What makes a company become what it is? For good or bad, it’s leadership. For years I’ve stated what should be obvious to all but is not. Microsoft truly is an evil company. Do evil leaders beget an evil company?

Most people who know anything about computers know something about Microsoft.

Most people know that Microsoft publishes Windows, which shows up on about 90-percent of all personal computers on the planet.

Most of those people know something about Microsoft Office, which powers the word processing and spreadsheet needs of business.

Most of those people and many others know that Bill Gates is Microsoft’s founder, leader, and the world’s richest human.

A growing number of people now recognize that Microsoft is at the heart of their computing headaches. Many of those know why.

Microsoft is an evil company. Evil leadership begets a company’s culture and Microsoft’s products and business tactics represent that culture.

What most people don’t know is why the company became embroiled in serious trouble with the US government, many state governments, most of Europe, and much of the rest of the world.

Perhaps they assume that everyone loves to hit a rich target and no one is richer than Microsoft and founder Bill Gates, so they’re fair game.

What they don’t know is that Microsoft used illegal tactics to obtain their market share and great wealth, got caught by the authorities, and, for the most part, were able to buy themselves out of legal trouble.

Worse, most people don’t know that Microsoft continues to use their monopolistic practices to quash competition, flaunt government regulators, and intimidate innovation through threat of litigation.

I’ve said it before, “nothing improves without change.” If Microsoft isn’t changing their basic tactics, their disregard of moral sense and their disregard for customer needs, the world will change around them.

That’s what’s happening now. The world is changing and Microsoft is not.

In the Bible at Matthew 15:14, Jesus, in describing the elite religious authority of the time, said, “Leave them; they are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

Slowly, steadily, businesses and individuals have recognized the blind guides of Microsoft, and the pit into which many are walking. They’ve chosen a different course.

The Mac platform has begun to grow far beyond annual industry market growth. The ability of new Macs to run Windows removed the last major security blanket for many computer users and businesses who seek an alternative to Microsoft’s hegemony.

Worse, look for Microsoft to bare their fangs at both customers and the Linux community by threatening patent litigation, claiming that Linux infringes Microsoft’s innovation and patent portfolio. It’s a saber they’ve rattled before.Linux continues to take market share from Microsoft in their once highly profitable server market, rallying around Novell’s SuSE and Red Hat versions.

Microsoft is being squeezed from two sides; quality and innovation on one end, and dependable, low cost server solutions on the other.

How will Microsoft respond to their first business threat in nearly two decades (since IBM’s last ditch effort with OS/2)? Will they innovate and produce new and better and more competitive products? Will they lower prices?

No, Microsoft will squeal, shriek, howl, and grunt like a crazed starving animal, and blindly attack whatever is near.

Instead of simplifying their long awaited Windows Vista, the replacement for long-in-the tooth Windows XP, look for a pricing scheme that only the gods would understand, for Microsoft needs their customers to remain in the dark.

There have been rumblings of this for months, but look for Microsoft to attack former partners and reveal their own iPod killer to thwart Apple’s highly successful entry into the portable music player field.

Worse, look for Microsoft to bare their fangs at both customers and the Linux community by threatening patent litigation, claiming that Linux infringes Microsoft’s innovation and patent portfolio. It’s a saber they’ve rattled before.

They will rattle it again as their market and profits are further threatened by more nimble, savvy competition. Both attempts at defending the ill-gotten gains of their empire will fail.

On a level playing field, Microsoft, under current leadership, is incapable of building a product to compete successfully with Apple’s ubiquitous iPod.

Microsoft’s seemingly evil leaders will spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about claims of Linux patent infringement that will only serve to loosen customers from their grip.

Why? It can be said that a company walks to the drum beat of their leaders. If their leaders exhibit evil, so becomes the company.

Perhaps it will be a long term benefit to the industry—customers and competition—that Microsoft continue their evil course.

They are failing and they will fail. Evil cannot triumph over good. Watch Microsoft’s course. The next few years will be interesting.

