Clarification of my position

• I am not Pro-Netscape (I prefer Opera) just anti-Internet Explorer. And that is a basically a side effect of my desire to keep Microsoft from dominating such an important utility.

• I am not Pro-Apple (see my apple page if you don't believe me.) I think by today's standards MacOS is a terrible OS, and I think Apple remained complacent for too long.

• I am not Anti-Intel, at least not in the same way. Intel is a technology company that makes quite reasonable technology that works. There are certainly alternatives (AMD, Cyrix, DEC, SPARC, PA-RISC) but Intel does not build products that are detrimental to consumers the same way Microsoft does. Intel has to make better and better technology as time goes on, and they do that and must be respected for that. As much as they try to trick you into believing it, Microsoft does not do that.

  That said, Intel has done some unscrupulous things (Appendix H, misguided lawsuits against former contractors, persecution of web authors: Tom Pabst and Robert Collins, allegedly infringing on Dec patents, entering and dominating the motherboard and chipset business) but have started to "come around". They are working very hard on their PR (bunny people, better documentation, "Intel Inside", etc) which has suffered in the newsgroups and press (the total mishandling of the FDIV issue for example.) At least the AMD/Cyrix/Centaur versus Intel market looks like some kind of a competition.

So why have I done this?  What is my motivation?  Its simple, I am a computer programmer, who's life blood is the PC industry.  I know that the reasons for the phenomenal growth of this industry is the often frenzied, and feverish competition.  Unfortunately, I've noticed great stagnation in the industry and it is attributable directly to Microsoft.  Microsoft comes in and smashes  markets to bits, and makes it impossible to compete.

At various times in the past 15 years, I've considered questions like "what  would it take to write a word processor?", "could I write a better spread sheet program?", "How would I write my own OS?", "What if I wanted to write a web  browser?".  The reason I ask these questions is because I see what's out there and I say to myself "I really should be able to do a lot better than that". For me, these thoughts would ordinarily spurn me to action.

But whenever I get the motivation to start ... I always stop. The incredible barrier that Microsoft has erected between me and what I want to do keeps me from really following through. Its not that I am too chicken to try to go up against Microsoft, but rather that I would find myself battling all of the Microsoft allies and converts as well. Sometimes the windmills are just too well built.

Could I write a product that might be pre-installed on Dell machines (like Linux,  DR-DOS, or Web Spyder)?  Not bloody likely.  Could I develop a new graphics  standard that multimedia and hardware developers would follow (like hybrid, or  VBE/AF)?  Not bloody likely.  Could I develop an OS philosophy and/or set of  standards that people could use so that developers would really embrace the  idea of portable software (like Java, Oberon, Elate)?  Not bloody likely.

I find myself at a cross roads, because either Microsoft is going to triumph and literally take over the entire software industry, or the rest of the industry will fight back and we will be able to weaken Microsoft sufficiently to allow the industry to be competitive as it once was. Should I just send my resume to Microsoft now, or my ideas to a venture capitalist? That is the question that plagues me, and that's what this web page is all about.