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Microsoft in Peru, Living Room
Two pieces of Microsoft news today. tfofurn writes "According to this AP quickie and this Reuters story, both on Yahoo, Microsoft is donating 'about $550,000 in money, software and consulting services to the Peruvian government for educational and "e-government" initiatives' to Peru. The AP story mentions the conflict of this with Edgar Villanueva's proposal to have the government use only open source software. Villanueva (/. interview), you may recall, wrote a famous letter to MS Peru a few months ago." And many people have submitted stories about Windows XP Media Center, coming this winter to a living room near you.
I say Peru go along with only using Open Source software, but keep Bill's gifts anyway. I don't see anything in the article about them being obligated in any way to use the stuff for a particular purpose, and I'd like to see him go into Peruvian court and try to sue to get it back.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
Let me tell you all the horrors of a capitalistic economy.
I own a lemonade stand that sells $5 lemonade. I have about 50 customers every 2 hours, giving me a nice customer base.
You see how I'm gouging people, so you open a lemonade stand for $1, and attempt to show people how to make lemonade at home for under $1.
I'll see what you are doing, and sell my lemonade for $0.50, which is less than it takes for you to make lemonade. For you to compete is for you to lose money. I can afford it, because I have capital sitting in a bank account. You go out of business, and I raise my price back to $5.
This is what MS is doing!
Its basic economics, people.
Now, don't give me the "linux is free" angle. Use the anology, but instead of money, use familiarity with the product, and the popularity with MS products vs open source ones.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Microsoft is donating something to somebody! Must be an evil conspiracy! Quick, let's make up some theories about how this will oppress people for years to come somewhere.
...give the customer a few free samples, get 'em hooked into the product and then that customer REALLY starts to pay.
If the Peruvians fall for this, they deserve what happens to them: Forever paying premium dollars for really lousy products from a compamy with an exceptionally bad attitude.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Proprietary software is only worthwhile if your freedom is worthless.
It's no different then scheduling the MS Sales Reps to come in for their 1hr long presentation, 45mins after you schedule the Oracle guys to come in for their presentation.
The two end up meeting in the hall, and notice each-other. Within literally hours you get phone calls and email saying to the extent "We really want your business, and well beat anything they offered".
Linux has to be prepared for this. Don't expect companies to back down from Linux competition simply because Linux is free. And don't expect companies not to use Linux as a expendable pawn in negotiations for better rates from existing vendors.
This is after all, how the free market works.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Ah I wish I could find the earlier comment were I said this is exactly what would happen in Peru. Well, no matter, this the usual Microsoft tactic. It worked in Mexico, now Peru. Will it work in Norway, a wealthier nation?
Must be nice to be able to print your own money like that: here's 1,000 CD copies of MS Foobar Pro, each worth $5,000 !! So we just made a donation of $5,000,000 and it's tax deductible (not that we pay taxes). And they'll still have to pay for upgrades. Beautiful! Let's see Open Source beat that!!
In the end I'm sure Microsoft will be more than happy to give every world government who wants it some "free" MS software. Remember what the actual cost of the software and CDs is, and how they get to write it off as a tax deductable donation at the retail cost. Then note that after a few years of running under the shackles of Microsoft it's hard to escape. Then MS recoups their 'costs' in your renewed licensing fees. Or, more simply:
1) Give away 'free' software
2) ???
3) Profit
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Thats very true. It's not like other manufactured products where it actually costs a company money to make each individual copy. I.E. if Ford donates a car there was actual cost involved in making that car above and beyond R&D. Whereas when MSFT donates 10,000 copies of office, there is no real cost involved as I'm quite sure the R&D for office is paid for. The real cost to them is actually very nearly nothing, not even boxes and CD's because they probably give them like 10 cd's and 10 manuals and 10,000 liscences.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
It would seem that the cost of Linux is no longer zero. Instead it is effectively negative because in order to compete with it, it seems, Microsoft has to give organizations a bunch of incentives. It says something that in order to create a reasonable value proposition for their software they have to, not just give it away, but actually pay people to take it.
So the question for organizations now is, is it worth the upfront money Microsoft gives you to possibly be hooked into their products in the long run. Certainly you can use a possible linux move as leverage against MS prices, but in the end, is it better to use the leverage or to take Linux.
You have to presume that Microsoft has a plan of how they intend to make back this money in the long run. I can guarantee you that they aren't cutting half billion dollar checks at a whim without thorough belief that they'll make up for it. I'm sure that 5 years down the road Microsoft will be coming around to collect on those incentives. They'll collect by increasing licensing fees, further invading privacy, etc.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
And if you were a company 100% on Linux or some other Unix flavor, you think switching to MS would not be "terribly painful and difficult".
Well, uhm... No. At least, not AS difficult. You see, Linux uses well defined standards and file formats instead of proprietary, constantly changing ones.
If it works, and does what they want it to do, why switch?
