posted 05-16- 05:29 PM            

If it's MS's product, it's open season. If it's a little guy in a garage, and he's charging a fair price, hands off.

posted 05-17- 07:42 AM            

Q.Did you have discusions with Apple in which you were trying to get Apple to agree to help you undermine Sun?

A. There was some discussion about what runtime APIs Apple would support, whether they would support some of ours or some of Sun's. I don't think I was involved in any discussions myself with Apple about that.

Q. Well, let me show you a document and try to probe what you mean by being involved. Let me give you a copy of a document that has been previously marked as Government Exhibit 265.

A portion of this document is an e-mail message from you to Paul Maritz and others and the portion I'm particularly interested in, and you can read as much of the three-line e-mail as you wish, is the last sentence, which reads, "Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do to undermine Sun?"

Did you send this e-mail, Mr. Gates, on or about Aug. 8, 1997?

A. I don't remember sending it.

Q. Do you have any doubt that you sent it?

A. No. It appears to be an e-mail I sent.

Q. Well, let me show you a document that has been previously marked as Government Exhibit 268. This is a document bearing Microsoft document production stamps M598 0110952 through 53.

Q.The first part of this purports to be a copy of an e-mail from Don Bradford to Ben Waldman with a copy to you, Mr. Maritz and others on the subject of "Java on Macintosh/IE Control."

12 Did you receive a copy of this e-mail or about February 13, 1998?

A. I don't know.

Q. Do you have any reason to doubt that you received a copy of this e-mail?

A. No.

Q. The first paragraph reads, "Apple wants to keep both Netscape and Microsoft developing browsers for Mac -- believing if one drops out, the other will lose interest (and also not really wanting to pick up the development burden.) Getting Apple to do anything that significantly/materially disadvantages Netscape will be tough. Do agree that Apple should be meeting the spirit of our cross license agreement and that MacOffice is the perfect club to use on them."

Do you have an understanding of what Mr. Bradford means when he refers to MacOffice as the "perfect club to use on Apple"?

A. No.
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"There won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go." -Bill Gates

"The internet is central to everything we are doing." -Bill Gates

"Winning internet browser share is a very, very important goal for us."
-Bill Gates

"It seems clear that it will be very hard to increase browser market share on the merits of IE 4 alone. It will be more important to leverage the OS asset to make people use IE instead of Navigator." -Microsoft manager Christian Wildfeuer (from an internal memo dated February 24, 1997)

"Pitting browser against browser is hard since Netscape has 80% marketshare and we have 20% ... I am convinced we have to use Windows-this is the one thing they don't have..." -Microsoft Vice President James Allchin

"...[Windows 98] must be a killer on shipments so that Netscape never gets a chance..." -Microsoft Vice President James Allchin

"We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free." -Microsoft Vice President Paul Maritz

"The idea that people know what they want is wrong. They need to be pulled through the Web." -MSN Vice President Laura Jennings

"Microsoft does not like negative or even objective press coverage and they have a tendency to be a bully about it. If something appears that they don't like, they have the ability to punish the publication."
-Bob Ingle, Knight-Ridder New Media president

"Everybody in the communications business is paranoid of Microsoft, including me." -News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch

"The common wisdom is that the person to worry about the most right now is Gates.... I think we've got to be careful." -Disney CEO Michael Eisner

"Anyone who doesn't fear Microsoft is a fool."
-Eric Benhamou, 3Com CEO
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posted 05-17- 07:36 PM            

I don't even particularly care who's product it is - the publishers of software feel that they are losing revenue to piracy so they raise prices to compensate and begin to implement protection schemes for their software that are getting to the point of being invasive (read about WinXP to see what I mean). Whether the companies are losing revenue or not is irrelevant - they feel they are so they compensate for it. Warez means higher prices and more annoying protection schemes that have a negative effect on me. It's alot like car insurance - if the car theft rate of cars parked on the street in your area goes up then so will your rates... even if you park your car in your garage everytime. I say fry the pricks who make things harder on the rest of us who are actually honest people... then fry the companies that still try to charge outrageous prices.

Yeah, Bill Gates is obscenly rich... but jsut imagine how rich he'd be if every copy of MS software in use had actually been purchased....scary, isn't it?

posted 05-17- 11:32 PM               

I use it sometimes, I really think sometimes its the companyies own fault, like 3ds max, If I was a commercial user I woudn't have a problem with paying full price, but as a home user who makes no money of anything made I think its a little insane to pay for it.

I don't pay for windows cause its a buggy piece of shit, but since its what 99 percent of the rest of the world uses I pretty much have no choice. Sorry folks, apple and linux arn't a choice yet.

I think it was all part of microsofts plan to let windows be pirated. What better way to spread the use of your product?

posted 05-18- 05:31 AM               

BTW, one final thing, really and truly, how come they cant press down more firmly on Warez when its so easy to find?

posted 05-18- 10:00 AM            

------------------
7./JG3_Himdog out
www.luftwaffe.net

posted 05-18- 11:30 AM            

Man, this sucks. What a pain in the ass. Oh well, I don't plan on upgrading my OS any time soon, Win98 is really stable with all my sims.

