ANFSD: Fascism Bites Everyone In The Pocket (Among Other Places)

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, for it represents the fusion of State and corporate power.

— B. Mussolini

If you've lived in the USSR, former Soviet republics, or much of south Asia (including Singapore), you're quite familiar with the concept of "exclusive distributors", which the Free World seems to have thrown on the ash-heap of history at roughly the same time as leaded petrol. For those who've never had the displeasure, it works just like it sounds: one appointed business entity is the only way for subjects of a particular country to lawfully access the products or services of a particular (foreign) company. In places like Singapore which follow a State-capitalism model, that exclusive agent customarily has strong ties to either the Government or to entities acting as agents of the Government (sovereign-wealth funds, public officials who also run nominally-private-sector companies, and so on). This rarely, if ever, is a boon for the consumer.

Case in point: today, I wanted to buy a good fan, a Vornado Compact 530, comparable to the Vornado fans I owned when in the States.

Naturally, I can't buy a fan from the Vornado Website, though it gives me plenty of information about the thing. A little search engine-fu tells me that Home-Fix are the exclusive distributor for Vornado in Singapore.

Naturally, I can't order anything, or even get any product information, from Home-Fix's site. I could, however, get the phone number(!) for their nearest store, and called to enquire about availability and pricing.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: Can you tell me if you have Vornado fans?

Clerk: Yes, we do. Which one are you looking for?

Me: The "Compact 630".

Clerk: Yes, we have that one, in white and black.

Me: How much is it?

Clerk: S$170.

Me: $170?!? So your rate on the US dollar is about three Singapore dollars, then? The list price on the Vornado Website is US $49.99!

Clerk: (as to a very small, very slow child) Oh, that's the online price. It's bound to be cheaper.

Me: Well, I've done some checking on various US, European and Australian stores; the walk-in retail price is right about the same.

Clerk: Well, our price is S$170.

Me: Well, thank you for your time.

Not to be terribly unfair to either Home-Fix or the clerk; that's the way the system operates here, and any company that didn't jack their prices up to whatever the marks will pay isn't doing things The Singapore Way. It's not as though it's actually people's own money; they're just holding it until those who pull the levers of State decide they want it back2.

So, ragging at Home-Fix or any of the many, many other businesses whose prices have no apparent correlation to corresponding prices elsewhere won't accomplish anything. If, as was let slip during the Singapore Presidential "election" this year, the Government's sovereign-wealth funds and people connected to High Places really do control 2/3 or more of the domestic Singapore economy, then complaining about any individual companies is rather like the man who's been attacked by a chainsaw-wielding madman who then worries about all the blood on his shirt. Fix the real problems, and the small ones will right themselves.

Incidentally, this also illustrates why I support the Occupy movement. If Americans want to see what another decade or two of economic and political polarisation between the top 400 families and the rest of the country will look like, Singapore is a good first-order approximation. And some sixty percent of Singaporeans apparently either couldn't be bothered to think differently, or were too afraid to.

Sigh. I still need to find a reliable, efficient fan.

Footnotes:

1. According to the current XE.com conversion, 170 Singapore dollars (S$170) is approximately US$130.19,, or some 260 percent of the list price. In a free society, that would be called "gouging"; here in Singapore it's called "buying a foreign product". Remember, no foreign companies really operate here. When you walk into a McDonald's or Starbucks or Citibank in Singapore, you're walking into a local, almost invariably Government-linked, franchise or local representative. The quality and experience difference can be, charitably, stark. (Return)

2. Known in the US as the "thug defense", after a Los Angeles mugger who used that line of "reasoning" as the basis for an attempted pro se defence in court. He was, of course, unsuccessful. (Return)

Don't Waste My Time.

What follows is a critique and a complaint, not a rant. What's the difference, you ask? A rant, in my view, is a primal scream of frustration and near-impotent rage that often doesn't let a few (allegedly) non-essential facts get in the way of a good thrashing. It also takes far more energy than I'm able to summon at present, for reasons that may become clear below.

