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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?
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
-Mohandas Gandhi
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...
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 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.
Having worked in the financial industry, I'm willing to agree.
They're afraid of software without a final source. Yes, there are the free software developers, but they understand that linux is made by hackers.
Red Hat et al. is actually making inroads in this, because they can be a "final source".
But until the huge amount of software that an average bank uses that is seen as important for their job is available on another platform, then linux will be on the sidelines.
Dan
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
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
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.
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."
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
While I agree with your post the same could be said of linux, linux very rarely 'innovates' (i'm talking about general Unix software now) other than you know that the software will likely be secure and stable. I mean, really, what was the last 'innovation' that occured in the *nix /world? Wow, we finally got journalling databases, and we are finally starting to get user-friendly UI enviroments. Whopee. Not the most technical of people so maybe the linux kernel does do some wonderfully modern stuff but to me it doesn't look like much.
.Net which is basically a suped-up version of Java to replace MS's previous failed java-usurper ActiveX. =).
Of all the modern OS's I feel the *nix world copies the most and does the least innovation. Think of all that could be done with kde/gnome - but instead they became win98 clones until just recently. Not that *nix software is bad it just being a wee bit hypocritical.
BTW, you missed
You have to realize that Bloomberg's specialty is not quality journalism, the WSJ beats them hands down, and they probably all know that. What make Mike a billionare, is that his service provides quantity journalism. That story was probably one of 500 published on Microsoft today. Not all of them were written by Bloomberg's staff, but quite a few were, and they do this for almost every company out there. This isn't an information service for acidemics, it provides near instantanous information for large investors who might just trade a million or more shares on the info provided.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
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
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...)
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.
The problem is that coming up with innovative ideas is a lot more expensive than cloning existing ideas. Whatever Microsoft does innovate is going to cost them more than it will for free software to essentially duplicate it, because the benefit of the innovation (being the only person on the market with it) gets chipped away relatively quickly. Even assuming that Microsoft is innately more innovative than the free software world, out-innovating free software is going to be a lot more expensive than, say, out-innovating Netscape or Sun or Oracle. It may or may not be worth it in the long run to try to press a full-scale assault on free software that way - it's kind of like trying to fight back the tide. Eventually the tide will catch up to where you are; you can either head for higher ground or start swimming with the aquatic sea-birds.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
M$ is paying Slashdot money so that we can continue to bash M$ here on Slashdot
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
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 $700,000 CEO salary looks like chump change.
He dumped 4 million shares in the past 2 years, but at that rate it would take several lifetimes to sell off his entire stake. His only chance of staying in the 11-digit club (as opposed to 10 digits or even 9) is to hope like hell that MSFT can maintain its current market share in the face of neverending pressure from competitor's innovation and open source. Steve's position is that of a fat guy on a treadmill, running to keep in place as it steadily speeds up...
I've worked with plenty of H1Bs, and some are good, some are bad. But that doesn't matter. Most management sees employees as replaceable parts, no difference from one to the next. They literally don't know how to measure the worth of an employee other than useless buzzwords or seniority. Thus when they see an H1B with the right buzzwords but at half the cost of a citizen, they salivate at saving money. The predictable result is that more H1Bs are hired, and since no attempt has been made to hire only the good ones, a lot of crap H1Bs are hired.
Thus the resentment by actual citizens trying to get the same job. Whether you fit the crap lable or not has nothing to do with complaints about H1Bs. You are tarnished by the management incompetency brush.
Infuriate left and right
In the past several years, M$ 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.
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 ?
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
China is a threat...through OSS.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Almost any other commercial venture would have buckled under pressure - internal or external - to remove material obviously offensive to such a major client. Of the legion of things Slashdot does wrong (a moderation system open to astroturfing, poor editing, repetitious stories ending in trite tag lines, etc.) this is one thing they do impressively right.
"I mean, really, what was the last 'innovation' that occured in the *nix /world?"
zope, postgresql, jabber, rsync, http, email, ftp, tcp/ip, DNS, distributed file systems etc. are all innovations that occured in the *nix world. I just stopped there but there are tons more. Just about every single piece of technology that you use every day come out of the unix world.
War is necrophilia.
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 $5,000 in consulting, and get a solution that will work. The consulting market price is low due to competition. The system will run, and there are many people that can provide this service.
Linux.. I can get the Intel hardware cheap, and the OS out of a book, or free. Not for the novice. I have to find someone who really knows what they are doing to get the apps set up and running. This takes time, and the cost can go through the roof.
Don't confuse inexpensive aquisition costs with inexpensive solutions. Until the mom and pop shops of the world can get accounting systems and small business software up and running inexpensively and easily, Microsoft will be around and making money.
is a good example why Ballmer should fear OSS. With M$'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.
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
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).
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
Just see what happens if somebody here proposes a different design for a window manager. They are yelled at mercilessly for being "user unfriendly". Unfortunatly everything that does not look identical to Windows is attacked this way.
We'll do what we've traditionally done: get paid to write software. I'd say about 80% of software is by it's nature not amenable to being widely distributed. For example, a point-of-sale system tied tightly into the pump-control, tank-monitoring and other hardware of a truckstop. Half a million or so lines of code, all told, and all of it so specific to one company's way of doing business that there's only a handful of other people who could use it without major modifications and customization. For all that, though, it's so critical to keeping the company running that abandoning it in favor of more generic solutions would be corporate suicide. It would simply cost too much in lost opportunities to have to wait 5 years for someone else to implement an idea, not to mention the costs of customizing it to match the way the company works (or alternatively changing the way the company works, but that's letting the tail wag the dog).
In that kind of situation, open-source is infrastructure. It's the generic code that handles the routine jobs and the well-known tasks so the programmers can concentrate on the critical parts that aren't generic.
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.
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.
Sorry, but the people of every nation are very responsible for their own government. It's their responsibility and they get exactly what they put into the government process. Which, apparently, in the case of most places, like China, Irag, Iran, etc., is damn near nothing. It's GIGO and NINO. (Nothing in, nothing out). :{(||
No, I understand that point all too clearly. If the media, hardware and software people team up to radically change the way things work, you will have four choices (as far as I can see). Number one: being a nice cooperative consumer of DRM enabled hardware, software and media. Number 2: using systems that have no DRM (older platforms, Chineese Dragon* chips, etc.) Number 3: be a cracker of DRM computers, and fraglantly ignore the law (DMCA, etc.) Number 4: do any of the above, and remain to be a strong critic of DRM, and make sure the people who matter know what you and the rest of the people like you feel about DRM.
:) On the other hand, pizza with Sesame Chicken, Lo Mein, and some cabbage might be pretty good!
*You want to buy silicon designed by a country that is probably most well known for ignoring the human rights of their enormous population? Sounds like bargining with the devil to me. They censor everything; what makes you think their chips won't have some nasty stuff in them as well? It's too early to say they do, but you must admit, the possibility is there. In any case, with this Palladium free computer you may be missing out on your media of choice. You'd better get used to Chineese Pop Culture
I realize I paint an apocalyptic picture here. It might happen, and it might not. The thing is, there are people out there who want to see this scenario unfold (the faster the better.) On the other side of the coin, there are people who don't care (lets face it, some people have more to worry about besides computers and technology.)
While being outsiders, castaways and criminals may be ok for some of the Open Source community, the vast majority of people don't know anything outside of AOL, MSN, Internet Explorer, Brittney Spheres, etc. To them, Linux is not an option at the moment; perhaps that will start to change in the near future, perhaps not. If (when) DRM gains steam, these people will be a fulcrum for the crowbar that will pry many more into the grasps of Evil. *insert melodramatic music*
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.