If one wanted evidence that Microsoft's monopoly power stifles software development, look what happened Wednesday when the company's main website went down: Tech people who work with Windows found themselves without answers to the many questions that plague their daily lives.
While coding did not come to a complete, crunching halt, some developers did report that since they couldn't access the Microsoft Knowledge Base, some of their problems with Windows products went unsolved.
The Knowledge Base is an enormous database with technical information for programming and debugging with all kinds of Windows applications. For programmers and other tech people who work in companies where Microsoft (MSFT) products are the norm, the knowledge base functions as a kind of Yoda, guiding them through their thorniest Windows endeavors.
"I've been using the knowledge base from Day 1, and I use it all the time – it's critical to what I do," said John Harper, who e-mailed Wired News when he was denied access to the site on Wednesday.
Harper works as a programmer for American Traveler Staffing Professionals, a company that finds jobs for nurses around the country. He is building what he calls a "content management application" for them, a Windows-based program, for which he frequently consults the Knowledge Base.
"This is the first time I've seen it so bad," he said. "I've seen slow-downs before, but this morning I couldn't get into the site at all."
Since the problem only affected Microsoft's DNS server, and not its main website server, Harper was able to get to the knowledge base using Microsoft's IP address: [. But for some reason, this fix didn't work all the time, and not for everyone. Other developers reported using other methods to get into the site.
Mike Eldridge, who works as a programmer at the Internet service provider Computer Café, said that he was looking for an article on the obscure subject of Windows dial-up networking on Wednesday when he found that he was barred from the knowledge base.
Looking for a way to fix his problem, Eldridge posted a request on Slashdot, the open-source-obsessed discussion site. A few moments later, Eldridge said, a Slashdot reader e-mailed him a way to get the Knowledge Base article he wanted.
"They sent me Google's cache of the page," he said, referring to the popular search engine, which keeps a copy of the sites it indexes.
But Eldridge got more than just a fix for his problem at Slashdot; he also got many comments about his post, which rebuked the Linux-loving Slashdot fans for saying that a crashed Microsoft site wasn't really so important.
Indeed, Slashdot swirled with controversy about this very point – does it matter that Microsoft is down? – and the discussion produced predictable Linux vs. Microsoft results.
But one developer said that whether or not one was a fan of Microsoft, it definitely did matter that the Knowledge Base was down.
"Half the world uses Microsoft!" said Christopher England, a systems administrator at Indiana University, Bloomington.](http://207.46.230.218/)
