drops in prices.

If one company abuses its position of power and doesn’t put the needs of the customers first, they will eventually suffer the consequences. If Microsoft would gouge the IT industry because they believe they have a position of infallible dominance, they will find that one by one, year by year, enterprise agreement by enterprise agreement, they will lose their market share. If they don’t adjust to the new situation, eventually they too will fall off the map. In serving the needs of its customers, a large company serves its own interests. The customers of a super corporation are not just the folks who live in the neighborhood. They are the collateral benefactors of all of the industries that go into supporting that mega entity, and are supported BY the mega entity, and they can live anywhere in the world. Tell me now that this isn’t to be considered the good of the public.

Are the haters of large corporations to say that it is not good for a company to make money? Or maybe just not large amounts of it? Probably they’d say it’s the second one, but they’re forgetting the fact that for a large company to just exist on planet earth for a single day, they have to spend a lot of this money on other folks, like their employees, for one. They have to pay the bills, they have to hire advertisers, so ultimately it’s the mega-sized companies that bring you Frasier, Survivor, Oprah, and even (shudder) Lou Dobbs Tonight.

My ultimate beef though is not a practical one. It’s an idealogical one. We should encourage those who succeed to lead as examples for others so that they can see that success is something that’s worth pursuing. The more successful people and companies we have in this country (or any country,) the more successful the economy at large will be, and the higher the standard of living we’ll have. And individually, it’s rewarding to see your ideas through to production, and moreso on a mega-scale. Bill Gates has earned the right not to comb his hair on TV, and I’ll bet that even Brooke Shields would like the same right. The cowering masses of admirers aren’t what the real winners seek. They’re a side effect of doing something that nobody else has done, and doing it exceedingly and emphatically well. Everyone admires Bill Gates, whether or not they’ll admit it. He’s a man of action, a man of success, and for some, the picture of what they can not aspire to be. They think that because they can never become like him that they should instead try to seize some of that which he has created (as in with lobbyists or legislation.) To slice off a chunk for those who will never do the things he has done, and will not lift a finger to that end. That’s where they’re wrong. You can aspire to be as great as you like. You can pursue your path to the end of your days. Nobody is going to give it to you, and they shouldn’t. It’s the ‘hard’ part that makes it so great. If you don’t make it to be as successful as you had aimed by the time you die, you won’t be walking around cursing the fact. But at the risk of sounding like I’m making a bad pun, (or worse, a pro basketball coach,) “You’ve gotta play to win.”