Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1
geekinexile writes "Bloomberg is running this Microsoft vs. Linux article as a top story on the Bloomberg system. Not so notable for what it says about Linux, but rather for the fact that the financial community is starting to actually get open source."
If someone was willing to volunteer their work to replace the product that I made for a living, I would be scared too.
To a company that sells software for a living, how can free software not be enemy #1?
Ballmer sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1
Well, why not? It is.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
from the no-comment-on-enemy-number-two dept.
Would you talk negatively about your own company?
Ugh, enough
Quality as job 1. That doesn't mean Ford's have quality, so maybe we're all safe.
this story is not only on Bloomberg's website. It is on the Bloomberg system as one of the top stories when you do news research on Microsoft.
Michael Tiemman (sp?),CTO of Red Hat spoke to our LUG last night. He said that Wall Street is starting to use Linux to run custom number crunching software and I think Oracle. Big computational farm sort of things.
sure they get it, but after almost ten years of windooze they can nearly reboot their pc's without a call to the helpdesk, I don't see them as a "switch" market, rather a sit around and talk about something new and not do anything about it market. Of course I would not be speaking to any of them reading this post...
Is anyone surprised at all?
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
-Mohandas Gandhi
Maybe if he hadn't gone apeshit that day, people might have been able to take him more seriously...
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
People are saying by and large, `It might be easier for me to move my Unix apps to Linux than to Windows,' although we're pretty close to making that untrue.
Somehow I doubt this. Anyone has any idea what he's talking about?
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
This space intentionally left blank.
We have told our sales force to really understand that this is kind of job one, Ballmer, 46, said in an interview last week. People are saying by and large, It might be easier for me to move my Unix apps to Linux than to Windows, although we're pretty close to making that untrue.
Lol, what apps are easier from Unix to Windows? Viruses? that is about it.
I've switched all my companies servers to Linux and Solaris. I am slowly bringing linux on board at my full time job. When the shoe fits, wear it. Unfortunately for MS their shoe is a size too small.
I totally don't get this statement. Can somebody please tell me how [hardware X + non-free-OS] can be cheaper than [hardware X + free-OS]?
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
world + dog are surprised.
unless, of course, Microsoft really means it this time and they were just warning us linux users the last few times they said this.
Although.." Microsoft marketers must rely on studies that show the cost of maintaining a Windows system is lower than that of Linux machines. Research has yet to show that people are replacing Microsoft products with free programs, analysts said. "
So we're going to be seeing MORE "studies" showing that Windows is cheaper to maintain? I'm sure they will be able to skew that towards Windows, but it's pretty hard to skew the fact that it costs quite a bit more to initially set up a Windows-based server infrastructure than a Linux-based one.
As far as the other bit? The major software that people would be replacing is Microsoft Office. I wonder how many are replacing it with something *cheaper* - like Corel's office suite. Gateway is already doing that...
Ballmer and his salespeople will have a hard time convincing business clients that their networks should be moved from the 40-year-old Unix operating system to rival Windows if customers have a cheaper option, investors said. So does that mean they run their mission critical data center work on a PDP 11 in a corner somewhere?
--
Of course the financial community is starting to "get" open source software. It makes perfect sense that a group of people who are experts in money would opt for a system that is just as good, at a fraction of the cost. These people know money - and financially, it just makes sense for them to go open source for at least some of their applications.
I'd say that Linux is of course Enemy #1, but it has been for years, at least back to 1998. And really Ballmer could fix this whole linux "threat", but then he'd accomplish basically what customers want anyway.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I like the last line in the article stating that Microsofts only option is going to be to out innovate the Open Source Commmunity.
I give them three weeks if they go down that path as opposed to the jack boot, "You vill use our Softvare" approach.
I wonder how many times we can see slashdot post a story that says the same thing?? Next week it will be a story about how someone is using openoffice but finds out that it cant open a document and have it render the right way...
Free and low-cost alternatives to Win32/Office like Red Hat's imroving desktop and OpenOffice.org are being looked at seriously now.
Linux may have gotten alot of hype and speculative investment in the 90's, but the current economy is where its price/performance potential becomes evident.
Not only is Ballmer scared, but Sun announced 4,400 layoffs today. The demand for commodity operating systems is kicking them in the pants, and their quality, but proprietary hardware seems less of a bargain as commodity hardware improves in price/performance.
FWIW, open source is sending some proprietary UNIX employees to the unemployment lines already. Next, it's Redmond's turn as the desktop improves.
Let's see 2002 - 40 = 1962.
Wow, All this time I thought Multics was in the late 60's and the first Unix came in November of 71.
Guess journalism and math don't mix.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Much of the financial industry is made up by broker firms. These have requirements from the SEC to conform to certain standards, many of which dictate information storage and handling. For instance, if a broker speaks to a trader on an exchange floor with some IM variant, the conversation has to be logged. Same thing with phone calls. They must be recorded.
The thing here is that it is not as much a cost savings (which does have a large part of it) issue as much as it is an auditing issue. It is easier to certify compliance with these rules if one can show that the procedures to store this information is open. This is much to the demise of Microsoft. Sun and HP have been very good to the broker firms this way, because they provide specifications to everything as well as warranties that their stuff works.
I am not speaking of individual desktop machines running some electronic trading front-end. I am speaking of back-end systems like databases and quote dissimination systems as well as order systems and so on. If one has the de-centralized ability to fix something that is broken, it is always preferable to that of compliance.
Research has yet to show that people are replacing Microsoft products with free programs, analysts said.
"Just because the research doesn't show it, doesn't mean that it's not happening", said wiresquire, from his former MS box, now Linux box running Mozilla and StarOffice.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
He must be new ...
Let's inform him on some of the "innovating" that Microsoft has done in the past ... shall we?
DOS ... Nope, they bought it ...
... Nope, got it from the Mac ...
... Nope, got it from NCSA (Mosaic) ... in fact, they almost missed the Internet ...
... Nope, WordPerfect was already around ...
... Nope, got it from the RIAA ...
Windows (UI)
Internet Explorer
Word
DRM
Hmmm ... seems that Micrsoft needs a little improvement for innovating ...
BTW, don't miss the Dancing Monkey
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
A quote that didn't make the article:
In other news, Balmer has admitted publically that it is currently easier to move Unix apps to Linux than to Windows. May the mass porting begin!
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
big picture time: this isn't about the 'financial community' getting open source religion. there are soooo many markets out there that have a) OLD dos based software and/or b) poorly written windows software.
i've done support with companies in insurance, medicine, financial, libraries, etc. mostly small, but some of them were not. they all have *Wretched* software. i'm still supporting dos programs for insurance agencies and doctors offices. there are markets out there that are just now starting to write windows software!
this is a window (pardon the pun) of opportunity to take some desktops away from microsoft.
between the licensing issues and expense of microsoft tools *and* the growing expense of the end-user environment *and* a poor track record of security, this should be an opportunity to show what open source can do. and be.
eric
..I think this is a clear proof that RMS just keeps getting scarier and scarier.. :)
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Free software, free software, free software, free software
it does not have the same kind of rhytm as developers.....
btw. we need a new version of that video!
More precisely, if the Microsoft platform weren't a prison full of shit for which you have to pay a huge rent (to use a -1 Troll-able anti-euphemism), I really doubt that Linux, for instance, would have so many followers
The Raven
The Raven
Like my company was. However that being said, what got me to finally breakdown and switch to Linux/Solaris wasn't the Nonexistent Security, Monopoly, the consistant Patches, the piss poor support or even the high cost. It was when trying to get my Exchange Server back up after it crashed for no apparent reason a book I was reading for help in running Exchange said:
"It is often preferable to simply backup you Exchange Server Data and reinstall, instead of trying to find the one hidden setting that is causing the error in your configuration."
That almost made me fall over in my chair.
From that day on I decided on a course for MS freedom. We now run Apache/Tomcat for our JSP server, MySQL for our DB Backend (until migration to Oracle is complete), and QMail/Horde/IMP for mail. It took a little time but saved around $6000 in software licensing costs and $5000 in new hardware that would have needed to be purchased.
So in the end I could deal with all the MS shit until the UI for managing Exchange got so bad it no longer became worth it to run MS on the server side. It was the best IT decision I've made (IMHO).
Quote: Ballmer and his salespeople will have a hard time convincing business clients that their networks should be moved from the 40-year-old Unix operating system to rival Windows if customers have a cheaper option, investors said.
I'm as old as Unix and I'm only 32. I'm not 40, dammit. These investors can't count!
Ok,
... maybe we actually should consider some alternatives to Microsoft!
So pretty much all us Slashdot readers know free software would be enemy #1 to Ballmer. The thing is, I can't help but think that he is adding more proverbial wood to the very same fire that is burning him at the stake.
IMHO, this statement would make many purchase decision makers wake up from their MSOFT induced coma and start to entertain the notion that maybe the geeks are right
I don't know for sure, but I tend to think that this is quite a SLIP up for Microsoft. It will do great damage in eroding their best and biggest customer base - the religious Microsoft fanatics that (up till now) refused to consider any other options.
_____________
Belly
I've been a FreeBSD/free software user for over 5 years now and in my experience, free software just works better. When was the last time you had a windows server that went 270+ days without a reboot (when was the last time there was 270 days between security patches?)?
If microsoft wants to win the war against OSS, they need to make their software far more resiliant against crashing and security issues.
Scott
> ``I don't know what you do [...] except
> to out-innovate the Linux community.''
Hmmm - usually M$ has the reputation to out-innovate competitors by
a) including the same features "for free" in the next release of Windows
b) buying the product/company.
Where Do You Want to Go Today?
"Herro, i am interest to be learned the Lubie lagrage. I hear Dragon Ball Z movies scripted by Lubie, very excitement for me!"
A Visual Studio .Net ad on this MS article! AHH!
*run away*
If Microsoft can do that, more profit to them. If they can provide the products people want and can afford, then they have nothing to worry about.
The problem is that they are a monolithic company. They have an official policy, some one decides to run a project, and throws programmers at it. They can make large scale (if not reliable) software quickly because they can afford to pay hundreds of programmers.