Editor’s Note: Before her death in the summer of 2006, Tera passed along her personal journal. It is filled with hundreds of comments, essays, observations, and perspectives on nearly every subject matter over a number of years. As time permits, I will edit and publish select journal entries for Tera Talks. Some journal entries, such as the one above, are prophetic even today.—Alexis Kayhill

Where are the laughs to enlighten a sober nation? The terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 did more than topple two buildings and destroy thousands of lives. It robbed a nation of humor.

A nation without humor is without laughter. Where there is less laughter, there are fewer smiles.

Where are the Kings of Comedy? Where are the nightly humorists of years past? Where is my extended entertainment family to bring comfort and solace?

I fear they’ve gone, perhaps afar, perhaps forever.

I could always count on Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor to provide warmth and family in Home Improvement each week, then daily in years of re-runs.

Who better to stir water cooler conversations than weekly episodes of Seinfeld (…it rhymes with Dolores)?

Cheers brought us the lesson that we want to go where everyone knows our name. Have we forgotten so soon?

I grew up with Opie, Barney, Andy and Aunt Bee on The Andy Griffith Show, not weekly, but in years of reruns which taught me that humor is in the heart, smiles come from the heart.

Today we’re faced with a constant barrage of the serious, in proportions as dangerous as any alcohol or tobacco addiction.

Television swams with what’s late breaking, new developing stories, and news situations which demand, commands, and won’t stand for anything less than our undivided attention.

No one at CNN smiles anymore.

What could once be counted on as a welcome respite from the stress and strains of a hectic day, the situation comedy now lingers near death.

Filling the comedic void is a string of CSI this and CSI that. What’s next? The CSI Peoria Vice Unit?

Worse are the semi-reality shows which have blossomed worse than terrorist acts on the world stage.

We’re a nation besieged by the serious, stalked by the opportunity of success, yet sentenced to view rewards given to others. We attempt to escape our humorless lives by a route with no escape, and no humor.

Where is Les Nessman when we need his bespectacled bewilderment, his ridiculously serious hog reports, and the surety of his weekly band-aid location?

Where are those souls of mirth and madness in media who inspired thoughtful considerations of exaggerated events which made our own lives seem less crusty and cold?

Where are the Kings of Comedy?

Editor’s Note: Before her death, Tera passed along her personal journal. It is filled with hundreds of comments, essays, observations, and perspectives on every subject matter. As time permits, I will edit and publish select journal entries for Tera Talks. —Alexis Kayhill

Cell phone or iPod? Will the iPod become a cell phone or die? Apple sits on top of the portable music industry, and on top of the online music industry. The iPod is king of players. The iTunes Music Store is king of online music, music videos, TV shows, and maybe movies. Is the king on a death march? Will your cell phone become the new iPod?

The answer is a resounding yes. Cell phone miniaturization is quickly gobbling up functions and features once reserved for standalone products.

PDA’s, cheap cameras, cheap music players (with expensive music). They’re all bowing to the convenience of the cell phone in your purse or pocket.

Apple’s iPod is on a death march.

Think about it. If you could have everything that your iPod nano has, but inside your cell phone, would you still carry an iPod nano?

“I might be wrong, but it seems to me the ability to easily buy a single, new episode of a TV show (and repeats), as well as single songs, albums, movies and music videos in a form that is easy to watch or listen, will change everything.”Carry it a step further. If you could have everything that your iPod with video has, including screen and storage, and get it all inside your cell phone, would you buy an iPod?

One more step. If your cell phone would synchronize to your Mac or PC as effortlessly as your iPod and iTunes does now, yet does everything the iPod does, and carries AddressBooks and iCal data, would you still buy a standalone iPod.

The answer is yes. If you don’t have a cell phone. The answer is ‘probably not’ if you could get a cell phone that does all that and more.

Make no mistake. The iPod is on a death march. That is, the iPod as we know it.

I know this. You may suspect it, others have said so, including Alan Kohler of The Age. In a very round about way, with a number of logical gaffes in between, without fully realizing his argument, Kohler hit the nail on the head.