---

As I've mentioned previously, I've been kicking the tires on the (relatively new) Kohana 3.0 application framework for PHP Web development. I'd previously used (and enthused about) the 2.3.x ("KO2") release; I was itching to get my hands dirty with 3.0.1 After a couple of dozen hours spent plinking away at it, however, I'm reevaluating my choices.

Two of the things that endeared the earlier system to me were the good-to-excellent, copious documentation and the active, always-willing-to-help user community (which, quite frankly, are the backbones of any open-source project).

KO3 is a different proposition entirely than KO2. As I write this, the eighth bug-fix update to 3.0 is available on the Web site. Since this is a new "the same, but different" project, all the users are starting fresh, so there can't be the same level of everyone-helps-everyone-else camaraderie as with KO2. This puts a foreseeable, far greater burden on the documentation to help people get productive as quickly and effectively as possible. However, the documentation, quite charitably, remains in a beta-quality state. This is true in comparison to both the earlier release and to other PHP Web frameworks such as Symfony2, CakePHP, FLOW3 and (notoriously) Zend. With most of these other frameworks, as with KO2, it was a quick, straightforward process figuring out how to get from the "hello-world" style demos, to being able to create a useful-but-simple site, to branching out from there. It's taken four times longer to get half as far with KO3 as with KO2.

Judging by comments in the Kohana support forums, I'm not alone in this; the documentation has been roundly panned by virtually all users who've bothered to comment. There's been far too much defensive "no, it isn't bad, you just need to read a bit more, and use the source, Luke" attitude from the project folks. During the KO2 lifecycle, the attitude I understood from their responses was more along the lines of "we know there are a few problems; we're working on them," quickly followed by "take a look at this." I don't know if 3.0 is so much more complex than 2.x that they simply don't have the bandwidth to document things to their previous standards. Frankly, I don't care any more.

I've decided that my existing projects that have been started in Kohana 2.3 will remain there; possibly moving to 2.4 when it becomes the officially-supported release. But I do not plan to invest any more time and effort into Kohana 3.0, at least until the new project has had some time to mature. I fully recognise the potentially self-defeating attitude inherent in that viewpoint. Virtually any open-source project depends on its community to "plug the holes" that the "official" project maintainers don't have time for or deliberately leave as open questions for the community. Well-run community projects are extremely collaborative, communication-rich environments.

Other projects take a "vendor/product" approach, essentially saying "Here's everything you'll need, soup-to-nuts; we'd really appreciate it if you built around the edges and took things deeper in your direction of interest, but the core that we're responsible for is solid." Those "vendors", the Zends and Sensio Labs of the world, have rich open-source offerings that they use as a platform to build (or offer) what actually pays the bills.

While I have a strong philosophical and experiential preference for community-driven (or at least -oriented) projects, there have to be times when I just want to Get Things Done rather than embark on an endless voyage of discovery.3 It is at those times that I'll reach for something that "just works" well enough for me to accomplish whatever it is I'm trying to do at the moment, whether it's to write a book or to bring up a client's Web site. I know and accept that any new tool, or new version of a tool I've used previously, will require a certain amount of time to "get up to speed" on. I don't know everything (or necessarily anything) before I learn it; the most I can hope for (and what I really do insist on) is that things make sense within the logical and semantic frameworks4 that they're expressed in, and that that expression is accessible, complete and correct enough that I can feel like I'm making progress. This invariably involves some sort of documentation; whether a "conventional" or online manual, a Wiki, or a user forum; the format is less important to me than the attributes I mentioned earlier.

Kohana 3.0, as it currently stands, does not meet that standard for me. And so I'm back in a feverish learn-and-evaluate mode with at least two other frameworks. I have projects to finish, and I have several chapters of a book I'm working on that had initially been written around Kohana 2, and will now need to be substantially redone.5

I intend to give each of those new candidate frameworks the same amount of time that it took me to get productive in Kohana 2.x (which was significantly less than the "industry leader," as I've previously mentioned). This is going to be an interesting week and a half or so, in the Chinese-curse sense of the word.