What they can't emulate is the ideas that come from a grass-roots community. If any one person has an idea, they can start to work on it. They have a huge body of software to research and re-use code from, and if they can demonstrate something that other people find useful, they can quickly gather programmers to the project.
Because it starts small, it may take longer to finish. But because it starts small, hundreds of ideas can be quickly tested, with the best being developed and improved by the community.
Haw can one company out-innovate that?
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
1) First they ignore you,
2) then they laugh at you,
3) then they fight you,
4) then you win.
5) ???
6) Profit!!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
No it's not. The jump in logic may not be obvious, but it is valid. This is essentially the way that India's independence from Britain came about, by passive resistance. When the British people saw all the horrible things that were being done to non-violent Indians, support for continued colonizations quickly dwindled. So, after the British fought, the Indians won.
It works here to - as soon as Microsoft starts fighting Linux, guess what gets free advertising? Even more, anyone in the business community can smell blood when they see one company getting so worked up over a competitor. If Linux wasn't the real deal, Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about it. So essentially, Microsoft fights Linux, Linux wins (in the sense that it gains larger name recognition, and hopefully, larger deployment).
Matt
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Slashdot is a quoted news source being used by Google News.
Be afraid, be very afraid
>Microsoft sponsored a booth for the first time >at the LinuxWorld trade show in August in San >Francisco. The company argued that Windows is >cheaper to maintain because it has more >compatible programs and comes with better >support. Using the same type of reasoning, Microsoft went on to argue that Windows is more stable because it costs more and has little animated paperclips.
On *this* article the half-screen ad that shows up is for visual studio.net?
Oh my..
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
Phase 1. Kill Linux.
Phase 2. ???
Phase 3. Profit.
Could someone who is saving all that money by using Microsoft Servers spring for some writing lessons for Dan Goodin?
That had to be the most disjointed, barely readable, "journalistic" effort I have seen since my high schools "newspaper", some 22 yrs ago!
You mean that Microsoft is going to pay me to use Windows at my home, when I can download the three ISO's that make up Mandrake Linux for the price of the electricity and whatever coasters come out of the CD-R drive?? I'm not sure of the logic behind this - I mean, aren't corporations in the business of not giving away money like that?
This sig no verb.
One of the things they need to innovate is how to innovate...
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
This conversation overheard outside Steve Jobs' Cupertino office...
MINION: Master, your plan is unfolding nicely, Microsoft and the Free Software community are locked in mortal combat!
THE INSANELY GREAT ONE: (Steepling his fingers) Yes, this is perhaps my most diabolical plan ever, while these fools argue, I shall take over the world!!! (Maniacal laughter). Now, leave me...there is much to do...
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
Most idiot CEOs already think free software is uninnovative and crappy.
Trying to bolster a platform that's already in place is a waste of time, and that can only serve to further the amount of free software in business, considering at this point its on a steady increase in use.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Once Wall Street will recognize that Linux is deployed already with very free, very programmable, fast enough and reliable enough DBMS (actually ORDBMS) PostgreSQL - then Oracle won't have much of chances either.
Less is more !
Microsoft's Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1 (Update5)
2002-10-17 18:19 (New York)
Microsoft's Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1 (Update5)
(Adds first-quarter results, beginning in sixth paragraph.)
Redmond, Washington, Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp.
Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is telling his employees to focus on
the threat that Linux and other free programs available on the
Internet pose to sales at the world's largest software maker.
The programs are called open source because thousands of
developers on the Web can collaborate to tweak and customize the
underlying code. They may undercut Ballmer's plan to counter
slowing sales of personal computers by selling more software for
the server machines that run company networks and Web sites.
``We have told our sales force to really understand that this
is kind of job one,'' Ballmer, 46, said in an interview last week.
``People are saying by and large, `It might be easier for me to
move my Unix apps to Linux than to Windows,' although we're pretty
close to making that untrue.''
Ballmer and his salespeople will have a hard time convincing
business clients that their networks should be moved from the 40-
year-old Unix operating system to rival Windows if customers have
a cheaper option, investors said.
``Linux has achieved the top billing in terms of their No. 1
enemy,'' said Scott McAdams, chief executive of McAdams Wright
Ragen, which manages about $1.7 billion and owns shares of
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.
First Quarter
Microsoft today said server software sales rose 14 percent to
$1.4 billion in the fiscal first quarter ended in September.
Server sales increased 5.8 percent to $5.11 billion in the 12
months ending in June, the smallest gain in at least three years,
as customers pared spending on computers and services and
evaluated free programs including Linux.
``Linux continues to grow share on Intel servers,'' Microsoft
Chief Financial Officer John Connors said on a conference call.
``For investors in Microsoft, the ramifications are obvious.''
First-quarter net income more than doubled and sales rose
26 percent to $7.75 billion, topping the average estimates of
analysts polled by Thomson First Call.
Unlike Linux and other open-source programs, Microsoft owns
and controls the Windows code. Rivals including International
Business Machines Corp. and Red Hat Inc. use the output of open-
source developers to build products and services that compete
against Microsoft software.
``The advantage of open source is pretty hard to match,''
said Ram Mohan, chief technology officer at Afilias Ltd., which
uses the free Postgres database to store and manage 3.5 million
Internet addresses. ``Microsoft makes awesome products, but
they're not aimed at my specific needs.''
Mohan, seeking a cheaper alternative to the Sun Microsystems
Inc. Unix-based gear he uses now, says he'll probably switch to
Linux because he likes the flexibility. He overhauled Postgres
with new features last year.
While Windows-based server computers are growing increasingly
powerful and can cost 40 percent less than Unix systems, open-
source programs have improved enough to replace Unix systems,
investors said.
Less NOISE
Ballmer a few years ago summed up Microsoft's competition by
using the acronym NOISE -- Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun and
Everybody else. Netscape Communications Corp., now owned by AOL
Time Warner Inc., isn't on Microsoft's radar anymore. Ballmer now
talks less about Sun and Oracle Corp. and more about Linux and
IBM's WebSphere program, which works with Linux.
Ballmer made $758,810 last year as Microsoft's stock fell 25
percent. The shares rose 34 cents to $50.75 at 4 p.m. New York
time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. They have declined by 23 percent
this year.
Tougher Sell
Microsoft marketers must rely on studies that show the cost
of maintaining a Windows system is lower than that of Linux
machines. Research has yet to show that people are replacing
Microsoft products with free programs, analysts said. Linux ran on
4 percent of servers in 2001, and the share will increase to 11
percent by 2006, according to researcher IDC.
``If Linux takes share, it will take down Microsoft's pricing
ability,'' said Michelle Connell, vice president at Wells Fargo
Private Client Services, which manages $75 billion and owns
Microsoft shares.
Microsoft this month introduced a program to help Unix users
switch to Windows. The company said in July it will increase
spending on research and development this year by 21 percent to
$5.2 billion, bolstering server programs and other non-PC
products. It's adding 5,000 workers.
Emulating Linux
Microsoft sponsored a booth for the first time at the
LinuxWorld trade show in August in San Francisco. The company
argued that Windows is cheaper to maintain because it has more
compatible programs and comes with better support.
As part of Ballmer's plan to woo open-source users, Microsoft
is sponsoring Web sites to provide advice to developers and let
them pool resources. He's seeking to emulate the way hundreds and
sometimes thousands of developers collaborate on open-source
programs.
``He's got it tough,'' said Walter Price, who helps manage
$35 billion at Dresdner RCM Global Investors and holds Microsoft
shares. ``I don't know what you do to protect your shareholders
and preserve your market capitalization except to out-innovate the
Linux community.''
Ruby is a cheap hong kong rip off of python.
Had Japan won WW2 in the Pacific Ghandi's quote would have been:
First they shoot you,
then they disembowel you,
then you lose.
That only works when the advesary comes from a liberal (19th Century usage of the word) tradition. Britain, like many Western nations, like to think of themselves as basically good societies, and want others to see them the same way.
Totalitarian/authoritarian societies do not have to deal with such niceties.
but anyone who wants to try to stop me from talking about anything I please can find me at:
417 S. Manning
Muncie, IN
How much of the development of Linux is being done by for-profit companies like RedHat or IBM? It seems like most of the new development is being done by people that are getting paid to do Linux development. I think this idea of thousands of developers working in their spare time to make Linux is overrated.
In which case makes the battle between Microsoft and Linux more of a battle of business models than some overhyped free vs not free battle. And I seriously question RedHat and other Linux company's business models. Pay alot of money to develop software, give it away for free, hope people are kind enough to buy the boxed version? I know they sell various support services too, but will that actually be enough to pay the rent? And if the margins are that good, why couldn't Microsoft eventually just adopt a similar business model?
Bigger companies like IBM and Sun may have a better chance with Linux since they have other revenue streams (hardware, services) that give them much bigger margin to blow money developing Linux. However, what happens when times get tight and departments get cut? Will they cut the non-revenue generating departments first?
Brian Ellenberger
Some of the business people did yell - "do you really see non-technical people using this 'Internet'?" and when we slid Mosaic to a few people "Do you really see business people using this 'World Web' thing?" . Yes, yes I do. "That just shows what you don't know about business." I'll get back to you on that one, ok?
Everyone had Unix desktops (well, most). Sendmail for 6,000 machines run mostly by, er, me, with end admins actually tossing in the binaries and one of 4 config files that ran the whole thing. SMTP got mail from London to Toyko, desktop to desktop, in under 2 seconds.
Did we live on Open Source? Well, the infrastructure did.
Trouble ticket systems took 2 years to be selected and rolled out.
Our group compiled "req" in a day and used that while we waited for Remedy.
Monitoring systems were selected for THOUSANDS per machine. /me looks at ethernet on the NeXT and Sparc 2 "no, hubs and routers, that sort of thing - just pony up the money for each box and we'll monitor it").
We put up CMU SNMP (would now use Net-SNMP) and got better results, despite management ("see, now, snmp is for Network devices"
Most importantly most trading system software is not store bought. Sure, on windows, they use some rapid development stuff. folks I know use a lot of Java, but it's a LOT of custom software.