To be fair to the reader of his rubbish, and much of it is, most tech pundits get it wrong when it comes to Apple, the Mac, the iPod, and the future of technology.

There’s the standard article about the Mac’s closed system, how Microsoft won because Apple didn’t license the Mac. Other articles warned of Microsoft’s impending entry into portable music.

Others prognosticate about how Apple will become a niche player in portable music, too. It’s just a matter of time.

Many of the arguments are plausible though wrong, most are laughable, and few recognize what’s happening in technology.

What’s happening? Change. Change is what is inevitable (besides woodwork tech pundits with another new argument and flashy headline). Not only is the iPod on a death march, so is pretty much everything else, including cell phones.

How so, Miss Tera? Cell phones get ditched every year or two, as users switch from one phone to another, one carrier to another. That’s change.

Cell phones now combine digital camera functions and PDA features. Poor quality in the former, better on the latter. That’s change.

Convenience and quality and style don’t always go hand in hand, especially in technology. PCs are cheap, convenient, but lack style, and except for a few brands and the Mac, lack quality.

A good digital camera loses on convenience, but carries a strong market on quality, perhaps style. PDAs? Take mine, please. These are relegated to a small niche, and Apple was wise to avoid competiton with Palm and PocketPC in favor of synchronization (such as it is).

The iPod wins on convenience, for now, wins on quality and style. For now. Convenience is a big plus for the iPod as it synchronizes wonderfully with Mac and PC, a critical element that cell phone manufacturers still haven’t figured out.

But Tera, don’t people go through iPods about the same as they go through cell phones? The answer is yes. iPod customers trade up, and then hand-me-down their iPods. It’s a natural evolution.

Change is also a natural evolution. The standalone iPod may continue to exist for many years but remains on a death march. The iPod will change. I’m sure of this because Apple continues to change the iPod, improve the iPod, keep the iPod competitive despite fierce competition from all corners and comers.

“All the pieces are there already. The Apple of 2006 is not the Apple of 1985, or 1992, or 1996. This Apple knows that managing change is a requirement for success today and tomorrow. Previous Apple incarnations did not, or could not manage required changes.”What happend to the PDA? It’s a niche, and that’s what many tech pundits say will happen to Apple’s iPod efforts; relegated to a footnote and a miniscule market share, just like the Mac vs. Windows.

I understand the argument. If we don’t learn from history, we’re relegated to repeating it, right? But that was then, and this is now. Apple is a much different company than 20 years ago, when Steve Jobs left.

Apple is competing successfully again against Microsoft and Windows. Apple is competing successfully against portable music player manufacturers and Microsoft.

Apple is about to compete against a different team in a different league. Survival and prosperity of the iPod is at stake. The iPod is on a death march and it is Apple making it happen.

Remember the Treo? It’s the PDA that became a cell phone. Apple will make the iPod become a cell phone. The technology is there. Miniaturization. Battery life. Hard drive size. Flash memory. Video screens. Virtual cell phone networks.

All the pieces are there already. The Apple of 2006 is not the Apple of 1985, or 1992, or 1996. This Apple knows that managing change is a requirement for success today and tomorrow. Previous Apple incarnations did not, or could not manage required changes.

This isn’t even the same Apple that kicked out the clones, that mothballed the Newton, that stomped on Copland. Will the iPod, as we know it today, die?

Yes. Long live the iPod. Hail, to the new iPod, the next iPod. Here’s to the future. The new iPod, the iPod phone, the iPad wireless, and the products that Apple must roll out this year and next year.

Why? Because this year and next year the average cell phone will do music, movies, video conferencing, and much more. Apple cannot afford not to play in another league. Apple doesn’t have the luxury of choosing the competition; the team or the league.

Otherwise, there will be more to the death march than the most recent iPod. Will the iPod in your pocket be replaced by your next cell phone? I’d rather replace my cell phone with a new iPod.

