"BIG THINGS - LITTLE THINGS - THINGS THAT MATTER"

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It's not the big victories that keeps us going, or, rooting for the little guy, it's those small victories you often don't even hear about. Sure, we've all heard about the BIG ONE - "David vs. Goliath", but usually that gets relegated to those bedtimes stories that the kids love to hear, while one parent gives a short wink to the other.

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Today we still have giants roaming the world, trying to squash each little David that comes along but they just can't seem to be able to do it. Take Microsoft for example - all they were was an OS (Operating System) software company they make computers work. Yet, high above the Earth, Darth Gater was busy building his "Death Star" on the dark side of the moon, working on plans to make their own versions of a programs which users wanted, and they ran on windows, only MS wanted people to run his program's (i.e. - Windows Media Player), plans of entering the hardware side of things and generally making it a software world.

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But there were many little Davids out there that planned to make better programs (and make them they did). One of my favorites was MP3 - we're all familiar with that format now, but if the Dark Lord had been able to smash it, MP3 would be a mere footnote in history. And let's not forget our champions of little fighters - APPLE. You know that APPLE is getting into Microsoft's turf when they (Microsoft) have to run commercials with excited people picking out their dream PC (for a certain price range) and jumping up and down when, after picking a PC which is made by anyone, but runs Microsoft as their OS - get it FREE.

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Let me digress for a moment when I ask, "Just what is a Microsoft PC??". I know of Dell, HP, ASUS and many others, but I've never seen a hardware pc that sez "MADE BY MICROSOFT". Any ways, my digression is over and so I say "THANK YOU APPLE", for being a thorn in Microsoft's side. You keep them on their toes with the IPODS, Smart looking hardware (Oh, that's right, Microsoft doesn't build PC's), and being relatively virus free. If Microsoft had devoted as much money as they did to losing projects like "Microsoft TV", and spent that money making smarter, tighter, more bulletproof code, then we wouldn't have had to suffer through ME, 2000 (eh), and (ugh!!) VISTA. Kudos go to Mozilla for their excellent, fast and reliable browser, and GOOGLE'S great search engine (Which i still prefer to the "non-cool" sounding "BING"). They are current under attack as I type. Microsoft couldn't do it alone, so they've made a deal with Yahoo (or in Yahoo's case "Made a deal with the Devil") to use BING.

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I know that there are dozens (maybe more) examples of how Darth Gater probably killed great ideas that would have made computing much better but I hate to think so hard on a Saturday - so, write me and let me know which ones you liked that got squashed, AND, what's worse than "squashed"? It's called "Bought-out-and-bloated". My prime example here was a neat program called VISIO. It was great, the engineers loved it!! It would even run over a network (how cool is that?).

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And then, one sad day, I sat down at my former desk to order the latest version and my link went nowhere. I called my salesman Sam (Great guy if you ever have the pleasure of buying stuff from him) and he looked under the companies name which was still on their database system, but all zeroes down the column. Sam said, "Okay, let me try just searching under VISIO", and we only had to wait a few seconds when he replied "I found it!" he exclaimed, "ummm...only it's now listed under Microsoft". Hence, they were bought out. I ordered a couple upgrades and waited for them to come in.

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Well as you would expect, they arrived with that Microsoft label and by golly the code had been bloated big-time. On some machines it would install - and ran very, very, slow. On other machines, it wouldn't install at all. Being as large as it was now, of course it would not run across the network, but I found a place with some of the older Visio (from the former company) and ordered it to appease the native (engineering) God's and that was when i found out that it would not install on an XP box ("Thank You, MS"). And as before, they've bought and bloated software for many years. Man, I didn't expect multiple paragraphs about this, as it was just an intro into my subject, but if you've made it this far, you either dislike Microsoft or, like reading my postings...

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I guess I'll cut out my other examples and move along to what was to be a divorce analogy. which follows a similar vein I suppose, but for those that care, I'll be free (after almost 2 years of legal hell) on Monday.

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Let's hope for some DX out there that day and look for me on 38 LSB - Woody

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