The Unix problem was that X and Motif were so miserable to develop for. It was like punishment for choosing Unix. My hat is off to the KDE and GNOME folks for picking up the ball that the X Consortium dropped. Mandate application look and feel. You must quit apps through FILE -> Quit. That beats the random ways that you quite in Wordperfect or XV or Lotus or XTerm or whatever.
The financial world will go to where better app development and better support are. That's been MS for a while, I hate to say. GNOME & KDE may save Unix.
You've probably also carved out a niche for yourself as the only guy in the shop who can keep what you've installed up and running. Very good. You're a Unix guy now.
I just installed Lindows 2. Using it right now in fact.
It isn't perfect, but its interface its pretty damned good.
The killer "app" that's holding companies to windows is MS Exchange, specifically the calendering piece and its integration with email.
But when the open source movement gets a really good, robust Exchange replacement, Microsoft essentially becomes redundant.
This new Linux stuff is powerful. When I look at it I understand why Microsoft is nervous.
I think the Lindows people are really onto something here.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The EarthFirst website could carry ads from Weyerhaeuser.
You guys need to understand there is no such thing as "reliable enough" on Wall Street.
I think one of the appeals of Linux on Wall Street is that they see down the road it could potentially run on their mainframes as well, to allow a common platform across the board. Of course this is 5+ years down the road, Linux is not even close to commercial Unix RAS features, let alone mainframe, and it lags Windows comfort on the desktop. But it is moving in both those directions, so for those niches where it works now, it makes sense to go that way rather than put in something else that'll require a tougher migration down the road.
The current Wall Street cost consciousness will fade once the market and economy start kicking again, but that reason is why Linux will still be making inroads on Wall Street.
I've always considered Microsoft my #1 enemy... I'm glad they feel the same way...
Um, IE wasn't from Mosaic, it was from SpyGlass, a respectable browser for its time. It, of course was based on the open source Mosaic.
``I don't know what you do to protect your shareholders and preserve your market capitalization except to out-innovate the Linux community.''
Good luck.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
He's quoted in the article as saying "We have told our sales force to really understand that this is kind of job one,'' Ballmer, 46, said in an interview last week. "People are saying by and large, 'It might be easier for me to move my Unix apps to Linux than to Windows,' although we're pretty close to making that untrue." Yeah, sure. What does it take to recompile from BSD to Linux? Not too much, depending on how large the app is. Now try to convince me that it'll be that easy under Windows. I can just imagine one of Ballmer's marketoids saying "Sure just recompile everything under Windows! GNOME, MySQL, everything!" Yeah, it's almost easier to port a Unix app to Windows that to Linux.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
Seriously, How many times do people need to say this? In every microsoft article on slashdot that I read I see a similar comment and it is always modded up. It's old! It's _not funny anymore_!
Fortunately for us who contribute software or programming to the world, we don't have to show a bottom line to a board that tells us what to do.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I don't think the problems Microsoft faces are so much a matter of them not doing their job. Instead, I think it boils down to the fact that a lot of people realize the long term threat to their business of becoming dependent on one vendor for anything. If Microsoft continues to build market share and eliminate viable competition, they will have less and less motivation to respond to customer needs.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Microsoft needs to focus more on the longevity, security, and innovation of their products instead of trying to lock people in a rapid cycle of upgrades and spending. People are smart, the internet is in every home, they are being exposed to the truth and being enlightened by the movement. The average user will not stand for spending $1,000-$2,000 every few years to keep up. Microsoft has to lower prices. Microsoft has to implement cheaper per-user licensing. And frankly, this is all impossible for them and in the end fruitless, since the community that drives open source and free software have an infinite supply of man power and talent. Microsoft cannot rely on aggressive monopilistic "squashing" tactics to defeat this foe, for there is no one leader, committee, or company to snuff out. And all the time they waste trying to conduct warfare using the same famailar tactics that crushed their fellow proprietary opposition, Linux and open source keeps getting better and better and more and more popular.
I say let the chips fall where they may.
i am starting a small business....privacy will be one of the top concerns of our clients.
i want an email server, a file server, a printer server, a web server, and a small database server....
can you give me one reason why the FUCK i would want to pay you...
-for the server software
-for the email server software
-and THEN - for every single person that wants to connect TO the server on TOP of the stuff that you already charged me for? And then want me to keep paying you every year?
good Lord - many small businesses don't want to keep paying your ass at every turn - our money is precious to us, because we don't have a lot, and so if we can save a buck or a few THOUSAND - we're NOT going to give it over to you when there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so.
AND... the lawyers tell me, like the medical folks are finding out - that if we are going to guarantee security and privacy AND be on the internet too - then you must think i'm wearing an ass-hat to go with software that hasn't fully told me
what data it collects
what data it sends back
what software it may or may not install
what software or data it may or may not watch
what format the files are in so that i can get at my data if i chance vendors later....
The reason that you are losing to Linux is because i get all of that for the supremely expensive cost of $0. TODAY.
If i don't want to be a linux geek, but still have the same kind of stability and software choice - i can hand Apple Computer $1000, and click my way to almost command-line free blissful servers.
And if you think that Palladium, Trusted Computing, and Licensing 6.0 are reasons TO RENT your software - you must be a gran mal ass choad.
Let me tell you what i DO want...
i want my privacy and i don't want to keep paying your ass, okay?
I don't keep paying the furniture guy, i don't keep paying the painter, and i don't keep paying the guy that i paid to run cable in my office.. so why the fuck do you think i should keep paying you after i've gotten what from you?
YOU ARE STUPID and YOU DON'T LISTEN TO US. And it won't be the DOJ or a bunch of lawyers that bring you down..
its your arrogance in thinking that i can't live without you...
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Ummm, I hate to shatter your world-view or anything, but Linux was created because Minix was not able to do the job (or, more accurately, Linus was not able to do any job with Minix, but it's the same difference). The creation of Linux had nothing (or "very, very little") to do with the existence of Windows. Put another way, the two would still have been created in absence of the other; their creations were orthogonal to one another.
Call me crazy, but I just don't know why Linux and Windows always have to compete for the same space. Sure, there's a little overlap, but generally the two (inter)operate separately and nicely. Right tool for the job... choice is good, eh?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Uh, dude this PROVES Ballmer's point. Sun, a huge contributor to Open Source and chief Microsoft competitor, is laying off over 4 thousand people!
Look at Open Office. Sun acquires code, spends a bunch of money working on it, has staff devoted to it (ex Zaheda Bhorat (Sun; community growth) Stefan Taxhet (Sun, Coordination Manager)
Sander Vesik (Sun, Release Manager), and hasn't made jack squat from it. Blow a bunch of money, don't get much return back. Not exactly a successful business model.
Open Source today depends on big companies to basically make charitable contributions. Remember, open source came to life in the free wheeling "profit and money don't mean anything" late 90's. In a "penny-pinching and cost control" environment, corporate charity will become harder and harder to find.
Brian Ellenberger
Quite frankly steve, I'm impressed, you got it this time, you can't beat your opposition when they're giving away their product for free. No matter how much betters yours is if ours is free they'll use ours... AOL is learning this lesson right now. So steve, I mod you +5 for insightfulness, and hand you a shovel to assist you in digging your grave, you can't buy us this time steve-o, sorry man.
It's easy to see why Ballmer feels a little threatened... he owns almost a quarter billion shares of MSFT, worth $11.7 billion. Next to that, his $700,000 CEO salary looks like chump change.
He dumped 4 million shares in the past 2 years, but at that rate it would take several lifetimes to sell off his entire stake. His only chance of staying in the 11-digit club (as opposed to 10 digits or even 9) is to hope like hell that MSFT can maintain its current market share in the face of neverending pressure from competitor's innovation and open source. Steve's position is that of a fat guy on a treadmill, running to keep in place as it steadily speeds up...
Ballmer, in the article, says:
"We have told our sales force to really understand that this is kind of job one. People are saying by and large, `It might be easier for me to move my Unix apps to Linux than to Windows,' although we're pretty close to making that untrue.""
Awful nice of Steve to admit that it's true now.
My
Limekiller
I've worked with plenty of H1Bs, and some are good, some are bad. But that doesn't matter. Most management sees employees as replaceable parts, no difference from one to the next. They literally don't know how to measure the worth of an employee other than useless buzzwords or seniority. Thus when they see an H1B with the right buzzwords but at half the cost of a citizen, they salivate at saving money. The predictable result is that more H1Bs are hired, and since no attempt has been made to hire only the good ones, a lot of crap H1Bs are hired.
Thus the resentment by actual citizens trying to get the same job. Whether you fit the crap lable or not has nothing to do with complaints about H1Bs. You are tarnished by the management incompetency brush.
Infuriate left and right
You, sir, should definitely be in a commercial. RedHat/United Linux folks, anybody reading? Hire him as your official SpokesSooner :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
It's kind of a shotgun effect. Sourceforge and freshmeat are perfect examples. At freshmeat you just need to filter on popularity to see what I mean. The well run projects that are tools community finds useful and stable will tend to be at the top. But you will typically have a choice among several project. You don't have to take the top one.
Microsoft can't do that in public. We've seen proof of that time and again. Their closed source model has gotten them in trouble time and again.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
to the capitalist economy. ;)
For it to work, everything has to have a dollar value.
If people go around *giving* things away (without it being a marketing ploy) what do you think will happen to the worlds economy??
My god man, think of the children!
(and how much they are worth in terms of organs and highly valuable organic compounds. Now *theres* capitalism!)
In the past several years, M$ has attempted to alienate their user base in every way possible. From their increasingly restrictive licensing which assumes every customer is a crook to the outright slop they promote as 'software', users - especially corporate - are looking for alternatives.
Of course, for the press they paint the picture that users are misguided (read: ignorant) and are turning to open source. Further alienation.
The M$ business model requires selling upgrades early and often. From here, it doesn't look like they're actually producing anything 'ya gotta have' but people are buying it 'because they have to'.
