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Ballmer, Gates on Microsoft's Future
RoadFever writes: "At the Microsoft shareholders meeting, CEO Ballmer acknowledged they may have a popularity bug. "We understand, based upon the fact that our industry didn't rally to support us, that we need to change the way we interact and relate to our industry," Ballmer said.
There's a summary article in the Seattle Times and more stuff on the Microsoft investor relations page.
Will words translate to action? Well, the company might want to start by toning down the habit of taking credit for every innovation: "Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines," Gates said." The question-and-answer session near the end of the meeting has the most juicy quotes.
QUESTION: It appears to me that the open source movement is gaining momentum, and as I understand it the key to success of a software product involves efficiently building an ecosystem of developers and users, resellers, and so forth. Doesn't the open source model a more efficient paradigm for building such a community around your products, and isn't perhaps Microsoft maybe on the wrong side of that trend of long-term?
MR. GATES: Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the bios of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there, that it had always been sort of free software and the universities would flourish and there would be more of that. We certainly accept free software as part of the software ecosystem. In fact, there's a very virtuous cycle where people do free things, some people find that adequate, sometimes companies will take that work and turn it into commercial products, those companies will hire people, pay taxes. And so you see the free software and the commercial software existing together.
There is a particular approach that breaks the cycle called the GPL that is not worth getting into today, but I don't think there is much awareness about how so-called free software foundations designed that to break that cycle.
In terms of getting people excited about software and building communities around them, yes, that is a key to success. Nobody has done that more effectively than we have with Windows. Are there ways that we can do that better? Are there aspects of this where we're actually learning from all our different competitors out there? I think it's fair to say yes.
In the pre-software vision is that there would be no jobs in the software industry, there would be no testers, no engineers, no taxes paid, or anything of that notion. So I certainly don't agree with the full sort of free software foundation view that there should be no jobs in this area, and that the kind of commercial advances and risk taking that we've been able to do you can't get that, you can't get things like speech recognition on a tablet computer coming out of that kind of a paradigm. You can get things that follow along, you can get some smaller software, and so we embraced the idea of the free software paradigm and the commercial software paradigm moving forward in really a self-reinforcing way.
MR. BALLMER: I just want to add one thing, echo what Bill said, but encourage you to go to our web site. If there's a key learning for us, we can't have free software, it's kind of inconsistent with the goals of most people in the room. We recognize it, it probably doesn't fit in most of these people's mind's eye, so we're not going to embrace that. But there is something about the way the community works to support itself which is brilliant, and which we've done many good things, but we think we've seen some good things sort of in the Linux, et cetera, world, and I encourage you to go up to Microsoft.com and check out our community areas. It's an area where we have sort of massively mobilized. It's still in the early phases, but we are massively mobilizing to try to stimulate communities, support communities, and really, if you will, borrow one from their playbook.
Why, he's the Al Gore of Open Source!
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Gates said: "Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines"
No, the reason you see open source is because people want the ability to customize code to their own personal needs without having to license said code from a monolithic company known for overcharging. Mr. Gates needs get rid of the god complex. Open source has nothing to do with identical desktops and everything to do with control of the code. This statement is just more overgrandizing and makes him look even more out of touch with the industry than he already is.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
MR. GATES: Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the bios of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the PC going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there, that it had always been sort of free software and the universities would flourish and there would be more of that. We certainly accept free software as part of the software ecosystem. In fact, there's a very virtuous cycle where people do free things, some people find that adequate, sometimes companies will take that work and turn it into commercial products, those companies will hire people, pay taxes. And so you see the free software and the commercial software existing together.
There is a particular approach that breaks the cycle called the GPL that is not worth getting into today, but I don't think there is much awareness about how so-called free software foundations designed that to break that cycle.