ROAD TO RECOVERY

Dick Pountain/14 June 2000 11:56/Idealog 71

There's no point in me denying that I am very satisfied with the judge's decision in the Microsoft case. I recognize the reservations being expressed by other commentators about the practicalities of breaking up the company, which I acknowledge will be difficult - that's if it ever happens at all, given the good chance of a successful appeal or a Bush presidency. I was very impressed by the way that the US trial judges, including Thomas Penfield Jackson who issued the break-up order, managed to understand the technicalities underlying this complex matter and cut through all of Microsoft's hostility, arrogance and spin to get to its heart - which is that not only have Microsoft's monopolistic practices damaged its competitors but they have also diminished the quality of its products and hence damaged us, the end users. It's hard to imagine a British judge of the 'who exactly are the Beatles?' school grasping its essence so effectively.

Elsewhere in this issue Jon Honeyball suggests that Microsoft's best strategy now would be to lighten off the arrogant pedal and show some goodwill by releasing the source of all but the latest versions of Windows under an open source licence, and I wholly agree with him. Having seen what Linux has achieved in a few years by harnessing the voluntary creativity that's out there in the user community, just imagine what could be achieved for Windows if all the hidden APIs were brought out into the sunlight. We would, for example, be able to have a fully customizable user interface with retro-fittable alternative shells, instead of having to suffer under the handful of misconcieved innovations (e.g. the Active Desktop) that Microsoft has deigned to allow us. It's always struck me as a great irony that the company that shouts loudest about free enterprise has always offered us about as much choice as the Trabant factory did to East German drivers.

I still bitterly miss WinTools, the alternative shell that I used to use under Windows 3.1, which made screen icons into proper objects with useful rather than cosmetic properties: for example every icon had its own start and stop times for self-scheduling, and could have custom behaviour defined for drag-and-drop operations. Freeing up the Windows source might allow third parties to devise such shells, along with snap-on cosmetic 'skins', with some hope of finding a market. It might also stimulate some competition in the arena of non-Web development tools so that we might get some lightweight language tools that support ActiveX to compete with the increasingly bloated Visual Basic juggernaut.

Of course it would be nice if the OS worked properly too, and the fact that it doesn't at present is something I feel rather acutely, since my new Windows NT4.0 system fell over in the worst (and most inexplicable) way, first losing the power to boot and after restoration losing one of its NTFS partitions without trace. I was truly appalled at the state of the recovery utilities supplied with the machine and the lack of forethought that had gone into them: for example the supplied CD containing an image of the factory default setup would not restore correctly if the boot partition was formatted as NTFS, though nowhere was this explained and it reported no error but just proceeded to produce a duff installation. I mentioned this in passing to Mr Honeyball, who told me a horror story of his own to improve my spirits. When recently testing a large batch of PCs for a client, he received the machines with their hard disks formatted with a single 2Gbyte FAT16 DOS partition, no Windows installed and a Win98 CD with no CD-ROM drivers. Getting the machines working involved, to cut it very short, diving into the BIOS to set CD booting, using FDISK to create a FAT32 partition and rebooting several times. This was not some fire-sale deal but machines on sale to the general public (God Help Them). The slovenliness of this hardware vendor does not excuse Microsoft for still relying on mechanisms this crude to configure the OS after more than a decade of experience.

Following my previous OS installation rant, a reader Ian Rudge wrote to me offering this excellent scheme for a 'OS Friendliness' rating he would like to see applied to software:

Grade 1: OS Friendly
Alters no part of the Windows system apart from a shortcut on the Start menu; all DLLs contained
within its own folder-structure; no registry keys modified, settings stored either in a new registry branch whose name matches the executable, or in a separate file; no shortcuts or OLE links to be stolen from existing programs; setup program does not force a restart.

Grade 2: Limited OS Friendly
As above but new DLLs may be added to the System folder: warnings before altering a registry entry or replacing a DLL. Uninstaller must restore Windows to the pre-install condition, removing all added components.

Grade 3: Invasive
Setup program alters core OS components and a system restart may be needed. Possible unpredictable interaction with previously installed software, risking malfunction up to and including total loss of data.
Full uninstall impossible, make a full system backup before installing.

Ian suggests that market forces would make such a scheme self-policing as it would become increasingly difficult to sell any software that didn't gain an 'OS Friendly' sticker. If only the Judge Jackson could enforce this too...