.NET? Why? My impression is most seasoned IT folk see it as a marketing gimmick. Re-invent. New release. Have to upgrade because the previous release doesn't do whatever. More stable. Repeat repeat repeat.
Sooner or later, this becomes obvious to anyone that has to shell out real money to play this game.
The funny part is they could have probably pulled it off but now it's a trust and credibility issue. Thanks, Judge Jackson.
that M$ switcher on their Switch page!
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
Let's see, 20,000 inboxes times about $6/seat is $120,000 -- versus -- free. Yeah, Exchange does more than just e-mail, but for that kind of cash in a cash-strapped educational institution, it's just insane. Add in the need to retrain some of my unix systems administrators or fire and rehire (not easy in a government institution) and it approaches an impossible scenario...
Win2k/XP is a rather nice Desktop OS. Its come a long way, finally stable, good features, and lots of applications and games. (Ya viruses too)
Truely, I dont think linux has a chance on the desktop. Hardware support isn't there, Application are not isn't there (Loki is gone). I know everyone is working thier ass off to make it, but until the average joe will want to drop Windows boxes for a Linux box, linux will be mostly a server os. (I'm not counting the slashdot crowd, most of us dual boot, and/or have a dedicated linux/bsd server.)
Servers are another questions, Unix is the only way I run my shops. After running DNS/SMTP/HTTP on unix and windows, I can tell from experience, a unix type os is the only choice. (We run Solaris) But hey m$ wins again, seems 1/3rd of all unix admin programs run only on windows or if they use a web gui, only IE is supported. (sigh/disgust)
-
Do you GLTron ?
I can't think of where M$ cloned the much beloved Clippy from.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
MS killed Netscape by giving away IE. I guess they get whatever comes to them!
And it's an enemy you can't just take to court or buy. He's fighting against an ideology, not a company.
``I don't know what you do to protect your shareholders and preserve your market capitalization except to out-innovate the Linux community.''
Did he actually say 'out-innovate'?
That of course implies that anyone in the office could maintain exchange...
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
"As part of Ballmer's plan to woo open-source users, Microsoft is sponsoring Web sites to provide advice to developers and let them pool resources. He's seeking to emulate the way hundreds and sometimes thousands of developers collaborate on open-source programs. "
News flash, Mr Ballmer:
You can't emulate Open Source development with a closed source OS. Nobody is going to contribute to your code base if they know that MS retains all the rights to your "shared" source code.
You can go ahead and mod me down for being troll, but, are MS Execs really this clueless?
Error Reading Steve Ballmer. Abort, Retry, or Fail?
It isn't that OS software is better, even though it is. It isn't that it is free, even though it is. It isn't that it is easier to use, even IF it is...It is Microsofts practices that have turned customers away. Their EULA's are dictatoral, they release ustable and insecure products - charge a fortune - and then use sneaky tactics like embedding new agreements for patches.
:P
If Microsoft had given a single thought to what customers want, need, and deserve...nobody would have even looked at OS software that has been mostly thought of as a fringe hacker system only useable by computer geeks. But they treated their customers like shit and they turned to alternatives - Linux mainly...the more that did, the more word of mouth advertising we got - something MS can't ever hope to accomplish because their reputation is quite bad now.
It is their own fault. People made a free system, yes...but it was MS's business practices that will bring them down - and now they see it happening but still don't get why
NR
Below is a snip of an article from today's NYT. It appears that plenty of people suffer from cognitive dissonance. The more they invest in MS products, the more reluctant they will be to walk away from them. Maybe it's the same phenomenon that sees people buying a Lexus or Audi instead of a Toyota or Jetta. Until they lose their really good papers BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP... they'll keep signing up for more MS stuff in shiny plastic-wrapped packages.
Microsoft Sales and Profit Rise
By REUTERS
Filed at 8:21 p.m. ET
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) said on Thursday first-quarter earnings more than doubled, topping cautious Wall Street estimates, as revenues surged on a new software licensing plan.
At a time when a slowdown on technology spending by companies has weighed on profits and shares, the world's largest software maker also raised its full-year revenue and earnings outlook.
Advertisement
Shares in Microsoft rose sharply in after-hours trade, gaining more than 4 percent to $53.16, from a close of $50.77 on the Nasdaq.
``I think this was a gangbuster quarter,'' said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Charles Di Bona. ``There is just really exceptional strength there.''
Boosted by new subscription-style licensing that encourages corporate customers to pay yearly fees for software, net income was $2.73 billion, or 50 cents per share in the quarter ended Sept. 30.
There's one aspect of Open Source that Ballmer and his friends don't get yet. He talks about trying to adopt the open-source ideas to benefit Microsoft. That dooms him to failure right there. People don't contribute to open-source software to benefit someone else. They contribute to benefit themselves. They fix bugs and add features because they need that done. And the contribute it back because they've already benefited from previous contributions from other people. It's all aimed at the benefit of the customer/user. When anyone, whether they be Microsoft or Sun or whoever, sets up a similar system aimed to benefit someone other than the people actually doing the work, those people don't buy in and the whole thing kind of shambles off into oblivion.
If Ballmer wants to adopt open-source ideas, the first one is going to have to be "How can our users add to and change Windows to benefit themselves?". As long as "How can users add to Windows to benefit Microsoft?" takes priority, it'll fail.
There was a study shown on Slashdot a few weeks back about the number of lines of code between Microsoft releases and Redhat Linux releases. The Linux code is growing almost exponentially (or let's say just really darned fast, for accuracy's sake) and the code for Microsoft is stunted. That's because there's no focus group to tell us to re-write the way something works and start from scratch. The longer code lives, the less bugs it will have, due to maturity.
There will come a time where Linux will be comprised of so much code that it would be impossible for any corporation, even Microsoft, to compete. Linux starts from a mature base and improves; Microsoft starts over in areas. Even though they're hideously tied to the DOS-days and such.
Sure, they're gonna have (mostly) functional drivers for the spiffy new hardware, but we get it, too, after a fashion. I just know this; desktop OS's increase in complexity, not decrease: at some point, no one will be able to start from scratch and start competing on the closed-source side, it's just too expensive...even if we're just measuring the price-per-line-of-code yardstick. Even with cool new programming environments.
Be afraid, sweaty-freak...be very afraid.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Let's inform him on some of the "innovating" that Microsoft has done in the past ... shall we?
I'm not someone to stand up for Microsoft, but this comparison _really_ is too easy.
What Unix users tend to forget is that Microsoft actually did some things right in Windows that Unix (or rather, the X Windows toolkits) to this date doesn't do right consistently. Take cut&paste. It's a basic feature, but the sheer scope of deviation among toolkits is just revolting. Tabbing between fields, same story.
As a matter of fact, the thing that I hold against Microsoft is precisely _not_ borrowing successful concepts from other companies. My favorite: Apple for years had a highly successful magazine for Apple Developers, called (wait for it!)... "develop". If a developer asked "develop" a question illustrated by an example, it would be answered with regards to the technology, but equally important, UI goofs would be pointed out.
If you look at MSDN, you will invariably see UI questions answered with "sure, you can do that, here's the code". No matter how counterintuitive or outright stupid the proposed UI is.
Microsoft sucks at trying to sway developers to pay attention to the looks of the UI (and, matter of fact, the WIN32 API doesn't make it particularly easy to do screen layout right), but much of the groundwork for UI behavior is done right, and screwing it up takes a conscious effort. A shocking innovation? I don't think so. Done better than the average Unix tool? You betcha.
Of course, Apple has much to answer for after they set the Dung Standard for user interfaces with their glitzy but totally unusable quicktime player.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I feel threatened by his personal hygiene, or at least his arm pits.
But the spirit of the words remains true. If Microsoft provided something that people were happy with, there wouldn't be much more Linux than Linus could put together himself.
Ok, I'll call you crazy. Linux doesn't operate separate of Windows. Microsoft has been trying to dominate the server market like they did the desktop market for years. Because there were always better quality choices available, Microsoft could only break in on the low-end. Linux competes for the same low-end business servers that Microsoft has made such successful inroads at.Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
Hmm...if free software is the enemy...wouldn't it make sense to counter free software by creating an Operating System that will only run programs that you deem acceptable to run, and then make it so that no free programs are "trusted", virtually eliminating free software as competition for the operating system within your control? Oh wait...they are already doing that with Palladium. I guess Free Software is the enemy for MS right now, with 2000 and XP...but we all know that if you right buggy code and then don't fix it before a future OS release, and then end maintenance on the old, people will have to upgrade in order to protect themselves. (I will comment on this in a second) So in essence the "plague" of free software will disappear within a year of the release of Palladium. What MS does with its purposeful bug-filled OS releases is just plain terrible. Create something purposely that has security flaws, then never fully update it so that those flaws are never completely fixed, and then end maintenance once a newer OS is released is just sick. The last time I checked, praying on people's emotions, like sense of lack of security, in order to "force" them to purchase something newer (which is I guess "not flawed") was called a SCAM. I'm also fairly certain that SCAMMING is ILLEGAL and that SCAM ARTISTS go to jail when caught. I guess money does buy freedom.
``People are saying by and large, `It might be easier for me to move my Unix apps to Linux than to Windows,' although we're pretty close to making that untrue.'' Best quote.... ever.
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
We all know that giving citizenship to anyone, even if they fail the racial profiling skin color test.
Anyone darker than chalk must be a terrorist.
Anyone as white as chalk is must be an evil hacker.
I am not dissing my country's anti-terrorist efforts, but some things are taken way to far. Some non-caffeine addicts also look albino. You fail the test one way or another. ThinkGeek tee-shirts shift it to 'another'.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Know why? Because open source never has been, isn't, and never will be in competition with Microsoft. Ask Linus - he doesn't give a rats ass what Redmond or the world thinks about Linux. He just wants to make a good product, which is the crux of the issue.
Open source is not a business. It's not an establishment. It's only a set of ideals that are suited to fulfilling a set of needs. For example, people who use open source software have a need for inexpensive, dependable, stable, secure operating systems. As a result, several such operating systems have been produced from open source development efforts. Microsoft does not, cannot, and will never fulfill those needs. Therefore, open source software and ideals will always thrive, just as they have for several decades now. (This nonsense about making software proprietary is still a relatively new one in the computer industry... and it's showing that it will soon fail).