Footnotes:

1. Technical reasons for moving to KO3 included the switch from a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture to hierarchical MVC (or HMVC); if you know what these mean, you should know this is a Very Big Deal™. Additionally, I've found it a Very Bad Thing to tie myself to a legacy (obsolescent) project, and the end of KO2 is being made very plain on the Kohana Web site.(Return)

2. If the new, pre-release Symfony 2 code is as good as the documentation, we're in for a real treat.

3. I am typing this on a Mac rather than a Linux box, after all (though I have three Linux VMs running at the moment).(Return)

4. This implies, of course, that there are "logical and semantic frameworks" sufficiently visible, understandable and relevant to the task at hand. (Return)

5. I certainly don't want to fall into the same trap as a previous series of PHP books, which relied on the obsolete and inadequate Ulysses framework. Ulysses has been justly and productively panned, which has to reflect poorly on the aforementioned book (which I happen to own) and its authors. (Return)

Again, Standards Matter

People who I've worked with, or worked for, or read my writing here and elsewhere, have probably figured out that I'm a huge fan of standards just about everywhere they make sense: data formats, user interfaces, and so on. After all, why should we have to relearn how to drive a car simply because we buy a new Ford in place of a Toyota that the Government doesn't want us driving anymore? (You see very few old — or even fully-paid-for — cars in Singapore.) The steering wheel, pedals, and other controls are in a familiar layout; any slight differences are quickly adapted to.

Not so with the Western world's most widely-sold word processing software (for instance); when Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows shipped with a different, unique ('innovative', whether or not you find it debatable, is beside the current point) interface. Bloggers bloviated, many users were deeply confused, and corporate help-desk calls (and support/training costs) spiked. People running Windows PCs were very rarely neutral about the change.

A year later, Microsoft shipped Word 2008 for the Mac. Although there were some interface changes, the points of loudest discussion in the Word:Mac user community seemed to be

• the omission of Visual Basic for Applications as an attempted cross-platform macro language; and
• the new semi-proprietary document format, which allowed flawless interchange with Windows users (VBA notwithstanding).

Interface changes, per se, didn't spark nearly as much angst as had the Windows version of the year before. While a certain amount of this should no doubt be attributed to Microsoft's experience with the earlier release, the main reason was both different and obvious.

When developing Mac applications, it's much easier and better to follow the Apple Human Interface Guidelines than to "roll your own" interface. Developers, including Microsoft, are well aware of the ways in which the Mac development tools make your life easier if you structure and style your app to meet the Guidelines (and user expectations), as opposed to how much scutwork needs to be reinvented from scratch to do things differently. Users benefit even more, as the amount of learning needed to use a new app, or a new version of an existing app, are much less than is the average under Windows or Linux. And, unlike far too many Windows programs, Mac programs are usually highly discoverable; the user may not know how to accomplish a desired action, but there is one (and preferably only one) obvious path to follow, and mis-steps are generally not heavily penalised.

Right, "everybody" knows this, so why did I spend five paragraphs restating the reasonably obvious? Because the real intent of this post is to draw your attention to a phenomenon which is a necessary outcome of that standardisation and discovery: it is much easier to switch from one Mac app that performs a given task to another than it is on Windows. Most Mac users periodically switch between different applications for a given purpose, even keeping two or three installed on their systems. When you ask them why, they don't (generally) point to bugs or deficiencies in one product over another; they merely switch between them as their use cases change. For example, though I have both Microsoft Office and Apple iWork on this Mac, I will often create or open smaller Word documents in a simpler application such as AbiWord instead. It doesn't have all the features of Word or Pages, but it has the basics, and it loads more quickly and uses fewer resources than its two "big brothers."

The average Mac user is also generally more willing to try new applications, and generally owns more applications, than is the average for Windows. Since she is confident in her ability to pick up and use a new program, generally without resorting to a manual or even online help, there is a much more open discussion between users and developers, since both have seen a good bit of "the competition" and know what they like and don't like.

