Dave Winer: Respect, Microsoft and Whatever. And I wonder if Microsoft would do better, and the rest of us as well, if there were open interfaces in the operating system that allowed a variety of different competitive products and services to be tied to the operating system.
The link above goes to a letter from Microsoft to Dave Winer, and includes his response. The quote is from Dave, and it’s a good point.
Microsoft has always claimed “open-ness” in a way that is flagrantly misleading. The reality is that Microsoft lives for lock-in on its overwhelmingly dominant platform. It’s not a coincidence that the only authentication method allowed for anyone using HailStorm or dot-Net services is Microsoft’s proprietary Passport. Nor is it a coincidence that Microsoft will hector users of Windows XP — that is to say, almost everyone who buys a new computer starting this fall — to create a Passport account.
The Microsoft letter-writer says worrying about lock-in is silly. Critics wrongly assume, he says, “that most users will just sheepishly follow us along, and we will destroy everyone in our wake, because the users are too stupid to know any better.”
Straw man. Users aren’t stupid. They had lots of choices in Internet providers back in the days when Microsoft included MSN with Windows 95 — though it also included AOL after AOL all but abandoned Netscape.
But when it comes to HailStorm, users will have almost no choice. And that’s the real point