We're not in competition with Microsoft. We can just sit back, laugh, write good code, and use the execellent software we've created to complete our tasks and solve our problems. Meanwhile, they'll run around like mad, trying to compete with an entity that cannot be competed with, spending billions in the process while we go by without burning a single cent! Sure, some people use open source software to compete with Microsoft (RedHat, IBM, et al). But in the end, we are not a business and the fools at Microsoft don't know how to deal with it. Soon, they'll go the way of the dodo and that will be that.
Microsoft will fail because they cannot identify needs and fulfill them. All this time, they'll be busy spinning marketing campaigns, filling magazines with FUD... when they could have been developing quality, open code. I suppose the customer is their last priority. This is a business doomed to fail.
Why bother.
Public enemy number one,
Thank thee for everything thou hast done.
Thank thee hartily, loyal chaps,
For putting this OS of ours on the map...
The idea of M$ actually wanting to compete on a level playing field is laughable.
They don't want to compete with Free Software. They want to illegalize Free Software, and force any would be Free Software developers to release their code into the public domain or under a BSD-like license: so that M$ can take all of their ideas, embrace them, extend them in their own products, and then give nothing back to the community.
Basically, if it were up to M$, what's your's would be their's and what's their's would be their's too.
Btw, for those of you blabbing about the Free Software community not doing any innovating, that's bull. Let's just take WM's for the moment.
PWM -- any proprietary window manager out there that can adequately handle tabbed windowing, a vastly superior system?
WindowMaker -- better than Win9x's UI or that of OSX, though WindowMaker and OSX share the same heritage, NeXT. Sure, WindowMaker was based off of the OpenStep standard, but it was an *open* standard. Can't blame the Free Software community for keeping something alive in a viable form when its own company had abandoned it.
Those of you saying that KDE and GNOME are exactly like Windows are wrong; its similar to Windows to make transition easier for Windows users. However, KDE and GNOME each have their own unique features which distinguish them from Windows.
Xfce is an excellent Free Software implementation of CDE; original? no, but excellent, yes.
Alot of you people saying that Linux WM's and Desktop Environments are just Windows clones need to actually use these things instead of just looking at the screenshots from themes.org. They offer many useful features which aren't found in Windows or Mac. There are also areas where Windows and Mac are better. Mac gets points for their universal file menu (any hope of them allowing us to make it hide-away?). Windows gets points for allowing you to make your desktop background a web-page, and for allowing you to add "docks" to the sides of it with your choice of applications/folders on them. WM's in Linux like WindowMaker get points for their elegant look and feel, simplicity (dock); PWM gets points for its excellent tabbed-windowing feature; Xfce gets points for being a nice desktop environment.
Check out my website for some of my suggestions on what would make an ideal WM.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
A software only company claiming free software as number one enemy?
What are they thinking? what are you smoking?
My previous post got modded off-topic, probably because the post I was responding to got modded to 0.
I don't exactly have the clearest concept of rights- the American school system barely mentions them, you know.
But some naturalized citizen makes the claim that a person of one country doesn't have the right to talk about another country, and I'm even more confused.
Now the Constitution is merely a piece of paper and does not grant anyone rights, but if I understand correctly, one of the rights it says that Americans SHOULD have is the freedom of speech. Now I believe that everyone should be free to address wrongs, no matter which country the wrong occurs in or which country the person is a citizen of or resides in.
And would somebody please mod xtremex's post back up from -1.
-
China is a communist country. The government controls the majority of the chineese economy and can mandate standards and shared cost allocation. China may ban Microsoft products from all state run businesses and government functions, although I doubt they would interfere with sanctioned, entreprenual computing systems.
- China has unreliable relations with the United States. China needs control over its critical infrastructure, including its computing systems. A sudden change in relationships with the United States, e.g., an invasion of R.O.C. (Taiwan), could cut of imports, upgrades, and technical support from Microsoft. It is as prudent to mandate self-determination of operating systems as of electrical power.
- China can take a long term view. China is the Middle Kingdom, with thousands of years of continous civilization. China, unlike the United States, could decide to embark on a path and resist pressure until it pays off.
- China is large, really large. The factbook states China is 1,200,000,000 (1.2B) people with a GDP of over $5,000,000,000,000.00 ($5T). China is the only country that could easily decide to commit a million people to full time Linux development and support.
The nighmare senario for Micosoft is that China makes the Linux operating system and open source applications a national security priority. Think of the effects of this quadrant of the planning grid:China leverages support for open source to build tighter relationships with countries besides the U.S. Open source authors are invited guests at massive conferences in Beijing. X-windows is replaced in two years. ChinaLinux preconfigured desktops surpass Microsoft in terms of reliability, ease of support, and scalability. Attempts to foster opposition in China due to massive revenuse from 100,000 person export-only support center.
A good future.
Cheers,
Chasm
We have one running on Sun desktop. Tracks and computes alerts for all NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ trades just fine, peaks around 40% CPU.
None of the Wall Street trading systems have PDP-11's anywhere within. You might think the markets themselves could handle their own biggest days, no?
That said, a number of companies still do, or recently did, use PDP-11 machines. I know one that retired a bunch in just the last few years.
Just yesterday, I was told about yet another scam that a fair number of rich families from a country whose name rhymes with King Kong are pulling. The buy a house in Canada and send their university-aged kids here who can claim "residency" because of the home ownership. The kids then go to the big universities, displacing Canadian students and don't have to pay the foreign student fees - a HUGE savings. At the end, they sell the house (lately at a big profit, since real-estate has been booming) and disappear to the US or Europe or back home for jobs. Canadian taxpayers get screwed by foreigners that have zero intention of setting up permanent residency here. What a country!
under educated secretary in personnel: "My computer was acting strange. So I just re-installed everything."
MSCE certified server admin: "My computer was acting strange. So I just re-installed everything."
Yup, your right.
Bridge Information Systems got bought out by Reuters February 2001. They have a very proprietary system built on top of Win2k.
It's very very fast. No other data delivery system in the world can compare. I could release specs, but that would be against my NDA.
I used to work there.
paranoid megalomaniac?
I've considered moving to Canada myself, on those rare occasions when I get fed up with current events in the US. Overall its quite a nice country. The traffic is totally insane though. I think you guys need to add a few more QEW's and 401's around Toronto. That stop-and-go traffic on an eight lane 100kph highway is ridiculous.
Tell you what though, those immigrants have made a big improvement in their lives by moving to Canada. It is more "international" in flavor than the US and they can fit in better, and Canada has all the commercial infrastructure just like the US does and plenty of frontier land, depending on your cold tolerance :-)
Clickety Click
With all of his money what is his reason
anymore for doing what he does?
Is it fun for him to try and put everyone else out of bussiness?
Is he able to sleep at night?
I feel so sorry for him.
He can't buy his salvation, he won't live forever. Vanity, all is vanity and chasing after wind.
what will he feel on his deathbed as his life flashes back?
Even though I am broke and out of work I feel that my life must be more pleasent than his.
I sleep soundly, and I eat well.
I don't dream of ruling the world.
I won't ever buy another MS product unless I am forced to do it.
I won't use their products unless I have to.
I don't care about his 'framework' or anything
that they do.
Mr. Balmer seems morally decrepid.
He sees his competition as 'enemies'.
What a juveniel point of view.
The laws of Karma are very clear.
His fate is determined by his behaviour (as are all of ours).
Does he think that he can really own it all?
Does he think that he can rule from the grave?
He will be born into his next life saddled with all of his bad karma.
how sad, how very sad.
too bad that we are all forced to deal with his poison point of view. He sees enemies where he should see equals.
There is enough work for everyone, but Microsoft wants it all.
I can't wait for Mt Rainier to blow. The sooner the better.
I hope that he realizes the errors of his hateful and malicious ways before he dies.
How sad that he can't respect other OS's and other points of views.
MS is a bunch of thieves. Money mongering old school assholes.
weep for them, they are lost and there seems no hope for them. Their greed, their narciscism, their hateful additude.
They have enough to last them for the rest of their lives, and yet they still plot the demise of all of the rest of us. They call us 'enemy' and then expect us to cheerfully buy their products.
The live in a veil of hate, they are flawed and ugly. shame on them.
Microsoft must rebrand the name of the product, Windows. Security is a key problem and the flagship product is named after a hole in an otherwise secure structure, covered with a fragile and transparent matter. How about this: Microsoft Concrete 3.11 ?
Microsoft will never win against Linux unless they drastically change their licensing model. Currently, a copy of Windows 2000 Professional costs AUD 685.00 here in Australia. Compare this to their server products: Windows 2000 Server costs AUD 2184.00 and Advanced Server costs a stunning AUD 7900.00. The difference in cost between the workstation and server products is an order of magnitude, but the install CDs are virtually identical except for a few marker files. They even share service packs. It's not like the Server editions have email or database functionality thrown in for free, they just costs more and have different logos.
Believe it or not, most PHBs actually believe they are getting more when they are buying Windows 2000 Server, and that's how Microsoft likes it. To be fair, it's not just Microsoft doing this kind of thing: Have any of you noticed how SMP servers always cost at least a thousand dollars more than single CPU servers or workstations? Are one extra CPU socket and a slightly different North Bridge chip a thousand dollars worth of extra hardware? I think not. Dual CPU machines are largely sold as servers, and most large OEMs have worked out that they can charge more money for server hardware, even if it is almost exactly the same as their workstation products.
Linux, and open source in general, challenges such marketing hype. There is no workstation Linux or server Linux. Any home user or small business can set up a mail or database server without having to fork over five or six digits sums for software that isn't really all that special.
Small to medium business is the largest target market out there. A small business can invest $5,000 in a Microsoft software/ Intel hardware solution, and $5,000 in consulting, and get a solution that will work. The consulting market price is low due to competition. The system will run, and there are many people that can provide this service.