Thanks HD,

posted 05-18- 11:33 AM            

Werner

posted 05-18- 12:27 PM            

Werner

posted 05-18- 12:45 PM            

XXXXXXX,

On the Data Widgets download, I was looking for a patch for version 3.12 that I had seen in April but can't seem to find now at the Infragistics site. I thought this file might be the one, but it appears I was mistaken.

As to our use of Data Widgets, I personally have been using the tools since 1996 both at home for private development and at work. The Sheridan Component Suite was the primary tool I recommended that our IS group purchase and we have been generally satisfied with the toolsets. We will likely continue to use them until we conclude our evaluation of the competing products.

I participated in the Ultragrid beta, and I have to admit that I was not overly impressed with the feature set nor the cost. The Infragistics/Sheridan merger caught most of us napping, and I share the sentiments of most of the developers I know in decrying the use of the product activation feature of the installer.

I have read Infragistics most recent press release on this subject. I think that following Microsoft's lead on product activation may cost you more than you anticipate. You do not have the installed customer base that most MS products enjoy and any eroding of your base due to the ill will generated by this change will hurt. If MS loses 10,000 sales (or even 100,000) due to customers moving to Lotus Smart Suite or Corel Word Perfect because they hate the product activation feature, they likely will barely notice it. If Infragistics loses 1000 (or possibly 10,000) sales for the same reason, I think they'll notice it! We also feel that the claims of lost sales due to piracy are specious - every developer I've met using your tools paid for them whether they ever registered them or not. And I don't think there's a cottage industry out there in Taiwan or even Topeka that's taking a lot of time to bootleg your tools.

In short, we have enjoyed using the Sheridan tools; they made our job easier and helped pay our salaries for a number of years. They were solid easy to use tools. And the eight developers in our area will be looking for another vendor for similar tools - along with any others we can convince.

Those in your company, at Microsoft, and any other software publisher who wants to treat developers (and users in general) as criminals before the fact should remember the lessons that Ashton-Tate and Lotus had to learn the hard way.

XXXXXXXXXX
Sr. Programmer/Analyst

I received the following reply from Infragistics and thought you might be interested...

XXXXXX

Dear XXXXXX,

XXXXX took the opportunity to forward your views to me and I hope you don't
mind me personally answering you. We do very much care about our customers,
and are very concerned about the impact of our decision on our market.

The main reason we instituted this process is not to stop intentional
piracy, but to curb the costly practice in primarily large corporations, but
in many customers of all sizes as well, of casual copying. Developer A buys
a legitimate license (our old license was restricted to one CPU, period) and
puts it on machine A.

Two weeks later, Developer B needs to work on the project for an hour, and
copies the project and our OCX to machine B. Three weeks later Developer C
takes over machine B for a new project and our OCX is on there. At some
point he moves to machine C and the proliferation of the product continues.
The only legal licensed copy is machine A's copy.

This is not a supposition. The number of customers who have come to us
since activation to explain they need multiple copies as they discovered
(through activation) that they had many illegal copies they didn't realize
they had is not insignificant, and has validated the need for activation to
us.

I'm sure XXXXX charges for every diagnostic test it performs. Components
should not be treated differently. While you may think all developers as
are scrupulous as you are, the fact is they are not. I'm not saying they
are intentionally dishonest, just casual in their concern for obeying the
license.

Activation was not something we did lightly, but only instituted after
careful quantification of the extent of loss we were suffering. And that
loss was significant enough for us to take this action.

Again we do care about your business, and I would like to take the
opportunity to talk with you further on this issue. Please feel free to
call me at your leisure.

Truly yours,
XXXXXXXX

XXXXXX,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my rather testy reply to XXXXX and I hope she understands that it had nothing to do with her original message. However, one of the things to which many of the vendors in our segment of the programming market (VB) are being less than sensitive is the fact that many of us are at a crossroads in respect to our choice of programming tools. Many of us find the new Microsoft .NET initiative as an unneeded distraction and a potential roadblock in our effort to meet production goals and deadlines. Few of us in the trenches have the time or the incentive to pick up a new toolset let alone deal with radical changes in the functionality in the 3rd party component tools, let alone trying to justify to management why we must completely replace our current tools with more expensive and unproven technologies. A number of prominent developers in our industry agree and Microsoft felt strongly enough about their reservations to fly many of them to Redmond to discuss it and, eventually make some rather weak concessions in VB.NET.

In the normal course of a day, we have to deal with solving the problems of the lab, dealing with the idiosyncracies and synergies of VB, Windows, Sheridan Data Widgets, Crystal Reports, SQL Server, networking, installation software, hardware, etc. We have no problem with these things - it's the reason we were hired and why they pay us the big bucks (yeah, right!). I don't need to add to that heap some new scheme for addressing supposedly rampant copying of a component toolkit. I can only recall two times in recent memory where we have had a problem with "violation" of the letter of Sheridan's license. One occurred when a contractor used a 1.x version of Data Widgets on a project; when we had to take over support of it, we discovered that we had no copy of the component. A quick call to Sheridan to order it solved the problem (at the time we needed it the 1.x version was no longer available at retail). In the second instance, we had a developer who left the company and took a copy of the software with him. We were out of compliance for the time it took to order a new copy.