More rarely than is the case elsewhere, but not rarely enough, this easy migration from one app to another is due to real or perceived defects in a previously-used program. This happened to me recently; the program I had been using for a few months as my main Twitter client was not showing me all the tweets of people I was following in the "mainline" stream that I would see when I looked at each person's stream individually. Once you start following more than about two or three people, the mainline becomes absolutely indispensable; you simply don't want to have to take the time to look at each stream in isolation. So, I moved to another client, Nambu (now in "private beta" for a new release; version 1.2.1 can be found via web search).

Two immediate observations: I already know how to use this, even though Nambu has a far more dense presentation than my earlier client. And, because of that "dense presentation", it now takes me about a fifth as much time to get through my morning and afternoon Twitter catchups as it did previously. (Multi-column view is the killer feature, guys; there's only one little thing I'd like to see different...)

Again, why make noise about this? Simple: I've been a Windows user (usee?) and developer quite literally as long as there's been a "Windows"; I ran across my 1.0-beta developer kit floppies (5-1/4", of course) a couple of weeks ago (thinking about having them bronzed...or mounted on a dartboard. Maybe both.) But the nasty truth is, I very rarely change applications that perform a given task in Windows. The pain level and the (hopefully temporary) hit on my productivity aren't worth it until the pain becomes absolutely excruciating. I don't have that problem with the Mac, at all. I can try out new applications at will, even daily-workflow applications, secure in the knowledge that

• I already know how to use this, at least well enough to get started, and
• I can go back — or on to another candidate — any time I want to.

There's a word for the feeling that having that kind of freedom, that control over your computing experience gives you:

Empowerment.

The Debate between Adequacy and Excellence

I was clicking through my various feeds hooked into NetNewsWire, in this case The Apple Core column on ZDNet, when I came across this item, where the writer nicely summed up the perfectly understandable strategy Microsoft have always chosen and compared that with Apple and the Mac. Go read the original article (on Better Living without MS Office and then read the comment.

As I've commented on numerous times in this blog and elsewhere (notably here), I'm both very partial to open standards (meaning open data formats, but usually expressed in open source implementations) and to the Apple Mac. As I've said before, and as the experience of many, many users I've supported on all three platforms bears out, the Mac lets you get more done, with less effort and irritation along the way, than either Windows or Linux as both are presently constructed.

But the first two paragraphs of this guy's comment (and I'm sorry that the antispam measures on ZDNet apparently don't permit me to credit the author properly) made me sit up and take notice, because they are a great summation of how I currently feel about the competing systems:

The Macs vs. PC debate has been going on for about 25 years or so, but the underlying debate is much older. What we are really discussing is the difference between adequacy and excellence. While I doubt I would want to be friends with Frank Lloyd Wright or Steve Jobs, both represent the exciting belief in what is possible. While Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer rake in billions, their relative impact on the world of ideas is miniscule.

Bill Gates understands that business managers are on the whole are a practical, albeit uninspired and short-sighted bunch. By positioning Microsoft early on to ride into the enterprise with the implicit endorsement of one of the biggest, longest-lived, and influential suppliers of business equipment, Gates was able to secure Microsoft's future. Microsoft's goal has never seemed to me to be to change the world, only to provide a service that adequately meets business needs. Microsoft has also shown from early on a keen awareness that once you get people to use your product, your primary goal is not to innovate to keep your customers, but, rather to make leaving seem painful and even scary. Many companies do this, but Microsoft has refined this practice into an art.

He then expands on this theme for four more paragraphs, closing with

Practically speaking Microsoft is here to stay. But I am glad that Apple is still around to keep the computer from becoming dreary, to inspire people to take creative risks, to express themselves, and to embrace the idea that every day objects, even appliances like the computer, can be more than just the sum of their functions.

Aux barricades! it may or may not be, depending on your existing preferences and prejudices. But it does nicely sum up, more effectively and efficiently than I have been able to of late, the reasons why Apple is important as a force in the technology business. Not that Microsoft is under imminent threat of losing their lifeblood to Apple; their different ways of looking at the world and at the marketplace work against that more effectively than any regulator could. But the idea that excellence is and should be a goal in and of itself, that humanity has a moral obligation to "continually [reach] well past our grasp", should stir passion in anyone with a functioning imagination. Sure, Microsoft have a commanding lead in businesses, especially larger ones — though Apple's value proposition has become much better there in the last ten years or so; it's hard to fight the installed base, especially with an entrenched herd mentality among managers. But, we would argue, that does not argue that Apple have failed, any more than the small number of buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his direct professional disciples argue for his irrelevance in architecture. If nobody pushes the envelope, if nobody makes a habit of reaching beyond his grasp, how will the human condition ever improve? For as Shaw wrote,

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.

