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."

Comments

I'm waiting for Steve

[teamhasnoi]

to outsmart perspiration.

Re:I'm waiting for Steve

[unicron]

Mark my words: Maybe not this Comdex, maybe not the one after that, but sometime within the next 5 years you will get to see that man have a corinary they will talk about in medical schools for the next century.

I can outsmart you in four words

[BurritoWarrior]

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

TCO?

[Adam Wiggins]

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!"

Re:TCO?

[Xerithane]

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!"

I think they are just starting to realize they can't beat them. Outsmarting some of the smartest developers on the planet is going to be very difficult. We don't need marketing, we have word of mouth. It's proven itself time and time again that word of mouth is more important than any advertising campaign ever ran.

Microsoft will change their "Strategy" claiming they will win with it each time they do it. In reality, it's showing Microsoft doesn't really know what to do with it. They'll pull BS lines, about IBM and liability, but in reality it means nothing.

I think the last strategy Microsoft will come up with is writing quality software, which is the real reason why most people switch I think. At that point, I hope it's too late for them. They've had their time in the spotlight, they've helped and done their part evolving computers to where they've been. They are a dinosaur now, desperately holding on by using yesterdays flawed technology and attempting to purchase innovation. Not to say I think Microsoft will ever go away. It's going to change drastically though.

Re:TCO?

[Xerithane]

Ultimately MS will probably kill Oracle, Borland, and a few others. In doing
so, they will eliminate thousands of software engineering jobs which enable
people to write open source software in their spare time.

I really don't mean to sound trollish, and I'm definitely not flaming, but this is rather stupid. I will give up everything, never touch a computer again, and join the circus if Microsoft can kill off IBM, Oracle, Sun, and the others.

Microsoft is not that big. Microsoft is not all powerful. Microsoft is dependant upon the OEM dealers. Dell, Gateway, Acer, Toshiba, etc. If they had another option for an operating system that was better than Windows (I mean actually better, not "It can do most the stuff, pretty decent") than MS will be history.

If Linux wants to beat MS, that's what they do. Build a unified windowing SDK, that's much better than Xt. Build a unified system SDK, for socket communication and all that. Finish Wine. Then, MS won't be able to stand a chance.

However, I bet we'll see MS come out with a Linux kernel before we'll see a unified Linux architecture adopted as a standard.

Perception of value

[BitwizeGHC]

I said this once on newsforge but it's worth repeating:

The way to beat free software is through the psychology of value. "You get what you pay for." Us free software guys like to think that we are the exception, but business guys think it's true. And they'd rather pay lots of money for the backing of the Microsoft brand name than get an OS which they perceive as a "college kid's project" for little or no money. The reality is different, and we know this, but it is the PERCEPTION that counts.

Between Beowulf and MOSIX, Linux pretty much has low-end clustering sewn up. It's at the cutting edge. Microsoft will beat Linux at clustering in the business sector, by creating the PERCEPTION that Windows NT clusters are reliable (even if it takes a huge support infrastructure just to tell the MCSE monkey to reboot the damned machine) and that Linux clusters are somehow less reliable because they lack said support infrastructure. That is my prediction.

When it comes down to technology, Linux wins. When it comes down to people's feelings, and perceptions, and their sense of security, Microsoft wins because they can afford to hire the people and purchase the companies necessary to make it happen. In the end, it's people's perceptions that really count... not the technology.

Re:Perception of value

[Brento]

Microsoft will beat Linux at clustering in the business sector, by creating the PERCEPTION that Windows NT clusters are reliable (even if it takes a huge support infrastructure just to tell the MCSE monkey to reboot the damned machine) and that Linux clusters are somehow less reliable because they lack said support infrastructure.