Linux.. I can get the Intel hardware cheap, and the OS out of a book, or free. Not for the novice. I have to find someone who really knows what they are doing to get the apps set up and running. This takes time, and the cost can go through the roof.
Don't confuse inexpensive aquisition costs with inexpensive solutions. Until the mom and pop shops of the world can get accounting systems and small business software up and running inexpensively and easily, Microsoft will be around and making money.
Wrong! -- In contrast to Apple, MS does not have to do it.
WINE proves Unix can have Windows Binary compatibility
So??? It's never been about binary compatibility... It's about market share and maintaining a monopoly.
Microsoft proves they're too stubborn to evolve with the times
Wrong again... They prove they want to stay in the most profitable business possible... Cammon kinds, repeat after me: Microsoft is a business, and businesses exist to make profits...
Linux, according to Netcraft. But then, when I tried to go there, it was down. Maybe that's part of Ballmer's cunning plan...
is a good example why Ballmer should fear OSS. With M$'s push for .NET, the "OS for the internet", it still faces competition from J2EE and perhaps Mono. Windows is still the thing M$ uses to whip the software world to submission. Software incompatibility (between Windows and Linux) is, I believe, the only stumbling block that keeps corporations from adopting Linux. With technical difficulties aside, IF Wine manage to implement more than 80% of the Win32 API then bibi Windoze.
Go Wine! embrace, extend and extinguish!
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
Bloomberg is a company that lives and breathes tech. They have a huge investment in technology, and tend to stay ahead of the curve. It isn't surprising at all that they get linux.
I don't understand why you guys keep pinning your hopes on China. China has a long history of ignoring IP rights. Why should the GPL be any different? Is the source code for Red Flag out yet? (Has anybody looked at it to see what it's doing while it's booting w/a totally blank screen? Installing a keystroke logger, maybe?)
They're already pirates on a grand scale, so what revenue would Microsoft be *losing* if they switch to Linux?
Actually it is enemy #10. It is just that enemies 1 thru 9 have already been squashed. This one is just different because their money cannons are not working against it very well.
Table-ized A.I.
so the F what?
And despite all warning signs, the US government sucks up for the
communists. They believe that China will fully open up their markets
for American goods, but forget it. China wants to be self-sufficient.
That's why they build their own Linux version, their own CPUs, their
own motherboards etc. The communists doesn't see the west as a reliable
partner, and just as you stated... they want to be able to say fuck off
to the west if necessary.
I make a big distinction between the Chinese people and the communists.
(after all, the Chinese communist party just have 50 million members.
The Chinese people are in general very nice and hardworking people, but
the communist regime is a bunch of unreliable liars.
the quote from this guy as well as the wells fargo and mcadams wright ragen reps point to the biggest threat to open source: the money it can take from funds that include m$ and other entities.
these deep-pocket funds are going to get pretty twitchy when the value of their holdings becomes threatend by a movement that cannot be bought, sold, or owned.
no matter the quality, if the money people can't get richer from it (or worse still, it costs them) *that* could prompt a bigger threat as bill and his minions could be
I don't want to switch majors in college after there are on high paying programming jobs left
I worked for Wall Street company. And I know (not from news articles) that both Oracle and Sybase are just reliable enough. They are crashing. They are freezing. There are cases of loosing data. There are core dumps. There are problems with replication and backup. There are log messages "Internal DBMS Error. Call Oracle Customer Support". And all that after paying and using a lot of Oracle Customer Support. Our partners said (of course unofficially) the same about Sybase.
We signed NDA with Oracle that such info would not be released.
There is no such thing as "absolutely reliable DBMS" (true for all software). You need more reliability - you invest more money into replicated standalone instances, backup, monitoring tools with ATP on application level, support contracts with NOC, night shifts, pagers and so on. And you do it with any DBMS.
With such investments any DBMS, if it is generally reliable enough (at least with ACID, replication and backup), will be reliable enough to satisfy specific reliablity requirements. Any, including modern DB/2, MS SQL and PostgreSQL. Not MySQL - lack of ACID. And not *old* PostgreSQL or *old* any other DBMS (even old Oracle) - lack of replication.
Same thing about OS. Yes, you can count Solaris as more reliable than Linux. But it's not absolute reliable either. And it is not even THAT more reliable than Linux, counting all investment you put around your Sun boxes, which are still freezing and crashing. I and my friends in other companies estimated that about 40% of all Sun boxes, from Sun-10 to E-4500, will stop from hardware temporary or permanent problem within as long as 1 year.
So, again - you invest a lot of money for hardware redundancy, while thinking - why Sun, why I cannot invest the equal or less amount of money to x86 and ultimately have same or more of reliablity? For example, I (and other guys) are not so frustruted with Compaq. Well, for top server we still stick to Sun.
Conclusion: when you buy very reliable solution (DBMS, OS, hardware), remember - that just the begining of you investment to reliablity. Ultimately there is no guarantee that you invest less money for the same level of reliability buying commercial product vs OSS.
Less is more !
Beat SGI up for it.... Remember the fahrenheit project. From one of the *many* press releases...
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Agreeing to put aside aside differences over 3-D graphics, Silicon Graphics Inc. and Microsoft Corp. said last week that they will work together on a common set of application programming interfaces.
They forgot to say, "As long as the API is a Microsoft one."
Blogging because I can...
Yeah right! nda on everything, paid liscensing you can't read without an nda. then they steal your open protocol because its got pieces of their code. no thanks m$
gs
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Odd that they would use the acronym N.O.I.S.E. -
Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else...
The article says they don't talk much about Netscape
anymore, or Sun, or Oracle. They still talk about
IBM and Everyone else, plus Linux. I guess that
means that their new acronym is L.I.E.
They're taking their dog to get its two shots before it's too late. You're taking your dog there too, right?
This is not a troll - this is an honest question/concern that I've had for quite a while regarding OSS: So if the world's problems can (and eventually generally are) solved using free software - what are developers to do for a living? It just seems like OSS developeres are shooting themselves (and the rest of us) in the foot. And you can talk about consulting, yada yada, but I don't think there's enough work out there for all the good developers out there to do consulting work.
While the effort to isolate the Linux community may be a nobel one in terms of Microsoft's squash 'em mentality, it would be smarter for M$ to try to capitalize on the linux rage by releasing their own distribution and charging for support. People seem to forget, while the actual software is free, implementing it into a specific environment/system is not! There is plenty of money to be made with Linux, just not directly selling it. While I can see there would be plenty of resistance to anything put out by M$, it would be the smartest move on their part -- might improve their image, and have the potential for gaining market share in the Linux sector (While linux is great and all, it's just not quite a viable alternative as a desktop OS for the general public yet. I believe it to be a strict contender in the server market).
The DRM thing could be a problem too, but I really think it will be such a disaster that it will be completely rejected by consumers. The sticking point is not the basic erosion of fair use copying, but that it is going to be so broken in implementation that it will keep people from doing what they are supposed to be allowed. Average comsumers don't have a lot of patience for bogus technology that won't do what they want, and DRM is likely to screw them over and over. At least the single function DVD player will play the DVDs they rent and buy reliably, and a DRM enabled PC will fail to do this often enough to make them royally pissed off. Put that in your business model and smoke it!
Software piracy is enemy number two.
The enemy isn't Linux as a compeditor but open source as a method of develuping software for free.
Just as software theft hurts the ability to sell software open source makes it difficult to make commertal software available.
People are not willing to buy what they can have for free.
What makes open source a greater enemy than piracy is simple.
Piracy is theft: Somebodys hard work is used with out paying for it. This is moraly, ethicly and legally wrong. The software is not free but taken as much so as one who steals from the store.
Open sorce is a free gift given in good faith to be used by anyone who will have it.
A way to prove your skill. Co branding may be done eventually. "Download Kelloggs Linux from our website or get a CD free with Kellogs brand cereals".
Oh I see your using Pepsi Office.
AOL gives away millions of CDs to keep the AOL name in our faces. Coke, Pepsi and other companys do put a great deal of effort into the same. Free software keeps odd names in our minds all the time. xmms, ogg, gimp all household names in the Linux world.
Plus the job potental for a graduated OS develuper improves with the success of his software.
Transmeta got lucky Linus didn't want to be a consultent a strong posability for populare OS develupers.
Software has become like air. You can buy it or you can get it for free.
Even if it's better quality when you buy it you'll only do it when the free stuff won't take you where you want to go.
(Under water or some new FPS game)
Microsoft makes it's money making the kind of software anyone can make. In the future commertal software will do things that take years of R and D to make possable. Stuff thats not going to come from a team of hobbyests.
Microsoft dosen't make that kind of software. Not yet anyway.
But excluding cutting edge games the mass market dosen't buy such software. They want stuff thats relitively easy to make.
Microsoft is facing the fact that the alternitive to software theft isn't buying software but downloading open sorce.
I don't actually exist.
Spoken like someone who's never actually used Ruby.
They cant get into their heads that many of the people looking at linux doesnt do it because of linux superiority. Microsoft has done a great job of alienating their own customers with high prices and shoddy quality. Not to mention how they have made a clear mark that anyone working together with them get a stab in the back.
If they had cared anything about their customers they wouldnt be in this situation.
All their talk about "fighting linux" is just BS. How big part of the market has linux? I think there are enough space to cater both but MS seems to think that ANY competition is dangerous.
Why do they have such little faith in their own ability to compete on fair grounds? It feels liek they are grasping for straws. Maybe times arent so easy when there arent many companies to steal ideas from any longer. Any smart person with a wild new idea for a killer app just think Netscape and then puts it in a drawer until MS gets under control.
HTTP/1.1 400
This has been up for a little while at OSNews, but I think it's really funny that this new Unix Code Migration Guide suddenly appears at roughly the same time Bloomberg runs an article in which Steve Ballmer says, "People are saying by and large, `It might be easier for me to move my Unix apps to Linux than to Windows,' although we're pretty close to making that untrue."
I guess they're doing their best to make sure that that's "untrue."
Eventually someone very visable is going to point out that the OSS community is a giant, loose-knit volunteer organization, among the largest in history.
It won't be this year, next year, or the year after that, but politicians around the world have already noticed the movement.