And that has been one of my favourite quotes for many years now.

The Best Tool for the Job

One of the nice things about growing up around (almost exclusively) men who were master mechanics, carpenters or other such highly skilled tradesmen was that I developed an appreciation both for "the best tool for the job at hand" and "making do with what's available" — and whichever of these applied, accomplishing the task at hand to the best of anyone's ability.

As I've progressed through my software and Web career, I've become highly opinionated about the tools I use, just like any other experienced software craftsperson I've ever known. You and I might use different tools to accomplish what functionally is the same task, but so long as we each have practical, experiential bases for those preferences, we should just go ahead and get what needs doing done. (There's an argument in there for open standards as a requisite for that to happen, but that's another post.)

Too many people who should know better have religious-level devotion to or hostility towards certain companies and/or products. Yes, that includes me; I know I've said some pretty inflammatory things, usually when I felt someone was expressing a religious belief masked as a technical opinion. No doubt they've felt the same about me and any others who were incautious enough to oppose their evangelism (or reactionism, depending on the circumstances). In general, it should be pretty evident to everyone with a personal or professional involvement in IT or personal electronics that trends are driven as much by "what I say three times is true!" as what actually can be shown to be true. That's how mediocre-at-best products become "industry Leaders"; inertia and close-mindedness set in, reinforced by a well-funded, continuous and strident marketing/branding campaign.

I was having a discussion about this online recently, with a former associate who's long had me pegged as an ABMer ("Anything but Microsoft"). I can understand how he formed that opinion; I've long complained about the (innumerable) defects in the "market-leading" operating system, and about how slowly progress has been made in cleaning up the most egregious faults (such as security). But I've also worked at Microsoft in Redmond — three different times — and I've always been impressed by the number of truly gifted people working there. They've had their triumphs and tragedies (anyone used Microsoft Bob lately?). They've had to deal with widely differing process and management effectiveness as they transfer between or liaise with different groups. They've ignored a lot of what has been done outside the company, but they've also created some amazing things inside; too many of which unfortunately never make it into public products.

And the quality of their work product varies as much as any of the factors that go into it. Cases in point: compare, say, Windows Vista with Windows Mobile or the XBox; compare Microsoft Outlook (forever known as "Lookout!" to security/admin people) with Entourage; compare Word for Windows to Word for the Mac — what I understand is a completely different code base (and visibly so) that "just happens" to be able to flawlessly read and write documents shared with Word for Windows.

I also reread a blog post I wrote last December where I detailed the issues I was starting to have with Apple's own Mail app for the Mac. I have a mail store that's hovered somewhere above 2 GB for the last year. I receive 100-200 legitimate emails per day (and up to 700 spams). I presently have over 230 filtering rules defined for how to handle all that mail. Those rules have been built up over the last five years or so — first using Mozilla Thunderbird, then Apple's Mail.app, and now a new system; a progression that also speaks eloquently about the value of open standards. I have never, to my knowledge, lost a saved message whilst transferring from one package to its successor. The few hiccups each transition has had with filtering rules have all been relatively easy to find and fix, with the newest app making that process breathtakingly simple.

The new mail app? As you've no doubt guessed, Microsoft Entourage. It, like every other Mac app I've ever used, Just Works as expected (at least until you get out to the far, bleeding edges). If Microsoft made Windows and Office for Windows as well as they make Entourage (and the rest of their Office:Mac products), they really wouldn't have to worry about competition — and they'd richly deserve that. The market-friendly price for their Mac product (where their major, worthy competitor sells for US$79) is just icing on the cake.