As somebody who's tried MS clustering, let me tell you that is one arena in which they will never succeed. The only time MS clustering even comes close to succeeding in the business sector is where you've already bet the farm on MSSQL or Exchange, and your growth rate has required more horsepower/uptime than a single box can handle. Nobody starting from scratch with clustering would even consider the MS route. My bosses didn't believe me until we brought in two separate MS-cheerleader consultants, and they even agreed. Clustering isn't where Windows succeeds in adding the perception of value.

The value is the ability to buy a server, install it, and have "the MCSE monkey" administer it with zero training. Microsoft has succeeded in adding value by making all of their administrative tools nearly identical, via the MS Management Console. Our network admin can take care of SQL problems as they crop up, even though he's completely inexperienced in SQL, simply because he's fluent with the MMC. If you want to administer a service in *nix, you need to learn the specialized admin tools for that service. That's the cost, and that's where the MS value comes in. Trained monkeys can administer high-end servers instantly.

Re:Perception of value

[bdowne01]

You're very right about this.

I literally just walked out of a meeting were a few of the business-zombies had just quoted "Microsoft has us backed into a corner".

The situation is that we have just divorced our parent company, and all of our MS site licensing went with it...so now we're left with 1000 or so desktop machines with Windows 2000 Pro on them, and Bill & Co. sending us a representative next week to investigate & give us a bill.

During one of their rambles in the meeting, one of the lead "licensing" people actually said, "...and we can't do Linux on the desktop". (We've already successfully implemented Linux in replacment of several Windows servers).

When I asked why (our users run the basic Office apps, with standard email (no Exchange), and all their work is done through a telnet app to an HP-UX server)... no one could give a single reason other than "everyone else uses Windows".

Microsoft has won on that battlefield. Unless technically-inclined people can make it into upper management, MS will win over customers by simply giving false claims of security, lower TOC, and pretty color PowerPoint slides.

It seems that in just about any other industry, a monopoly would be declared foul by business-savvy execs. For some reason, a monopoly in software gives a false sense of security to these people.

Is it fear of the unknown? Is microsoft like the reassuring parent after they've been told a scary ghost story? I'm still trying to figure that out.

Re:Perception of value

[mwa]

and pretty color PowerPoint slides

This seems silly, but it's actually a huge opportunity for those who give presentations to decision makers: Use OpenOffice/StarOffice/KPresenter!

After the presentation, casually mention what you used (or even finish with a little "created with [product_logo]). You'll be surprised at the audience reaction, since they were sure during the whole presentation that you were using PowerPoint.

(If you need to distribute the presentation, export it to HTML so they can view it with nothing but a browser.)

Re:They have outsmarted us with palladium

[leviramsey]

Since palladium will be in the cpu and bios itself, I wonder if it will even be possible to turn it off?

Considering that the Palladium standard requires that the BIOS allow Palladium to be deactivated, I would say that it's more than possible.

Re:Ballmer

[rmadmin]

Na, not that way, they are going to do it the Valentine way. "I'm not proud," Valentine said, as he spoke to a crowd of developers here at the company's Windows .Net Server developer conference. "We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers ... Our products just aren't engineered for security."

Translation: We'll outsmart them by making them think our product sucks, then we'll surprise them with... oh wait, our product does suck.

Ability to code the tedious parts

[michael_cain]

I always thought that one area where MS has an advantage over the typical open-source application is that their developers are all on salary. So when marketing (or whoever makes the decisions) determines that there should be an integrated spell-checker, someone will code it up because that's what they're paid to do. As opposed to the open-source problem of finding someone who wants to do it.

Let's face it, lots of the little things that make an application "full featured" in the eyes of the typical home or business consumer are a drag to code.

Balmer's a funny one

[0x0d0a]

Technology like clustering would be better in Windows than Linux eventually, said Balmer

Intimidating.

"We will beat Linux on clusters."

Good luck. There's a lot more researchers doing distributed Linux work than there are on Windows, though I'm sure MS is blowing lots of money on it in their private labs. Windows is not great for a headless cluster machine -- lousy remote administration, high CPU/RAM overhead, not the best performance, costs more.