That's where I think the 'Then you win.' comes in. Someone makes a speech that encapsules Microsoft's position in two or three easily understood sentances, that sends public opinion through the floor.
I am a science fantasy fan
hmm...i wonder what the click scores of the following would be :
1) microsoft article
2) linux article
3) microsoft vs. linux article
my bets are that #3 gets the most press, at least in technical circles
or at least the most shock-value attention
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
That kind of resistance only works against a relatively civilized opponent, who will not go to any lengths in their fight. The Soviet Union or Nazi Germany would just have slaughtered Gandhi and his followers until none were left, and be done with the issue.
How does the analogy map to Linux vs M$? I don't honestly know. Maybe it just doesn't. But I don't see M$ shying away from doing anything that might help them win the fight.
Well no. Just a lot of flat files tied together by journalling. If something goes wrong, we have the source code and can fix it ourselves. With open source you can get the same benefit.
Hardwrae replication by itself is not an answer. You can't split an order book for a product up without an associated performance cost.
... if everyone who used Linux bought a copy of XP =)
I saw this quote from someone working for the state of Utah and found it rather interesting (not surprising of course) "We buy Microsoft products, and we have this sort of love-hate relationship with them like everyone else, I suppose," said Phillip Windley, chief information officer for the State of Utah. "Last year, they forced us to conduct an audit, which was very painful. And it turns out that the bottom line was that we have overbought. They didn't offer to refund any of those overbought licenses. But if we had underbought, they certainly would have required us to pay more money, I trust."
Well its seems that pepole in general are starting to open their eyes for the possibilities in opensource. Although, like some of you have already mentioned, its not necessarily the superiority of Open Source software as much aas it is prices for MS products that is turning the tide.
In Denmark there are trial runs for all the regional councils to change all their public services onto open source machines, completely dropping MS products. Although there are soem technicalities about reliability, the millions of $ that are to be saved has made almost every politican there a supporter of the open source environment.
-.sig sauer-
"Soon, they'll go the way of the dodo and that will be that."
Now, we wouldn't want to face that perspective, would we?
-- Serge K. Keller
But they wont do this; the Chinese Government will understand that by obeying the GPL and releasing the source the American economy can be radically altered, if not disrupted as everyone switches over to "Free Chinux".
This will be nothing short of a revolution.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
If it's reusable code then why is the codebase size growing exponentially?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Even if they would out-innovate GNU/Linux (which I find hard to imagine), the free software community will still not switch, since they care more about freedom than about having the technically best product.
This brought to you by the talk-about-obvious-statements dept....
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
I think the OSS movement could use such a campaign. Heck, even MS is using "switchers" story nowadays, so why shouldn't the Free Software Foundation ?
You broke the chain jerky! That's the first time I've EVER seen 6 insightful(ly modded) comments in a row, and you had to go screw it up. Figures it be you, "Anonymous Coward". All you post is crap anyways...
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
Under communism, man exploits man. Under capitalism, it's the other way around...
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
Lets have a look at the facts besides Steves paranoia fud. Linux not really is the enemy, Microsoft or at least the twist the company did since Steve took over is it. Companies never really considered to switch to Unix until Microsoft almost blackmailed them with their new subscription program. I think the critical point will be around 2004 when the public support for win2k runs out. Most companies never really considered an alternative, many of them were happy to go the windows route (well the suites were, buy Microsoft dont have any issues in the management), but things have changed with the new licensing scheme. There is an alternative, a good community also is there, you can buy support if needed and it works and doesnt have all the licensing issues connected to Windows.
The next stupidity out of Redmont now comes with Palladium and TCPA, do you really want to trust a mission critical system to an operating system where somebody might nail unasked an update onto. Do you really want to develop for a system where you in the long term might have to pay an annual tax to keep a signing key alive and do you really want to have somebody else decide if your program is allowed to run anymore or not... This is simply personal computing without personal computing. I think Microsoft and all the others will fall flat on their faces in the long term with this. And at that time, non TCPA implementing systems will be good enough so that you can push them onto the average joe.
switch to Linux/Solaris
Hell, RMS would be realy pissed.
Yes, I *know* that Bill told you last month that security was our absolute number one priority here at Microsoft. That was last month. This month, destroying Open Source is our absolute number one priority. Open Source threatens our revenue stream, whereas nobody cares about security - we can just bolt that on later if we need to.
For those who browse at -1
I'm glad that this story submitted yesterday (directly from Bloomberg on my desk) is run today on Slashdot under geekinexile/CowboyNeal. Even submission comments are mostly unchanged. But what's the point of this attitude? To give a bit of credit is simply polite...
--
-- Caron Carlson. "Allchin: Disclosure May Endanger U.S." EWeek. 13 May 2002.
Basically, Microsoft is so far behind in the security game that they have no realistic chance of catching up. IBM and others have already found ways to
make money from Free Software and Open Source Software. Their only chance is to use DRM and DRM legislation to lock users into a subscription model of pay per use/month/quarte/year/whatever not so much for the software, but for continued access to documents encoded in one of Microsofts proprietary and undocumented formats.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Don't you think that business like
the lower turnover. If I'm not mistaken
H1Bs are constantly fearful that they
will lose the sponsorship of their
company, and so don't hop from job to job,
giving the company lots of leverage with them and
in effect with US citizen workers as well.
I wonder if the fact that microsoft is making tools to make unix users life easier is telling microsoft anything? I mean look, Linux is REAL compition so we need to make new stuff? Sounds like compitition is a good thing, who would have thought.
ebeodd@hotmail.com
I wonder if anyone has ever conducted a study on the economic implications of OSS. Money needs to change hands for jobs to be created. If, as some people seem to advocate, all software was OSS, how many paying jobs would be left in the industry? I know there would be service oriented and sys admin jobs but how many jobs would be created if $20 was exchanged for every copy of Apache in use today? I could be wrong but it seems like it must have some effect on the developer market.
I'm sounding like a broken record on this but:
.iso from http://www.samsungcontact.com and try is for yourself. Nope it's not OSS, but more secure, stable and a hellofalot cheaper than Exchange.
There a perfect drop-in replacement for Exhange on Linux/Unix:
Samsung Contact
The_mailserver_formally_known_as_Openmail (from HP)
Download the
(disclaimer - I have no affilation with Samsung - blabla)
Not true for many reasons, not least of which is that Ruby is Japanese, not Chinese.
graspee
I really doubt linux ( or any other freeOS ) will be the ulitmate demise of Microsoft.
If they ever do go away ( which i seriously doubt now ), it will be due to their own mistakes and blunders.
That is what will do them in, themselves.
Though with as much funding and political power they have now, i doubt they can be killed..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
However, if the only thing one ever does is use Mozilla and xterm (which is all most Linux users do, let's be honest), I guess I could see how it's easy to miss that stuff.
This is going to hurt a little for all of us that make our living off of software, particularly system software, but:
.NET important? Hint: it differentiates the MS Windows platform from open source OSes. MS understands very clearly that developers write software, sofware dictates platform, platform determines hardware infrastructure and therefore they are gunning for the only real points of control. First, software developers then business owners. If the business owner demands .NET, the developers develop for it. If the developers develop .NET software, business owners will buy it.
.NET or the .NET tools.
* The OS is a commodity now. It should be priced accordingly.
* Networking software is a commodity and should be priced accordingly.
* The relational database is a commodity now. It should be priced accordingly.
* Basic productivity applications are a commodity, and should be priced accordingly.
Why do you think MS is moving into the enterprise software market by purchasing Great Plains (Accounting/ERP) and developing a CRM package? Why is
MS's lone hope is that their "bookend" strategy of generating end user demand and developer affinity will keep the market from seeing that there's nothing that you CAN do with Windows that you CANNOT do with another less expensive OS/development tool/platform.
I think MS will loose long term: the enterprise software market is very, very specialized and therefore there are smaller segments. There are no "universal" markets like desktop and server OSes that everyone needs. Interoperability is happens fine without
Can't wait for the market to sort it out.
$G
-- $G
How come every time i'm actually intrested enough to click that read the rest of this comment button there is like 1 more line of text? nuts to this.
Is that they want a lot of apps developed for free under the Windows enviroment, with no counterpart in the Unix world.
:-)
As a last resort, their "free software" comunity would be based on their products. They will figure out how to profit from it (...as if they haven't figured out already
Today, Windows developers think of selling their product, no matter how crappy it is. Or they have these clones of Word like OpenOffice that do NOT rely on their technology. Well, they want to change that.
If there should be a free Word, it must be based on their patented / owned technology. They "why's" we will find out later on...
unfinished: (adj.)
The open source model has produced VERY little that is impressive.
KDE is largely funded by Trolltech to build an additional market (X11) to their development platform. The full software package (Win32 + X11 + Mac OS X) costs over $4k per developer. Even if you only have 1 build engineer for all but the target platform, you are still over $2k/workstation.
Apache was a university project.
BSD was a university project. BSD developed a completely free Unix work-alike. GNU redid that work, but sometimes uses BSD code to do so. This is fine and legal, but it is a bit morally suspect to take BSD code, improve it, lock the changes away from BSD (all fine, part of the BSDL), AND TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH MORE YOU FOCUS ON FREEDOM, that's the rude/morally suspect part.
PostgreSQL was a university project.
University projects tend to have academic methodologies applied, so they are properly designed, and people paid to work on them. There are a few corporate projects that are equally impressive.
Linux picked up corporate support, and now the kernel is being redesigned (revision by revision) to not be backwards. Many things that were solved in academia in the 60s and 70s of computer science (and read by every MIT Comp Sci undergrad in our systems class 6.033) were don't "incorrectly" by Linux which has been recovering.
Mozilla has been almost ENTIRELY funded by Netscape as a company and as an AOL Time Warner division.
Apache was derived from a publically funded project and further developed by professionals maintaining the patches for their corporate/academic jobs.
Open Office has been almost ENTIRELY funded by Sun Microsystems.