I don't hate Microsoft. I just wish they would stick to what they do as well or better than anyone else, and leave the crappy products that can never be anything but hypersonic train wrecks — like Windows and Internet Exploder. I wish that ever more fervently every time I'm asked to help some hapless Windows usee fix "why my computer doesn't work". That would also make Microsoft's long-suffering stockholders — including current employees, former employees and myself, among others — feel a lot better.

Happy Updating....

If you're a Windows usee with a few years' experience, you've encountered the rare, monumental and monolithic Service Packs that Micorosoft release on an intermittent basis (as one writer put it, "once every blue moon that falls on a Patch Tuesday"). They're almost always rollups of a large number of security patches, with more added besides. Rarely, with the notable (and very welcome at the time) exception of Windows XP Service Pack 2, is significant user-visible functionality added. Now that SP3 has been out for seven months or so, it's interesting to see how many individuals and businesses (especially SMEs) haven't updated to it yet. While I understand, from direct personal experience, the uncertainty of "do I trust this not to break anything major?" (that is, "anything I use and care about?"), I have always advised installing major updates (and all security updates) as quickly as practical. Given the fact that there will always be more gaping insecurities in Windows, closing all the barn doors that you can just seems the most prudent course of action.

I got to thinking about this a few minutes ago, while working merrily away on my iMac. Software Update, the Mac equivalent of Windows' Microsoft Update, popped up, notifying me that it had downloaded the update for Mac OS X 10.5.6, and did I want to install it now? I agreed, typed my password when requested (to accept that a potentially system-altering event was about to take place, and approve the action), and three minutes later, I was logged in and working again.

Why is this blogworthy? Let's go back and look at the comparison again. In effect, this was Service Pack 6 for Mac OS X 10.5. Bear in mind that 10.5.5 was released precisely three months before the latest update, and 10.5.0 was released on 26 October 2007, just under 14 months ago. "Switchers" from Windows to Mac quickly become accustomed to a more pro-active yet gentle and predictable update schedule than their Windows counterparts. The vast majority of Mac users whom I've spoken with share my experience of never having had an update visibly break a previously working system. This cannot be said for Redmond's consumers; witness the flurry of application and driver updates that directly follow Windows service packs. XP SP2, as necessary and useful as it was, broke more systems than I or several colleagues can remember any single service pack doing previously...by changing behavior that those programs had taken advantage of or worked around. Again, the typical Mac customer doesn't have that kind of experience. Things that work, just tend to stay working.

Contrast this with Linux systems, where almost every day seems to bring updates to one group of packages or another, and distributions vary wildly in the amount of attention paid to integrating the disparate packages, or at least ensuring that they don't step on each other. Some recent releases have greatly improved things, but that's another blog entry. Linux has historically assumed that there is reasonably competent management of an installed system, and offers resources sufficient for almost anyone to become so. Again, recent releases make this much easier.

Windows, on the other hand, essentially requires a knowledgeable, properly-equipped and -staffed support team to keep the system working with a minimum of trouble; the great marketing triumph of Microsoft has been to both convince consumers that "arcane" knowledge is unnecessary while simultaneously encouraging the "I'm too dumb to know anything about computers" mentality — from people who still pony up for the next hit on the crack pipe. Show me another consumer product that disrespects its paying customers to that degree without going belly-up faster than you can say "customer service". It's a regular software Stockholm syndrome.

The truth will set you free, an old saying tells us. Free Software proponents (contrast with open source software) like to talk about "free as in speech" and "free as in beer". Personally, after over ten years of Linux and twenty of Windows, I'm much more attracted by a different freedom: the freedom to use the computer as a tool to do interesting things and/or have interesting experiences, without having to worry overmuch about any runes and incantations needed to keep it that way.

