Category Archives: Social comment

Microsoft = IBM

March 4, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Today John Dvorak wrote a pretty good article on why Microsoft’s stock is, in his words, dead money. Yeah, I know it’s on Murdoch’s news service, but Dvorak’s old school and knows his stuff.

It is so odd how things cycle. When I was hustling machines about five miles from the Redmond campus, I hated the IBM reps. Every one of them. They were not merely arrogant (though nothing like the Apple reps, the very snottiest of all), they were stupid (which the Apple reps were not). We were making 5% margin on IBM machines. We made 20% on others. Also, no one wanted IBM. Why should we sell it? Well, because it’s IBM. In reality, we were selling them at cost to keep our dealership. We couldn’t get to a profitable discount level with IBM unless we sold more. However, when we had a line on a big account and were willing to go out at cost just to advance our business with IBM, IBM would go direct and undercut us (and we were to understand and accept this, that ‘business was business’).

Their attitude was that everyone should want IBM and we should push everyone to IBM, even when a retarded goblin could see that IBM was the very worst deal going. Even when they came out with a good product, people didn’t want IBM’s MCA (‘MicroChannel’) architecture. They had a great portable and I had a client interested in two. He asked about the architecture, and I said ‘MCA’. His words, quoted exactly as I recall: “Not that f***ing MicroChannel.”

Microsoft, by contrast, was swift and slick and witty and inventive. It was eating Lotus’s lunch, WordPerfect’s lunch and just about everyone else’s. It was the smartest kids in the room. Some of its stuff was dumb (remember ‘Bob’?) but a lot of it took hold. Even IBM used Microsoft’s DOS (which M$ didn’t actually invent, but bought in desperation early on). And when IBM tried to make everyone buy OS/2, the market said ‘meh.’ You could tell the Microserfs when they came into the store. They looked like hippies gone full geek, total slobs. You didn’t make judgments. They were often FYIFV (‘f*** you, I’m fully vested’) tycoons and they might well write you a check for two brand new laser printers.

Now M$ is the dinosaur rather than the juggernaut. It invents nothing. It follows and tries to appropriate the market, and the market increasingly sneers. In the process of its rise, its ruthlessness made it many, many enemies who yearned for the day M$ would become irrelevant. I was one, as I labored on supporting M$ products in the workplace as an IT jock, basically forced to deal with them as the world was once forced to deal with IBM whether it liked IBM or not.

Dvorak’s right. MSFT is a lousy buy, even though its price has been flat for years while the market has risen. They’re not going to invent anything. If they weren’t sitting on so much cash, and if they didn’t have so much inertia due to the past with regard to installed base, they’d collapse. They are in much the same situation as IBM once was. They can say what they want, but people no longer care.

Addendum: As an editor, I find it fun to look back in hindsight at my past commentary, especially where it missed something. This is how we learn. My views held up for two years on this one, and then MSFT began a climb. Writing in 2020, it’s up over 200–about a 9x gain in seven years. What I learn from this is why I no longer buy separate issue stocks at all.

Human relations, Social comment

Fred Phelps and the anti-Vietnam War movement

March 2, 2011 jkkblog 4 Comments

Today I was reading that the Supreme Court upheld Fred Phelps’ right to picket and harass military funerals, part of their KKK-esque anti-gay crusade. I don’t have a firm opinion about what the Supreme Court should have done, partly because I don’t have J.D. after my name and I understand my limits of understanding, partly because I don’t have any respect for the SC to begin with, and partly because I have zero faith in law and the rule of law anyway. But having seen Team Fred in action from 40′ away myself, and being nearer fifty years old than forty, it did bring to mind one thing.

In our time, the military is openly, publicly and loudly glorified and adored; even a hint of anti-military scorn would get one a lot of angry reactions. If you are young today, you never knew a time when the military was unfashionable. I assure you that there was such a time: my own youth. Numerous reliable sources relate experiencing verbal abuse and degradation just for being in uniform, and especially for getting off the plane from Vietnam. Evidently it was so common it came to be expected, coped with by service people, and socially accepted to a degree. Which is not to say that the soldiers suffering it were unhurt by it; oh, no. It did at least tip them off to the kind of reaction society had in store for them. I was too young to have a view on this, but old enough to know of the social current. It lasted into the early 1980s, when I did put on a uniform a few times and get some small tastes of it myself. Imagine a ROTC unit that tended to de-emphasize uniformed presence on campus just to avoid stirring stuff up? I was in one.

Now, I am not sure that anti-Vietnam protesters ever picketed or disrupted an actual military funeral. We have general consensus that disrupting anyone’s funeral is disgusting, at any time for any reason. A lot of people found ways to oppose the Vietnam War without insulting Special Forces guys as “baby killer” in airports; fair enough. (Some people are uncomfortable with homosexuality, too, yet don’t approve of Phelps on any level.) But how different were the two extremes, really? How different were the fanatics in the airports, heaping scorn on some poor sod who got drafted and sent to the 1st Cav, survived and graduated, and then wanted to come home and get back to normal, from the Phelpsites I saw in a vacant lot in Pasco holding up signs advocating more military casualties? Fred Phelps and the airport harassers had more in common than I’ve heard anyone attest. Motivated by pure hate, both asserted the right to pour verbal abuse on targets who could not effectively fight back. The only difference today is that it’s no longer fashionable to abuse the military. Sadly, if Phelps had stuck to just disrupting funerals of AIDS deceased, there would be nowhere near the backlash against him, even though his conduct would be just as contemptible.

I sit, and I watch, and I marvel how social currents change people’s ethical compasses without most people noticing.

Addendum, nine years later: I read these words from my past in light of four years’ concerted effort to remove all democracy from our republic, and I think this: If a client had come to me in my capacity as an editor, presenting me with speculative fiction like the past five years, I would have had serious misgivings about it. I look back now and see a wannabe dictator mocking a POW veteran and not losing many supporters, and I see just how variable people’s ethical compasses truly are. And it confirms my belief that a fluid ethical compass is no ethical compass at all.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.