These massive hobbiest projects that we hear about don't really exist. The big projects are developed by grad students paid to do so or corporations whose employees work on them. The open source development model is 80% myth. However, Linux is a large "niche" system, the third largest marketshare of any OS. As a result, if you are a company that doesn't think that they can directly sell (and compete against the Microsofts and Suns of the world, releasing it open source helps you get deployment.
It helps a bit with bug fixes, and a LOT with mindshare. It doesn't, however, get lots of code written. There are lots of 1-person development efforts that are released GPL, and a bunch of corporate/university projects. This "grassroots" development is mostly myth. Myths are important, they teach lessons, values, and are motivational. However, they aren't real.
Alex
Microsoft is scared, and the SEC makes them show it. While Steve Ballmer is running around making statements about how Microsoft is "pretty close" to making it easier to move from UNIX to Windows than from UNIX to Linux, his company's annual statements are painting a different picture. Every year since 1995 Microsoft has described UNIX variants such as Linux as having "gained increasing acceptance." The space devoted to these operating systems, particularly Linux, has certainly increased in Microsoft's annual statements.
.
In 1995 Microsoft's 10-K filing with the SEC stated:
"Variants of UNIX run on a wide variety of computer platforms and have gained increasing acceptance as desktop operating systems."
That sentence is the foundation upon which Microsoft has voiced its official concern at the encroachment of the Linux operating system; it has remained intact in every annual report Microsoft has filed, including its most recent filing of September 6, 2002.
More here . .
Read any good sonnets lately?
Linux is a unix. Note the lower case "u", implying genericness... like a kleenex is a paper tissue, a xerox is a photocopy, etc....
Oh, I get it, all right. And you've just repeated what I said about why MS's attempts to do this won't work.
> Out of these two political systems, my choice is the latter.
> Communism has never worked, and will never work. Perhaps a
> mix a la Sweden is nirvana? Just prepare yourself in paying
> the taxes to keep it running.
I believe you're confusing ECONOMIC systems with POLITICAL systems. But, you've hit the jackpot on what is the root of many of our (USA) problems... the economic system is RUNNING the political system, hence we live in a corporatist society.
Totalitarianism is the enemy... doesn't matter what economic system is pushing it.
But you are missing a very good point here, any company may do anything to manipulate as much as it can, but the truth of the matter is that we all have choices, and once palladiums are on the market, I will choose a chinese-wireless-palladium free multiple-teraflop mobile pc with built in everything and online-self-upgrading-Linux server! YEAHH!!! ..I cant wait to order a slice of pizza with one of these puppies! >;D
I think a MAJOR point everyone seems to miss is who this money is going to. IF linux servers are more expensive to run that Windows servers, what does this mean.
We all know that using linux eliminates Windows licensing. We also know that hardware costs are lower due to linux having more reasonable hardware requirements. So where does this extra 10k a year we are saving go to make the servers more expensive. It goes to the IT staff. Linux requires IT staff that know what they are doing. If all of these MCSE people (of which I was one) would get off their behind and become linux advocates we could take home that piece of the pie M$ is getting.
Spread this far and wide.
He should see see it as enemy #1. It could very likely prove to be the source of Microsoft's demise.
.NET programming tools will come out for Linux and keep the cash flow going. MSN online will be far more popular than AOL. They will quickly thrive on TabletPC software while thrive while Open Source takes its time getting there. And so on. They'll survive on that while they expand to other ventures and plan ways to move back into previously profitable areas. Keep an eye out for a MS-Linux.
There's no way that open source could turn into Microsoft's downfall. Microsoft is smart -- they have a strategy. Keep moving, keep changing, keep expanding. Imagine that StarOffice / OpenOffice / WordPerfect etc. and Linux / BSD / OSX cut off 90% of Microsoft's current revenue. By that time Microsoft will have turned their XBOX venture into a very profitable business.
Look at Apple. Early in the fight between Jobs and Gates people would have laughed at the idea of Microsoft producing software for Mac. There is a MS-Office for OSX. Today Microsoft owns part of Apple. If tomorrow everybody switches to Mac, Microsoft still makes money. (I'm reminded of a Dilbert cartoon where Wally invests in the competition and becomes rich.)
Not only that, but they keep learning. I'm not trying to sound like I'm worried about the Borg here but Microsoft is smart and can see pitfalls in the road. They're like a successful virus or disease, it will evolve to avoid any cure far faster than the cure can take it out. So you've cured the cancer in your chest? Good, but it has already spread to your brain.
Open source may be an irresistable force, but Microsoft doesn't believe itself to be an immovable object. It will just live around open source.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Yup I agree with most of your concerns. With some luck and enough press-coverage about users not being able to run the software they want on their computer, people will look to alternatives. Apple just may gain a wee bit more marketshare, especially since they're looking to use IBM's 64-bit chip, freeing them from their aged motorolla processor, and most likely enabling them to hop on the whole "Gigahertz-whiz-bang" bandwagon. Prices might come down too as they'd gain marketshare.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Uhhh... what happened to security? "Trustworthy Computing?"
(sound of crickets chirping)
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
Thank you.
This will be of great interest.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I like *that* spin. If Unix were 40, it would have been released in 1962. But, it makes a nice spin, after all, anything "40"ish is over the hill.
After all a 30 year old would be just prime now, right? And, a 34 year old is prime with a bit more experience, right? But 40, well, that's just too old.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
These are Still Open Source Communities.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
After all, he has a tough job.
"Hi, I'm Steve Ballmer, I made $758,810 last year running a company whose value dropped 25%, selling stuff you can get elsewhere for free."
Todd, it could work, people are lazy and non-vigilant. It means they forget easily and try to take the shortest path. Microsoft is trying to clean up image a bit (in the developers minds) and offering a good framework.
... believe what you want anyway (I am _not_ trying to prove myself right, I only see they are fixing things that where harming them, and that developers WILL turn a bit more MS-friendly)
Also, offering it for free. It's much better than what they offered before. They really are delivering, but
unfinished: (adj.)
Developers won't matter. When the legal department looks at the agreements and says "What are you doing letting someone else make a profit off our property without us getting a cut of it?", management will sit up and take notice.
I do believe Bruce Sterling spotted this one coming. I forget if it was in Distraction or in Heavy Weather, but the setting was a future where America's economy had collapsed due, in part, to Chinese software destroying (as in out-competing) American technology markets.
MS would lose the revenue they're currently banking on! Duh.
Mplayer (playing windows media files)
..., Linux, ... }. The lines you're drawing between these various projects and how matter in the grand scheme seems to be based wholey on this concept of the survivability and marketablility of Linux. Everything you mentioned, with the exception of WineX, can run on any platform (Windows included). So, with that in mind, the issue is, well, a nonissue.
Mplayer plays a plethora of media formats. Most of them are not Windows specific. It's quite (mostly) popular for watching DVDs and DivX encoded video. Are either of those "Windows media files"? Only if the MPAA has their way.
SAMBA (comunicating with Windows machines)
That kind of makes sense. But machines have got to interoperate, right? We have a need to be able to talk to any other computer, regardless of its OS. I don't think this fits your category.
Apache server (serving http documents to 98% of IE users + the rest)
This just doesn't make sense. It can serve documents to any web browser. How does this make it Windows inspired? Besides, before Microsoft broke law, the web was viewed by browsers that weren't IE. (Note that IE was inspired by *nix software development, Mosaic if you remember.)
OpenOffice reading and saving MS Word/Excel compatible files
By the way, OOo's native file formats are far superior to those of Microsoft's Office suite. The reason for the interoperability is so that people who need an inexpensive, portable office suite can easily move over. Again, not inspired by Microsoft.
GICU or GAIM: comunicating with Windows IMgrs.
So Windows is responsible for the advent of instant messaging on the Net? I think this happened with IRC a long time ago, and before that, `talk'... began on, you guessed it, *nix.
WineX: playing Windows games
There's nothing about games that makes them Windows, other than the fact that they were written so poorly as to not be portable. WineX is picking up the slack of poor game developers (both in skill and financially speaking) that won't develop for other platforms. Mac users have the same complaint.
Mozilla 1: at last being able to see the web IE users see it.
We've never had a need to impliment proprietary, broken Microsoft extensions to web standards. I'd much rather view the web without them. Even to this day, Mozilla still does not see the web how IE users see it because it is standards compliant (mostly). What IE users see isn't the web... it's Microsoft's own little thing.
I mean, ok you can do other stuff that does not involve Windows compatibility, but why then are these the most popular applications. Take away those apps, and our Linux dies in a month (my bet).
The only one you could take away that might even kill Linux is Apache. Linux is strongest in the server room where Mplayer, OOs, IM, WineX, and Mozilla should not even be found. Samba is debatable... I would never use it because it's a pathetic protocol. Linux is strong now because of its formidable server position. It's only the desktop that we're still weak on. Soon, that will be solved.
Incidently, Linux != open source. Instead, open source = {
Why bother.
Everything you are talking about is to do with performance. Did I say apache was the fastest? Did I say it had cool performance innovations? Did I say "Open source is more innovative than closed?"
No, I didn't.
My point was only that Innovation does not necessarily mean invention. Nothing more.
Yes, it means all the stuff that people added to apache to let it do new things. Why? Sure, a properly written nsapi module would be faster, but that doens't help as many people get something done. You can look at stuff like php and all the other weird apache plugins as slow and crappy, but they are also highly functional, and allow a great many people to make use of them and come up with their own innovations.
People - and I'm particularly calling on all Islamic /.ers - we've got to do something about this.
Well bugamededsedfred. Somebody - the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils did something, according to this story from the Australian IT news. I'll quote it in full to pre-emptively prevent the /. effect :
Obviously Rohan Gunaratna isn't quite familiar with the Australian concept of "Freedom of Speech" - it's not protected by our Constitution, just by custom (a far more solid guarantee IMHO). As long as it doesn't actually incite hatred and/or violence, it's best if the Government buts out, regardless of the article's nausea-index. This one comes close to overstepping the mark, but such cases should be and are given the benefit of the doubt.For the Mainstream of Islam to take notice that the Islamofascists have brought the whole of their religion into disrepute, that's another matter. Good on 'em.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist