Since 1980 or shortly there after the Microsoft Corporation has made a name for itself by providing an operating system called Windows for personal computers. An operating system controls and functions as an interpreter for computer hardware to communicate with applications or software installed on computers. An operating system is a crucially important component to any computer system. Without a well made and intuitively designed operating system your computer would not be able to see or communicate with any of its hardware like a floppy drive or modem, and therefore connecting to the internet would be impossible since you need software and a modem to get on-line. Today computers are used in almost every industry across the planet. They are just about everywhere you look, used for business and schools alike, not to mention for games and multimedia like music and videos. If anyone were to own or control the main operating system used across the planet, they would be unstoppable. I have been an MS-DOS and then Windows user from day one and after being in the computer industry as a professional for over twenty years I have come to believe that the Microsoft Corporation is indeed involved in a grand conspiracy with other companies to dominate and monopolize the computer industry at any cost. If you were able to some how control whether a computer was useable or not, you could eventually charge money for people to be able to use their own computer, this is where Microsoft is going today.

     It is a well known fact that Microsoft did not create their first operating system called MS-DOS. It is also suspected that they copied their windows and icon type layout from Macintosh. There are several other coincidences that lead people to believe Microsoft has never innovated anything at all and that in contrary they have slowed down innovation of computer technologies by strong arming new opposition. If Microsoft were the only company to make computer products the creation of new technologies would be quite suppressed. When Windows 95 first came out, it had so many problems Microsoft had to publicly announce they released it before it was finished to meet a deadline. Can you imagine if Ford or Chevy were to do that what would happen? This was done because Microsoft wanted to make sure no one else would get a chance to oppose them. There were several other operating systems releasing that year and it was a very exciting time for computers. No other product on the market requires so frequent updates, this makes you wonder if Windows is truly the best operating system or if it has just been marketed really well. Since then Microsoft has crushed the competition with their monopolizing hold on the general public do to the fact that most computers today are sold with Windows on them. Andrew Colley wrote an article on ZDNet showing once again the things that can go wrong; he says “Microsoft's software activation service is coming in for a new round of fire in the wake of a system outage that prevented the company issuing activation codes to its Australian customers over the weekend”, so if you needed to use your computer that weekend, oh well. You may be thinking, nobodies perfect, but that is not the case with Microsoft, there is not one of their products that did not need updates, and with Windows 98 Microsoft got smart and made the public pay for the fixes by changing its name to Windows 98 Second Edition. So has Microsoft ever released anything when it was done, not if there was a dollar to be lost?

     If any one company created every possible product in any one industry, would you think that it was trying to monopolize the industry? That is exactly what Microsoft has done and is still doing. Microsoft has left not one computer product for any other company to have a chance to create without the competition of the big giant. Microsoft makes mice, keyboards, just about every possible software product; they have even reached into the gaming community by creating flight simulators and other games. You would think that with all the other products Microsoft makes they would at least be able to leave games alone, God forbid someone else might make a dollar. Today it is almost impossible to think of a computer related product that Microsoft has not tried to dominate. This in any fair minded persons eyes, this is the essence of a monopoly. Every joke has a bit of truth or it just wouldn’t be funny, Tim Barry writes “Bill Gates’ personal philosophy about innovation in new product development: The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.” These business practices are chaotic to our society and do nothing but make the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. Perhaps Microsoft thought Play Station was making too much of their money so they came out with XBOX, yet another example of how Microsoft can’t stand for anyone else to make a dollar. James Gleick writes “There was a moment in history, just a few years ago, when any number of operating systems, real and imagined, could have emerged to run the world's personal computers. That moment is past. The Microsoft architectures have established them selves so deeply in every segment of the computer business that they cannot be displaced, not even by Microsoft. Those standards are an essential facility - to use antitrust jargon - like the 60-hertz AC current that flows to every American household. To date they have remained mostly open and mostly public, because that served Microsoft's business interest. Now the Government could, and should, declare a public interest in open standards in computing.” Moreover the belief that no company should have control of such an important component of the computing industry is shared by many and that maybe Windows should be given to the people as open source so no one person could ever own it again.

     When you buy a software product, the programmer has no way of knowing if you are copying the software and giving it to all your friends. Hence the creation of software keys was initiated. This is a key that can unlock your software for you to be able to use it. Your name was usually a part of that software key so that you may be uncomfortable with someone else having your name on their computer because it would show up every time the software’s about box was shown. Microsoft decided to go even further with a new protection scheme called “Activation”. They made it so you would have to call them every time you reinstalled the software or changed a peace of hardware on your computer. As you can imagine this is quite inconvenient for almost anyone that upgrades their computer frequently. What if they went out of business or decided it was too expensive for them to provide this activation service for you anymore? Then how would you activate it, since it will not run without it? This protection scheme also gave Microsoft a way of knowing what hardware you have and some other personal information you may not want them to have. In the process of trying to protect their product, Microsoft has invaded people’s privacy and made money from this intrusion. They say knowledge is power, but this is a little too much power for any one company to possess. The bottom line is that Microsoft wants their money for every computer that uses their operating system. Here Susan Walker tells us how most people feel about this, “It's hard to believe that after I purchase three computers with three full versions of MS Windows on them, they would expect me to purchase three upgrades, one for each computer. It's hard to find a computer to buy that doesn't have Windows on it.” The problem with this type of thinking is that it can be escalated to almost any other item or topic. Can you imagine if the cable company said you needed to pay for each TV using cable in your house, if you’re old enough to remember, they tried this? Internet companies tried this with internet connections; they did not want people connecting more than one PC in your home to the internet per paid account. Someday Ford may try to say you need to buy a separate car for each person in your home. This may sound absurd but that is where business is going today, and Microsoft is taking them there.

     It is quite clear that activation just does not work and that if you irritate your customers with lengthy installation processes, they will eventually not buy your product at all. Though the need to protect intellectual property is understood being of a programming background, activation is so intrusive it will soon be gone. Moreover there are some ignorant people like Ken Fisher that think this issue is easily solved and say “All Microsoft should really need to do is check and see if two or more computers are booting with the same Product ID, with oscillating HWID (mine, then my neighbor's, then mine, etc.). The fact that I may upgrade my system should be irrelevant. All that should matter is if the same Product ID is being used near simultaneously on two computers. This could easily be detected by looking for repeat patterns or oscillations in the HWID”, but the part he fails to understand is that no one wants to buy three boxes of Windows at over a hundred dollars each just because they have three computers at home. There is a better way to protect your software without irritating anyone, except those who should not have your product. This is by no means new, but you could give users a setup that is a two part code that combines a user’s name with a password and make the user’s name show as a large splash screen every time the application runs so that if it is a pirated copy it will irritate that person to see the owners name every time he or she uses it. Eventually that pirate will decide to purchase a copy of his own if he really likes the product, because people love seeing their own name.