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Ballmer: "We'll Outsmart Open Source"
An anonymous reader writes "Micorosofts Steve Ballmer is spouting off again in this ZDNet UK article. To an audience of Most Valued Professionals in London, he says 'We'll outsmart open source.' Among other things, he also says 'Linux is a serious competitor.' We've known ever since the Halloween Documents that they have been running scared, but this looks like a prelude to a whole new round of dirty tricks. It also looks like damage control for the statements of Microsoft's Sr. VP Brian Valentines last week."
Interesting: they aparently are abandoning their whole total-cost-of-ownership argument. Balmer states, "We cannot price at zero" and "We can't beat them [Linux] on price" - thus implying that Linux's price is zero. Quite the opposite from "it costs you more in the long run!"
Which, of course, will only apply in the USA. The rest of us will be safe, for a while.
Stick Men
There are two main thoughts that run through my mind when I think about competing with Open Source and the IBM model. The first is that, the main problem with competing with Open Source is that it's always faster to copy than to innovate. It may take years, multiple focus groups and millions of dollars to produce feature X or behavior Y in some commercial product but after that it usually takes a fraction of the time for that feature or behavior to be replicated in competing products. This is much compounded by Open Source which is also typically free (as in beer) thus undercutting the original innovators. A good example of this is commercial Unix and Linux.
In such an arena, it seems inevitable that the only way to slow the inexorable march of Open Source is to resort to Intellectual Property. So far no one has done this to any significant degree (the MP3 patents don't count because they are a different issue) although there has at least been discussion amongst Linux kernel hackers about patent liability which will only continue given the proliferation of software patents and the more features that various Open Source projects copy from their proprietary brethren. It is food for thought.
The second thing that comes to mind is that Open Source is shifting the balance of power from software developers to software consultants. For companies like IBM with huge consulting divisions (their Global Services division is at least thrice as large as all of Microsoft) this a great boon which they are willing to sacrifice a lot of software development to gain which explains their intense support of the Linux and Apache projects. To compete with this, I believe large software companies will have to use similar tactics including providing more source code to customers, making more software available free of charge and providing more extensive consulting services. Of course, this would significantly change the landscape of the software industry. Open Source and Linux would indeed have changed the game.
Disclaimer: This post is my opinion and does not reflect the thoughts, strategies, intentions or opinions of my employer.
Right-o, because, as we all know, no communities based on shared interests and goals ever existed before the open source movement came along.
Too many open source advocates have the bad habit of overestimating their own signifigance and underestimating everyone else. That's probably why most people don't even know what Open Source is.
I crack up when I see the "Developers" line. Let me compare thee to Linux (which will represent the open source community as a whole), MS development environment:
COMPILER:
Linux:
Many compilers for many languages. Free. LCC and GCC for C, G++ for C++, Eiffel, *ML, more than I want to go through. If you want, you can also buy commercial compilers like icc.
MS:
Killed most compilers for their platform (except the oddball ones) by squashing them with their own. Visual C++ generates pretty tight code, but you're just screwed if you run into a bug with it. Oh, and it costs lots of money. Most compilers commercial. Mingw/cygwin exists but not supported well (MSDN support bitterly hates both).
DEBUGGERS/DIAGNOSTICS:
Linux:
memprof, debauch, debug mode on malloc, gdb, strace, ltrace....many, many, many more. These were the ones I used on my last small project. All these are free, and there are many more.
MS:
Um...ntinternals put out regmon and filemon. Apparently MS puts out WinDBG for free, though I haven't used it and apparently it isn't too popular. No free high level debuggers. Few diagnostic programs for already compiled code.
DEVELOPER SUPPORT:
Linux:
Email the developers for the kernel, libc, SDL, XFree86, or whatever library or kernel bit you're working on if you find a weird corner case or bug. Get response, bug fix, patch. Most exchanges between core developers documented on publically available (and searchable) mailing lists, so usually you don't even have to email. Lots of IRC channels of developers who are interested in talking about their work.
MS:
Guess at what's going on underneath the covers, most of the time. No source to look at. Some newsgroups, mostly for higher level problems. Can purchase extremely expensive (though usually effective) MSDN incidents.
SAMPLE CODE
Linux:
Tons. Usually, if it runs on Linux, you can see the code. If you're using a library and you find an unclear bit in the documentation, you can take a look at the source.