You gotta love the new media. Finally, there’s a way to monitor the monitors. I’m a self-avowed, dues paying, card-carrying, experienced Apple Watcher™. By default, that makes me a Microsoft Watcher™, too, right? Well, it’s what I do.

The following is an outliine of a recent series of events, characters, situations, quotes, and blunders that tell me that Apple will continue to do well, and Microsoft is learning how to weather a storm. Or two. Or a dozen.

My case in point is Windows Vista (formerly code-named Longhorn, and soon to be referred to as Windows XP Pro Service Pack 4). If you haven’t heard, don’t worry about it, but Vista won’t show up now until 2007. Remember 2004? Then, in succession, 2005, 2006, and still no successor to Windows XP.

Why? What happened? Arguably, Microsoft is the richest company in the world (check those profit margins and cash in the bank), with more engineers than Apple has customers.

Why can’t they deliver on an update of Windows? After all, little bitty, insignificant-market-share Apple has updated OS X about four times in five years, with another on the way.

Can you say Copland? Copland was a project to create a new operating system at Apple back in the 90s. It was designed to be the end all, be all, monolithic Everything Inside™ cool OS, and still be backwards compatible with Mac OS 7.5.x and Mac applications.

Except it didn’t happen that way. Why? It’s too complex. It might be easier to put a man on the moon, than build a new operating system from scratch that has everything, and everything else, and still more, and be compatible with what’s already running on 350-million PCs.

Uh, didn’t Apple do that with Classic and Mac OS X? Yes. Didn’t that give them a clean slate to introduce the chocolate coolness of Cocoa and XCode? Yes.

Why can’t Microsoft do the same? Because they haven’t weathered the same storm that Apple went through with Copland to get to Mac OS X. Now, Microsoft is up to their collective asses in substantive dirty water.

And dirty laundry. How so? Because Chairman, co-founder and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates is in charge of software, and his five year report card is being compared to Microsoft’s flat-lined stock price. F. Dead.

How so? Because CEO and Peter Boyle look-alike Steve Ballmer spends less time leading the company than he does running the company into the ground. Five years. No new Windows. No change in the stock price.

So, what does the dynamic duo do in such a situation? Just days ago, Ballmer told Forbes that Microsoft will roll out “an amazing wave of innovation” with a dozen new products this year.

One of them won’t be Windows Vista, and your guess is as good as anyone else as to the others.

“My children—in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.”Not to be outdone by his Young Frankenstein bodyguard, Bill Gates says, “Security issues have made it more imperative to get up on the latest technology.” Oh, really?

How about this? “The big issue nowadays isn’t performance; I mean, we perform super, super, super well.” Wasn’t it Cleopatra who said, “Performance is in the eye of the beholder, Mark”?

Meanwhile, the Empire displays a strain and stress the public has never seen. Microsoft employees openly call for Ballmer’s resignation and more accountability with each Windows Vista delay. The head hunted are now the head hunters.

To counter the bad publicity, Ballmer goes on the offensive, which, for him, appears to be child’s play. How so? He admits to brainwashing his children to avoid Apple’s iPod and Google searches, in favor of Microsoft solutions.

When asked if he owned an iPod, Ballmer responded gleefully, “I do not. Nor do my children. My children—in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.”

What else? Microsoft faces tens of millions of customer who don’t like their products, while Apple basks in tens of millons of customers (arguably a smaller number) who border on fanaticism.

What’s wrong with this picture? How did the world’s largest, richest, most powerful software company get this way? They’ve never had to weather a storm, work through a true crisis, or bet the farm.

That would appear to be on the day-to-day To-Do list for Apple, but Microsoft doesn’t have that kind of experience or intestinal fortitude, hence the problems grow, become baggage that never gets handled.

Witness a recent show where Microsoft demonstrated new features in Windows Vista. The technology press, the same folks who write about Apple and iPod and Mac in glowing terms, were outright derisive, bored, annoyed, bitter.

