MS: Use the Source, Luke!

McSpew writes: "The WSJ (via MSNBC) has an article about Microsoft's upcoming push to get universities to use .NET code in programming courses. Their code-sharing initiative is all about winning hearts-and-minds at the university level, where Linux and open-source rule the day. The article does a good job of explaining the issues and why MS may yet fail in spite of their push. I wish the article had discussed the reverse-engineering issues of needing 'virgins' who have never seen the product being reverse-engineered and how MS's newly broad distribution of its code makes finding virgins much more difficult."

Comments

Re:How hard can finding virgins be?

[Svet-Am]

This must only apply to CS students, because I am a computer engineering student and I get more than my fair share... I suppose have a nymph for a girlfriend helps, too. :-P

Seriously, though, I sit and laugh at MS's attempts to infiltrate into the last vestiges where they don't currently have a foothold. I attend MS State and yesterday our Computer Security Research Head, Dr. Vaughn said that he sees Microsoft losing their foothold to Apple and *NIX due to their track record with security alone. But, even Apple and *NIX aren't invulnerable to security issues.

To quote him "if people don't trust them when all of the sensitive data is on one machine, what makes them think that people will trust them when their sensitive data is floating around the internet."

Two things are hindering distributed computing the way MS envisions it: deployment of sufficient broadband and TRUST. People don't trust Microsoft anymore. Even if they were to magically fix every bug in every product and release a patch for it tomorrow, people would not trust them because of their history of neglecting their consumers.

Apple is kind of in the same boat, as is Linux. People distrust Apple because Apple is notoriously narciccistic and people distrust Linux because their is no *one* entity to hold responsible for failure.

Personally, I think that this entire distributed computing push is simply a techno-fad. Sure, we will see some terrific apps emerge which can really take advantage of being interconnected via the web. But, I believe the OS and most productivity apps (like Office, Money, etc.) are at home on the client desktop. I feel that in the end, we will see a compromise be reached. Apps stored on the client with all of our custom content like our documents and such stored in a central location. Then, we can still access our work from any interconnected place, but we are not pushing an entire operating system onto the client terminal.

Sure, you lose some of the customization you may be used to having on your native box, but there's a point to that. We're talking about TERMINALS, not our WORKSTATION. The nature of terminals is that they are temporary works spaces. Let all of our custom prefs sit on our normal workstation and give us a generic "get the work done" environ on the terminals.

But, that's just my opinion...