MS:
A fair bit, in certain areas. Game developers, in particular, have built up some web sites that have lots of snippits. Usually hard/impossible to get library source code.
GENERAL DEVELOPER COMPETENCE:
Linux:
Many new programmers, but most are interested in technology for its own sake and doing cool things with it, so learn the system inside out. Some accessable very skilled systems developers.
MS:
Many, many Visual Basic coders. MS dug its own grave with Visual Basic. Very low barrier to entry, very difficult to scale above a certain height ("Well, you *can* do this advanced thing in Visual Basic...you just need to also know how the underlying Win32 API works and how Visual Basic chooses to interact with it"). Some contractors that should be shot before calling themselves developers (I remember an expensive contract with a GUI-coding-tool using developer at one company...). Some competent ones, as well.
APIS:
Linux:
Some UNIX cruft. Usually, APIs are pretty clean. Emphasis is on keeping things clean for the many developers -- if something is unclear in gtk1, fix it in gtk2.
Windows:
The most godawful APIs in the world. Win32 is so full of cruft, poor conventions, inconsistent conventions, and unnecessarily complicated *crap* that it's amazing. Most advanced MFC programmers end up having to interact with Win32 as well to do certain things that MFC can't do. Has some great snippits on MSDN, along the lines of "Do not use this argument, as it represents a security risk and has been obsoleted. Some developers may wish to use this argument for backwards compatibility with Microsoft CSPs."
OS CAPABILITIES:
Linux:
Pretty much if you could want it in an OS, it's there. I've yet to miss something (well, Linux *does* need disk priorities on processes for scheduling, but Windows lacks them as well).
MS:
No fork()? Damn, that was a pretty convenient syscall. How about file deletion...can I delete or move an open file? No? Nuts. As for the registry...well, it's one ugly, giant unregulated hack that lots of programs directly modify and end up screwing up all sorts of stuff. The number of times I've seen borked file associations because a program was writing straight to the registry and prevented Explorer from reading or coping with the file association is ridiculous.
I could go on, but the point is that any MS claims of being ahead on making life good for developers are absolutely ludicrous. The *worst* thing about Windows, easily, is doing development for it.
May we never see th
In a parallel story by InfoWeek:
Microsoft pushes on in server OS market
By Stacy Cowley
September 24, 2002 9:18 am PT
LINUX IS THE only serious threat to Microsoft's increasing dominance of the market for server operating systems, according to new research from IDC.
Microsoft's share of new server operating environment license shipments grew from just under 42 percent in 2000 to nearly 49 percent in 2001, IDC of Framingham, Mass., said in a summary of its recently released "Worldwide Client and Server Operating Environment Market Forecast and Analysis: 2002-2006."
On the client side, Microsoft's already overwhelming 92 percent share crept up to 93 percent in 2001. IDC analyst Al Gillen attributes the company's continued growth to its licensing programs and to customer transitions from older Microsoft products to its current software.
Click Here for the rest of the story.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
An exercise for the AC...
... but most estimates put the proportion of all code written in-house at companies other than software vendors at over 75%.
Here are my points:
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OSS doesn't make sense in the reseller market (the one Microsoft is in)
As said previously, why spend millions making software when it's out there for free. If Microsoft makes the best product in the world and sells it for $300 with the source under an open source license, someone will just take the code, maybe modify it a bit, and derive their own product, presumably selling it for less.
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but it makes sense in the support market.
Read.
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Example is Red Hat. No, they're just under being profitable
From Red Hat's website:
"In an increasingly difficult IT environment, Red Hat delivered a profit and generated positive cash flows for the first time," commented Matthew Szulik, President and CEO of Red Hat.
I conceed, I was a touch out of date.
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but they aren't catering to the large market
From Entrepreneur.com:
"Linux was the primary OS for 27 percent of the server operating market at the end of last year"
Again, I'm a little out of date, but 27% is not the kind of market share that Microsoft has (41% from the same website). I phrased "catering to the large market" incorrectly, but I think you get the point.
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I should also add that it's estimated that over 70% of development occurs in-house and not for resale.
From opensource.org:
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Programming will collapse if software has no market value
Very unlikely. Code written for resale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. It used to be said that 85% of all the code in the world was written in-house at banks and insurance companies. This is probably no longer the case
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I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but I figured that someone asked for links, I might as well offer them for those who show a real interest (and don't have their heads up their asses).
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.