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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?
from the no-comment-on-enemy-number-two dept.
Would you talk negatively about your own company?
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.
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
-Mohandas Gandhi
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.
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.
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
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."
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).
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."
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.
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
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.
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
What is this 1962 you speak of? I thought the world started on January 1, 1970...
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...
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.
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
Most open source software is indeed completely lacking in innovation.
However, you appear to think that CEOs actually think about software...
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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
Most open source software is indeed completely lacking in innovation.
Yea, but "innovation" in Windows is simply switching around a few menu items here and there, integrating freeware, and selling it for a premium. How is that innovative? I think Ballmer throws that word around way too much. Microsoft hasn't done anything truely "innovative" in a long time. Ballmer has some nerve calling OSS "cloned" software when Windows has cloned features from many other OS's.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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!
I've seen more than a few companies that simply will not run Linux (or BSD, or Plan 9, or BeOS, or whatever). My wife's company is going to bankrupt itself because it *has* to get on the MS license subscription bandwagon. Which is fine. If MS can sell that bill of goods, then bully on them. But the people at my wife's firm think that they can't even run Linux. They don't even consider it. I don't know why that is.
If they need to run Exchange, then so be it. Does that mean their web server needs to be IIS? Not at all. They don't know that.
You're right: MS is competing with Linux. But there's a lot of room to move in the small server/edge network/whatever area; it's a huge playground, and they choices don't have to be mutually exclusive.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
... 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."
That is a rather serious point. As everything stands now, packages get released with trojans in them. Just imagine the amount of source that would have to be checked if one million engineers were churning out code?
It would be nigh on impossible for, shall we say, Americans to chechk through that much source. There simply arent enough developers to do this. We would end up simply having to trust that the Chinux source/packages were entirely benevolent, or, not use them.
The latter will not be an option by the way, since it will be the defacto world standard. Hmmmmm sounds VERY familiar!
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