As for their distributed filesystem beating Linux...well, might happen, but they're building on a database (overhead implied), whereas Linux has the excellent AFS (openafs and arla implementations, both free), Coda, and Intermezzo, plus some other fringe ones. All the filesystem people I know (CMU is a big distributed filesystems research place) do Solaris or Linux...not Windows.

Microsoft is considering extending its shared-source initiative

You don't get it, do you, Microsoft? Seeing the source is the smallest benefit of open source to your customers. *They* mostly care about less immediate license costs, and (the biggie) no vendor lock in in the Linux world. Open source strongly facilitates this. Your NDA and smartcard supported limited shared source program doesn't interest these types in the least -- especially the NDAs, which are designed to *increase* lock-in.

For nine years, the company has designated users with particular skills -- usually seen by how often they intervene helpfully in newsgroups -- as "most valued professionals". Currently there are about 1,200 MVPs, half of whom are in the United States

Whee. Linux never needed a formal system for this because it already happens. Stop by any of the channels on irc.openproject.net. You can get hours of real-time help...not just one lousy newsgroup post. Good luck on this one, MS.

"We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux."

Hell, I'll bet there's a lower percentage of Linux users pirating *any* Linux software than there are Windows users *pirating Microsoft Windows*! The only reason anyone pays is because MS does aggressive business audits and has OEM deals.

The big issue there [with IBM], he said, was a reluctance to accept legal liability for open-source software.

Well, fuck me senseless. MS must be planning on accepting legal liability for their own closed source software. Hot damn. I've wasted more times fixing problems that their software has caused than I can count. Windows Updates that bluescreen and render a computer unbootable. Crashing Office installations. You name it. I've been wrong about MS all along! They're going to come through and actually support their software! Tech support will be free, not expensive "incident-based" issues! Woohoo!

Re:And this from a man...

[zulux]

for (x=1;x>=1,000,000;x++){
print "DEVELOPERS";
}

Hey! This is Microsoft we're talking about:

10 PRINT "DEVELOPERS"
20 GOTO 10

and for the L33t Microsoft developer:

10 ? "DEVELOPERS":RUN

[clippy]
Hey, It looks like your trying to be sarcastic

Meep Meep

[signe]

Yep... we'll outsmart Open Source.

You see, we're going to order this rocket sled from Acme...

-Todd

Re:They have outsmarted us with palladium

[turgid]

Which, of course, will only apply in the USA. The rest of us will be safe, for a while.

In for a spin?

[miffo.swe]

"The big issue there, he said, was a reluctance to accept legal liability for open-source software. Ballmer said"

Last i checked any software from MS it did contain a nasty EULA that prevents me to take any legal action now matter how much the product was faulty. Its really ugly to pretend that they themselves give any when the never do and use that as an argument against linux.

I think we are really in for a spin against linux from Microsoft. The bad news for them will probably be that since their trust account is completely drained none will listen to them. The more they spin the more they tend to look like bad loosers.

To lay so much effort on making all competition look bad indicates that their own products doesnt have enough value to compete.

Re:They have outsmarted us with palladium

[chuckles1335]

My guess is they want Linus to write linux for a palladium system so they can send him to jail or sue and end up killing linux

The "code" needed to run Palladium will be released under the BSD license.

It seems to me that the BSD license allows BSD code to be incorporated in a GPL product because the original BSD code is freely availible. This covers any legal problems.

As far as technology goes, the user decides what code to run, Palladium only tells you the code is unsigned and reccommends against running it, but the user still makes the final decision.

As currently explained it will be both legal and technologically possible to run linux on a palladium box. The only question is if you want to.

Competing with Open Source and Changing the Game

[Carnage4Life]

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.