( C/C++ != C) && (C/C++ != C++)

A thought which ran through my mind as I was browsing some job requirements recently... Why are recruiters still hung up on "C/C++", years after even Microsoft got around to shipping a reasonably compliant compiler (depending on your prejudices and code needs, anywhere from Visual Studio 6 in 1998 to VS.NET 2003)? "C/C++" started life (or zombiehood) as a Microsoft marketing term back in the late 1980s with the release of Version 7 of their C compiler, which included "some C++ features". MSC 7 wasn't a "real" C++ compiler, but companies such as Borland (now CodeGear), Watcom (now part of Sybase), IBM and others, were shipping compilers that implemented the bulk of the (then-) Draft Standard in a (largely) portable, consistent fashion, so Microsoft was able to muddy the waters by calling their product "C/C++", secure in the knowledge that many of their customers had too little C++ experience to see through the marketing. Incidentally, this (non-Microsoft) competitive innovation spurred numerous advances, such as Alexander Stepanov's (of AT&T, later at HP) Standard Template Library (STL). Microsoft, in response, introduced a "Container Class Library" which was in practice quite inferior (since it required contained objects to be derived from the Microsoft Foundation Class library's CObject class and (if memory serves) did not support either multiple inheritance or thread safety. Since Microsoft's compilers at the time did not properly support important Standard C++ features such as templates and runtime type information (RTTI) that were needed for the STL, the compiler defects created market opportunities for companies like Rogue Wave and Dinkumware to create products with similar but not identical function. Timewise, this was really when Microsoft was starting to really push developer lock-in - the practice of introducting non-standard and/or proprietary "features" which were made central to the development process. Despite the existence of numerous superior (in design, function and in productivity) class libraries such as Borland's ObjectWindows Library, Inmark's zApp library, the previously-mentioned Rogue Wave toolkits, and others, Microsoft's MFC carved out huge market share and mindshare, largely because:

• it was bundled with the Microsoft C ("C/C++") compiler;
• its limitations and defects mapped most closely to those of the underlying compiler;
• it came with a primitive but usable GUI builder, for "click-and-drool" development; and
• it was relentlessly praised by the Microsoft-beholden tech press of the day.

That last point should never be underestimated; publishers of less-than-laudatory articles, such as C Users Journal and Will Zachmann (when he was writing for PC Magazine) would find themselves cut off from Microsoft's press briefings, rumor mil and other means of "keeping up with the competition". This was meant as punitive, to "hurt" the "offenders"...who promptly wrote up the entire sordid affair, built a certain amount of loyal sympathy from the industry grass-roots, and survived quite well, thank you very much. Getting back to "C/C++"... the term was a marketing fix to a technical problem which rapidly gained "mindshare" with its intended audience: marginally to non-technical people (senior managers, HR people, etc.) who wanted or needed to sound technically knowledgeable. Microsoft was able to play on their lack of real language knowledge coupled with follow-the-herd instincts to help force adoption in enterprises, from the top down. While this helped to increase sales, and helped preserve Windows' market share and lock-in in the enterprise for nearly two decades, it seriously retarded the take-up of standard, portable C++ in the industry (as intended). It also gave companies like ParcPlace (with Smalltalk) and NeXT, later Apple (with Objective-C) incentives to use "alternative" languages, either to gain some "control over their own destiny" independent of a competitor, or simply because C++ at the time was not up to the tasks which they wanted to accomplish. In any event, by around 2000 (plus or minus a half-decade), Microsoft had caught up with where the rest of the industry had been for a decade or so (bringing serious, proprietary backward-compatibility baggage along with them). The marketing need for the 'C/C++' Newspeak was gone - but the corporate world that had learned the newfangled technical language back in the day was still in place, bound only by the Peter Principle (whose bar, thanks to the new technology throughout the enterprise, had been set depressingly high). Consequently, you still run across job ads with text like this (from the Singapore Straits Times of 13 August 2008):

C/C++ EMBEDDED SOFTWARE Engr. Contract. Call 6xxx7085

Truly informative about the needs; at first blush, seemingly written by a completely non-technical HR person. (I didn't follow up the advertisement to actually verify this, however). What's the point of this whole rambling rant? To try to impress upon you, my half-dozen Loyal Readers, a technical truism that has been around as long as there have been technical gadgets: "80% of what you know will be obsolete in n months; the other 20% will never be obsolete. Using that 80% beyond its shelf life just makes you look silly." Or, if not 'silly', then at least 'locked in to an out-of-date technology or idea.' And that, with very high likelihood, does not deliver a competitive advantage to your organization.