The business case for switching isn't JUST saving money. It's weening yourself off of said proprietary formats. Being locked in to a certain format might not be expensive RIGHT NOW, but using open formats means that it will never be any more expensive.
Okay, I'll bite.
So what if your $5 lemonade is awful? It gets sour quickly and has a terrible aftertaste. A few times you buy this lemonade and the glass you got it in has a hole in it and your lemonade spills out. Since this $5 lemonade company has removed all other competition through "hard work" and now demandes that instead of charging for every glass, now you are charged for every sip you take.
Not only that, but in the future this $5 lemonade company won't let you but anything else except for their lemonade in that glass. So your stuck, paying for every sip of lemonade and then being forced to drink more and therefore buying more.
Yeah, that great. Because this lemonade (with that extra sugar that you can't remove from it) has given you cavities. And since you live in a non-socialist country that allowed the lemonade maker to thrive no matter how corrupt their practices are they have destroyed all other alternatives. By now they also own the water stand and are probably your dentist.
So thumbs up to you dude. Great insight on it all.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Anyone that read the Congressman's Villanueva response to Microsoft defending free software solutions, could notice that via dialog M$ wasn't able to get anywhere, the congressman was absolutely right. But M$ knows that Paru is a economycally (not cultutrally) poor country of latin america so they decided for the most effective tactic ... disguise their economic power and supremacy as a donation. And force them to use their solution.
What a shame
Peru: We've decided to check into a drug rehab center.
MS: Here, have some more drugs -- for free.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
How about MS Word, Access, Excel and Powerpoint?
How about how Word 95 can't open any Word 97 docs. (Before you say, everyone does this... what was the necessity for this. If the upgrade was dramatically diferent, and it wasn't possible to use the same format, I might go easy - in this case, it seems really hard to make that argument.)
How about Access 97 vs 2000...
How about MS SQL Server, and your "special" extensions to SQL.
How about Active X, C#, HTML that only works on IE.
How about Kerberos?
How about breaking the OS/2 3.X compatibility mode every time they did virtually anything to Windows.
How about the totally bogus error messages you got in the beta versions of Windows 3.x when you were using DR Dos?
(Some of these are not propriatary file formats, but clearly demonstrate the capability and willingness to use despicable acts to maintain their power - and keep you by the short hairs.)
MS probably has one of the worst records of ANY company in the history of the computer industry. Locking you into a specific "hamster wheel" is their specialty.
If you like being MS's "hamster" go ahead. Many of the rest of us don't really care for it. For many reasons, money out of our pocket being one of them.
Cheers!
I seem to have to do this about once a month on slashdot, so I may as well get it out of the way now. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats have been released by MS. Word and Excel are actually supported binary formats (You can call their dev-support line if you have some issue with accessing the file structure). Power-point is not support, but is not confidential/proprietary.
Ok, if you don't want to write your own program to read the format, save you data in common formats then RTF for Word and HTML for Word/Excel/Power Point.
Anytime an office 2k and later application saves to HTML it really means 'save to XML'. Look at the file, it's pretty easy to comprehend, and it's documented as well.
Access? Access is an ugly mutt of a programming language and database. There is no alternative to Access on Linux unless your going to rewrite it in some other language/db. What do you expect the format to be? It's heavily dependent on VBA, and the database engine more recently is closer to SQL then any of the old Jet systems. The MDB file actually contains p-code 'compiled' by the VBA subsystem. Asking for a format to something as ugly and complicated as that is insane.
Do you expect Oracle to open up their database binary format? Should all the binary data files in lotus notes be standardized and published? How about RTFM. When you roll out Word 97, it by default maintains compatability with Word 95. It does this at the cost of disk space (writes both versions basically). You can configure Word 97 to only save as Word 95 as well. Also, MS provided Word import converters for the other direction.
Why was this done? Progress. You've heard about that right? Sometimes, when your a programmer, you make near sighted decisions that later bite you in the ass. Other times you come up with a better way of doing something, and you weight the change.
The Office team wanted Office 97 formats to be DocFiles, it's part of OLE 2.0, look it up it was all the rage in 1995. Basically, it allows multiple binary streams per document. Docfiles also provide their own internal mechanisms for subdirectories, locking, and transaction (i.e., commit/rollback) semantics. This has all sorts of other wonderfull benefits to us developers. Rather than let themselves and their features be forever locked in place due to old format, they bit the bullet and went for the change. See above paragraph. Change is a good thing. It means something is still alive. That's right, extensions. OPTIONAL FEATURES YOU MAY CHOOSE TO USE. SQL 92 and the other standards work just fine on SQL Server. You aren't forced to use the extensions. They are well labeled. You make a decision at design time, "Do I plan to be tied to SQL? Do I want to be able to leverage other RDMS systems?" Based on those choices you may decided to begin to use xp_sendMail or NOT TO. As a developer, I'd recommend against it. the xp_* procedures are nice for testing, or making some custom admin jobs, but if you use them in an app that is going to need to be RDMS neutral, you are the fault. Do you think developers are stupid enough to acidentally use an xp_ procedure and not know it's specific to MS SQL Server? "Duh, i didn't know Oracle didn't have xp_msver command! How can I tell what Window Version this is runnning on!" Active X is a standard. Implement it as a plugin, and walla, it works on Netscape. Oh wait, someone's already done it. Implementing it to work on another OS is a bit more of a challenge, but simply that... a challenge. You can do it if you'd like, it's well documented.
I have no idea what your're problem is with C#. My guess is you don't fully understand the CLR. Here's a hint, with certain OSS projects in the works, your C# code will work on Linux. Walk in peace in this enlightenment. Oh yeah, C# the language itself (.net aside) is completely documented. Implement it however you want.
As for HTML that only works in IE, this is a subject we could spend hours on. Most of the time, the reason HTML works in IE and not in NS, is because IE is more FORGIVING. It overlooks a lot of your errors. DOM, CSS, HTML (the actual standard, not what you were refering to be anything inside a web page) and many other _STANDARDS_ are well documented and each browser has very well known pluses and minuses in how it handles any 1 of thousands of test. Pick some specific issue if you want to further that line of dicussion. I'm going to assume you mean the extension added to the kerberos protocol so it would work in MS AD model? God forbid they use an EXPLICITLY ALLOWED vendor specific extension field for EXACTLY the purpose it was built for in the Kerberos specification. It's in the protocol for a reason. Being that was written by the IBM guys back when NT was the next OS/2 I sympothize (as a developer) with MS having to maintain someone elses subsystem every time they tried to make NT better.
And I say this rarely to (valid) points such as this, but... who cares. That subsystem was horrible. How about we worry about what's going on now, rather than bitch about things that no doubt happened in the past and no doubt we not 'good'.
My guess is you're not trying to do a Dr. Dos upgrade to Win3.x beta right now. After all we're talking about going Window shop to linux and vice versa. OK, so long as we don't get into generalizations. I guess as a developer, they've only put money into the my pockets (and bank accounts).
Just remember, "Everybody hurts.... sometimes...."
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
What the hell I'll take a swipe at it.
.NET.
" Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats have been released by MS"
Not all of it. Some of it relies on OLE so it can not be used on any other OS. Some of it is patented.
"When you roll out Word 97, it by default maintains compatability with Word 95."
I think he meant it the other way. MS arbitrarily changed the word format for a minor upgrade. This forced people to upgrade to 97 when they got files written in 97 and 95 would not open it. By default word did not save documents in RTF or 95 format. He was not talking about backward compatibility.
"OPTIONAL FEATURES YOU MAY CHOOSE TO USE. SQL 92 "
MS SQL server by default uses case insensitive collation which is not SQL 92 compliant. That's just one I bet I can find a few more if I dig around.
" Active X is a standard."
Very funny! Which standard body approved it?
"You can do it if you'd like, it's well documented."
If it was easy it would have been done but it's damned near impossible. Besides who knows what inside is patented.
" your C# code will work on Linux."
Well except that you can't code GUI and Database which makes it just about useless outside of
"As for HTML that only works in IE, this is a subject we could spend hours on."
You are conveniently overlooking the many "extensions" IE supports. I know you have to do that because (apparently) it's your job to spread MS FUD here but we all have visited sites which are useless in non IE borwsers. From vbscript to activeX controls, to proprietary tags. Embrace and extend.
"God forbid they use an EXPLICITLY ALLOWED vendor specific extension field for EXACTLY the purpose it was built for in the Kerberos specification. It's in the protocol for a reason."
The guys who programmed the protocol never even imagined that somebody would use that field and not document it. Furthermore they never in a thousand years imagined that somebody would protect it as a trade secret. Sometimes people who are good, decent and honest presume everybody is the same they never once considered that evil people would take advantage of them. I bet they are all kicking themselves now for not releasing the original code as GPL. MS took the code and used it to shut out linux and freebsd shame on them.
" How about we worry about what's going on now,"
When you are talking about the character of somebody it's perfectly OK to point out evil acts in their past. Should we ignore the past records of child molesters, murderers and rapist because "they are not doing it now"?.
" OK, so long as we don't get into generalizations."
Nice. You totaly destroyed his argument.
" I guess as a developer, they've only put money into the my pockets (and bank accounts). "
Good for you! During the communist regime in the soviet republic people stood in bread lines but there were always a few who made out like bandits. In a totalitatian govt the masses starve and the party heads drive bentleys. Sure you made money but a bunch of people paid to buy crappy shit that broke, were coerced into buying shit they did not want, were denied competing products, yadda yadda yadda. I'm glad you made out great just recognize that a ton of people got ripped off.
War is necrophilia.