Add to this that it has been my experience with Sheridan and many other software companies that the level of support available immediately is dependant upon the amount of money you or your employer are willing to spend for it. Most developers I know are reconciled to the inevitable delay in exchanging e-mails and waiting in queues on the telephone to solve a problem. I do not plan to add to that the time it would take to get a product activated on a non-networked workstation or when 'Net traffic is high and servers are slow in responding or the myriad other problems that Infragistics has not foreseen.

I suspect that most corporate shops work in the same manner (those with which I've been involved do). The scenario you cite with developers A, B, and C seems at most a straw man argument - we don't have developers dropping in for an hour or even a day's worth of programming and needing installation of tools (their contribution would be suspect in any case). Even with your ABC example, most reputable IS shops would make sure that developer C got a legal copy for use on a daily basis. At most, we might have been out of compliance with the letter of Sheridan's license for the length of time it takes for corporate orders to clear the obligatory red tape of purchasing for a new employee. If Infragistics intends to take us all to task for a lack of compliance for that period, then we do need to look elsewhere quickly.

Are all corporate shops as scrupulous? No. Are we as scrupulous as I think we are? Likely not - with VB and Delphi there are plenty of "developers" lurking in every corner of the company. As for those you mentioned who found they were out of compliance by virtue of the product activation feature - how did that happen? Isn't that a part of the "new" installation routines and if they have the new software they either A) purchased it or B) were stupid enough to call up and admit that they were trying to install the software illegally. Unless you've really invented some new technology, any "bootleg" copies of the Classic Sheridan software already installed will continue to be used illegally.

Anyway, I have no problem with a company wanting to be paid for everyone of its products in use. I do have a problem with being regarded as a criminal before the fact and being forced to deal with yet another potential thorn in my side. Look to the lessons of the past ten years. While being pirated to the extreme (and vilified to boot) Microsoft was still able to grow to dominate the desktop with Windows, Office, Visual Studio, IE, etc. without resorting to product activation. The fact that they are moving to it means that they also have lost sight of these lessons and may yet suffer a mighty fall. There are many popular commercial products that started life as shareware that was never paid for, but because of the compelling nature of the software they were able to dominate their niche.

Again, I thank you for taking the time to respond. I remain unconvinced and suspect that all of us doing Windows based software development will be dealing with some painful issues in the coming years.

XXXXXXXXX
Sr. Programmer/Analyst

Like I said, who pays in the end?

Himdog out

posted 05-18- 01:50 PM               

MP3 is a lossy compression, It throws out info. Thats bad in my book.

So I only listen to it when I have to.

I'll be buying the new tool cd, It also help that I don't see alot of music coming out that I like so buying a cd a couple times a year (IF THAT) doesn't break the bank.

About windows XP, Pirates have already cracked the betas, 3dsmax was supposed to be uncrackable, It was suppposed to take many life times of computer time to pull off.

The crack was out 24-48 hours later, The guy who was talking about it in the article said there was probly only about 10 people in the world at the time that could have pulled it off, And someone did.

What we really need though is to stop just bitching about windows and make a viable alternative thats compatible with windows.

posted 05-18- 02:29 PM            

It's a non starter. If I ever bought any such software, and found such a procedure in place, it would be returned for a refund damned fast. I won't even register software...it's a pain in the arse and I get jack-shit for my trouble anyway.

Make your feelings clear to the vendors and vote with your wallet...if you ever buy such software, take it back for an immediate refund.
As for multiple installations on one's own computers...get to fuck! All this seperate licence BS for each PC, it's nothing but pure greed. It's a bit like a bookseller saying you can't read the same copy of a novel in different rooms in your house...you have to buy seperate copies for the front room, the bedroom, the khazi...etc.

PISS OFF!

posted 05-18- 03:02 PM            

"Win95 is really crap by todays standards, you should upgrade to a decent OS immediately. Unfortunately the only one that's really viable is Win98, on account of bill gates criminally bankrupting the competition. Not only that, Win98 is buggy shite and outrageously over-priced...so here's a free upgrade from moi."

Alledgedly and maybe possibly, I have upgraded about three hundred customers over the past year. And every time I do it I get this real warm feeling in the pit of my stomach...I think it's called a sense of great satisfaction.

Tucker Hatfield on CFS2: "It don't need patching. It ain't gonna be patched either. Hey, we're microsoft...fix it yourselves. Suckers."

I paid £265 for Macromedia's Dreamweaver. I consider it an excellent program, but disgustingly overpriced. A while later I was sent a crack for all their other 30-day trial full-programs. I downloaded the lot, activated them to full status with the crack and stored them away for a rainy day.

I will NEVER sell or profit from warez, but I sure as hell don't condemn it's private use in the right circumstances. Scum like gates need to be sent a message...get greedy, engage in criminal business practices, be prepared for a backlash from the street.