Re:Ballmer

[tshak]

I'm in this community and I share my code with others (in newsgroups and published articles) all the time. No one is anti open source, not even Microsoft. Ballmer is just an idiot who doesn't always properly define open source. Microsoft is anti-GPL, and they also want to protect the intellectual property that they've spent billions on. However, when it came to .NET, they released the source code via the Shared Source license (not true OSS, I know). Because of the nature of .NET they felt it made business sense. And that's what it comes down to. Complete and utter OSS generally doesn't make business sense. Look at Apple. They don't open up OSX - they'd go out of business. But they did embrace the concept to an extent with Darwin. It's all about balance and not about extremes.

I just have to say again, that I'm very dissapointed in your post, the moderation of it, and the lack of intellectual honesty. You may hate MS, and all things MS, even us developers. But to make the blind assumption that the community is a bunch of closed source bigots is just as bad as myself making the assumption that Linux is hard to use without ever even trying it. We have a strong community that shares ideas and code all the time - we just don't base our businesses on that philosophy.

Security through obscurity

[jcsehak]

from the article: While Ballmer stopped short of advocating Microsoft's old "security through obscurity" policy, he pointed out that publicly posting bug fixes often prompted attacks. "The hacker waits till a fix is posted, then writes an attack and sends it out," he said. Such attacks are based on information in the fix.

In related news, I've noticed that the more dishes I clean, there more there are to get dirty, so if I don't do the dishes, then there won't be any clean ones to get dirty, and I'll be saved a lot of work.

Um, Ballmer didn't say "outsmart", the ARTICLE did

[TomatoMan]

I'm no fan of Uncle Steve, but unless I'm missing something, he himself didn't use the word "outsmart". He said "We have to compete with free software, on value, but in a smart way." ZDNet inexplicably translated this to "outsmart", and the anonymous poster takes this one step further to "We'll outsmart open source."

Sloppy and dumb. Keep right on lowering your standards, everyone.

I smell Iocane powder

[Ilan Volow]

We've bested Steve's Ballmer's spaniard and we've beaten his giant. Like we didn't see a battle of wits coming....

Compare and Contrast

Re:Competing with Open Source and Changing the Gam

[miguel]

dare, I do not agree with your assumptions, and hence with your conclussion.

Linux is just starting to make inroads in the enterprise and critical application markets, say it became useful in 2001. This is the area that has been dominated by Unix since 1986. So it took us "only" 16 years to duplicate the enterprise functionality of a Unix operating system.

Sometimes copying is easier than innovating: but achieving total compatibility -which can not be ignored- is a massive task. Wine has been cloning the Win32 API, and it is one of the most ancient projects from the Linux community: it was there back in 1996, and we have still not managed to clone the entire Win32 API. Yes, copying certain things are easy, but achieving the compatibility is a completely different matter.

Am going to give you another example which must be closer to you: the Xml implementation in .NET features state of the art innovations for large XML document handling, and in Mono we will have an extremely hard time implementing your XPathNavigator-based XSLT. Even with reference implementations (like Daniel Veillard's), this is a truly advanced piece of code. We can emulate it using slower, more inneficient mechanisms, but we wont be able to perform as well as Microsoft's .NET XML implementation.

I rather see Microsoft stay on the innovation track, than go into a legal battle against Open Source projects.

Proprietary software has some advantanges, and open source has different ones. Open Source is making some inroads into a Microsoft-dominated world. And I do not see anything wrong with having more than one operating system in our day to day environments: it promotes open standards, it promotes well written and well documented reliable solutions, and ultimately, it allows the consumer to choose a solution that is right for him.

Miguel

Re:Ballmer

[Dalcius]

An exercise for the AC...

Here are my points:

---
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.

---
but it makes sense in the support market.

Read.

---
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.

---
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.

---

I should also add that it's estimated that over 70% of development occurs in-house and not for resale.

From opensource.org:
---
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 ... but most estimates put the proportion of all code written in-house at companies other than software vendors at over 75%.
----

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).

He doesn't need to

[K-Man]

Invention is 99% perspiration. He delegates the inspiration to others.