Microsoft’s new slogan is “People Ready.” Apparently leadership at the Redmond Giant wasn’t ready, as two days later they announced that Windows Vista wouldn’t be ready for users until 2007.

Is Windows rattled? Yes, as is much of Microsoft these days. What innovation can a Microsoft customer expect in the next 12 months? Many customers and Microsoft employees request innovative changes at the executive level, starting from the top down.

It won’t happen, and Microsoft won’t die, either. But it’ll be fun watching what happens. I’m an Apple fan, a Mac user, and a Microsoft Watcher™. It’s what we do.

We just don’t view things the same way. My view of life and what makes up life is my view, though it’s remarkably similiar to that of other women. Not everyone has the same view. Take men, please.

It’s time to put on my combination sexist, humorist hat and reveal the true differences between the sexes.

Male and female, God created us. We’re different, despite laws that try to treat us the same. Go to any concert hall with an equal number of men and women, and the line to the women’s rest room is always longer.

We’re different and we see things differently. Don’t believe me? Ask your nearest opposite sex person to describe a “thingy”

Female: “Any part under the hood of a car.”
Male: “The strap fastener on a bra.”

See the difference? It’s in the genes.

OK, try another. Ask your nearest opposite sex person to describe and define “vulnerability.”

Female: “The open sharing of thoughts and feelings with one’s life partner.”
Male: “Playing any contact sport without a cup.”

This could go on forever, right? Unfortunately, it does, it has. There’s no stopping to not notice the difference between the sexes.

Need yet another example? How about this? How do men and women view “flatulence” (look it up if you have to, guys)?

Female: “An embarassing by product of improper digestion.”
Male: “An endless source of self-expression entertainment, and male bonding.”

This is one I’ve actually heard from my parents. What’s a remote control to you?

Female: “A device for changing from one TV channel to another TV channel.”
Male: “A device for scanning through all 175 cable channels every three minutes.”

Had enough fun? Let’s try a different twist. Are objects male or female? Here’s a few examples to try on your friends.

Tire – male, because it goes bald and becomes overinflated.

Kidney – female, because they always go to the bathroom in pairs.

Shoe – male, because it’s usually not polished, and the tongue often hangs out.

Copier – female, because, once it’s turned off, it takes awhile to warm up, it’s an effective reproduction device when the right buttons are pushed, and it can wreak havoc when the wrong buttons are pushed.

Ziplock bag – male, because they hold everything in, but you can see right through them.

Got a few of your own? I thought so.

Nearly half the world’s population has a difficult task ahead. Supporting themselves. You think the US has a Social Security problem? It’s nothing like the one in China and India. What’s happening there will surprise you.

A few billion people are working to support a few billion more who can’t work. Do the math. It won’t work.

China and India both have great armies. Armies of cheap labor and educated engineeers. Both are on a fast track of demographics that hopes to grow prosperity before the growers grow old.

The problem is that researchers who research such things think the workforce of both is shrinking. Fast. Why? Retirement.

In the US, retirement usually starts in the early to mid-60s. In China, many women retire in their 50s and most men by 60.

The peak working age, those 15 to 64, who support the rest of the non-working population will peak soon. That math puts a strain on resources that pay for those who don’t pay for anything.

In another generation or so, according to the math of those who mathematize such things, 10 Chinese will be working to support seven Chinese who can’t.

See the problem?

India has a problem, too, though of a different scale. Middle class.

India’s middle class, many of the ones who speak English and take jobs away from Americans, is growing too fast. India has five times as many engineers graduate from college each year as in the US.

Those who speak and read and write English are the haves, those who don’t (over 75-percent) are the have-nots. 40-percent of India’s entire population is illiterate, compared to China, which rivals the US.

India’s middle class, as with China’s, will be working to support the classes that don’t work, can’t work, or don’t make enough to support themselves.

For the next decade or few, both China and India will take investment dollars from the US and employment from US workers. Then it will change.

The middle class of all three nations will be working overtime to support those classes that can’t support themselves.

It’s a good thing I’ll be retired by then.