Munich opens gates to Linux (vnunet)

Posted Jun 25, 2004 16:30 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Ah, I beg to differ quite strongly re: Mr. Walker's views on Microsoft (at least using the following evidence from his Hacker's Diet book that he wrote a while back. (It's a pretty good system, BTW. Worked for me...) :-)

This quote is from the page about the Excel spreadsheet tools that he created to use with the diet book. It seems to indicate that a 'complete marriage to Microsoft' would seem to be a bit of an overstatement...

Why So Many Versions?

The Hacker's Diet spreadsheets were originally developed in 1990 with Excel 2.1 on Microsoft Windows 3.1. Some of the components in the package use Excel macros which are, for the most part, relatively simple and straightforward compared to those found in a typical corporate Excel application. Nonetheless, thanks to Microsoft's practice of "strategic incompatibility" and utter contempt for the investment made by their customers, these rudimentary macros have required specific modifications for every single new version of Excel in the decade since they were originally released, and things have gotten worse, not better, since Microsoft introduced the new Visual Basic programming language for Excel (itself a cesspool of release-to-release incompatibility), due to what appears to be a deliberate Microsoft strategy to destabilise the original macro language in order to force customers onto the new one (at a cost to Microsoft corporate clients I estimate on the order of a hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars).

The upshot of this is that while in a reasonable world spreadsheets and macros would be capital, created once and then used thereafter with no additional attention, in the world of Microsoft, software developed for their platforms is a "wasting asset" more like a stock option with an strike date about 18 months from the time it was developed. By then Billy Boy or one of his Kode Kiddies will have changed their mind about something (or simply introduced a gratuitous incompatibility, whether for strategic reasons, due to sloppiness or incompetence, or just for the Hell of it) which pulls the carpet out from under the application and its users when they "upgrade" to a more recent Microsoft release (which is increasingly involuntary as more and more new computers are sold pre-loaded with the latest releases of Microsoft operating systems and applications, offering the customer no option but to pay the "Microsoft Tax" bundled in the cost of the system).

And here's another quote from the download page of the Palm version of his diet software:

The central component of the computer tools which accompany The Hacker's Diet is the Eat Watch--the weight monitoring, charting, and trend analysis software originally developed as Microsoft Excel macros in 1990. By the standards of the time, it was pretty cool to be able to enter weight and exercise log entries into a spreadsheet which automatically calculated the daily trend and variance, and then press a button and have a pretty, full-colour chart pop up complete with weight trend and calorie balance analysis.

But that was then, and this is now (2000). Never did I imagine when writing the original macros that Microsoft's unique blend of incompetence and contempt for their customers' investment would cause those macros (like virtually every other Excel macro package all around the world, except for the most trivial) to break on almost every successive release of Excel, all along the tedious, tear-drenched trudge from Excel 2.1 to Excel 2000; that ever steepening spiral into the foul pit of intellectual corruption from the days of "386 Enhanced Mode" to the era of the talking paper clip.

But I digress. Due to numerous experiences with shoddy quality and incessant incompatibilities in Microsoft products, in 1996 I abandoned all new software development for that platform. But the computer tools for The Hacker's Diet remained wedded to Excel, a proprietary platform which history had proven notoriously shaky and likely to continue to degrade since Microsoft abandoned the macro language in which I developed the tools in favour of an even worse one based on Visual Basic. Today, Microsoft provides little or no documentation of or support for the original macro language in current releases of Excel.