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Microsoft's New Hurdles
gnuadam writes "The New York Times (free reg. required) is now running a
piece about how the recently accepted
settlement between Microsoft and the DOJ will affect the ever-so-loving relationship between them and the "worldwide community of volunteer programmers" who work on Linux and associated programs. Of interest, one interviewee quipped, "My prediction is that within three years time, Microsoft will `give away' its operating system to preserve its revenue in the applications business." Would Microsoft give away Windows to sell Office? Stay tuned." Update: 11/04 19:33 GMT by T : In related news, an anonymous reader writes "In an interview with Linux and Main Free Software Foundation General Counsel Eben Moglen reacts to Friday's U.S. v. Microsoft ruling and describes how it and 'trusted computing' will figure in formulating the next version of the GPL, expected in the next few months."
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
Ignore the noise.
Keep coding.
Keep releasing.
That's what will win the battle.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
The Linux strategy is to undercut Microsoft,
Wow, is this really the Linux mission statement? I thought it was more about making a great operating system for free, not controlling the market.
This article really doesn't say anything, and says the above quite wrongly I think. I doubt Microsoft will ever give away windows...that would be an interesting day if they did. Over here in East Germany, almost everybody uses StarOffice because it's free and just as good. Free Windows and Free StarOffice...nobody would complain (except microsoft)!
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Microsoft's own Steve Ballmer: "Linux is a tough competitor."
Sombebody's been lying...
I realize that your posting panders to the "Microsoft bad...everything else good" crowd, however I would like to call you on a few assumptions.
a) What amazing abilities does Microsoft Office derive via these secret covert hooks that the source to the OS will reveal? This is an oft stated claimed, and I'm curious what the thought process is behind it. Will the "MakeOfficeProgramGreat()" API call suddenly make Open Office that much better? Of course this is all moot anyways as open source programs usually don't capitalize on OS specific hooks even where there are advantages.
b) While this might be hard for the kids to believe, Microsoft Office earned the position that it's in right now. I recall when it was an underdog, and then review after review after review found it to be best. While it's far from perfect, in any overall, non-biased comparison it came out on top. It's my personal opinion that Open Office doesn't even remotely compare with Office XP.
c) This same thing can be said about virtually any other MS program. I run Microsoft SQL Server because it's a very powerful, cost effective database system. I use Visual Studio.NET because it's a fantastic development environment that I've never used a rival to.
MS is in the business of selling software.
That is the first mistake that people make when trying to understand Microsoft. They don't sell software but, rather, they sell you the right to use it for a preset amount of time.
Businesses do not have the right to transfer licenses - we saw that with the Kmart fiasco. Now that the licenses are tied to hardware, consumers do not have the right to keep their MS software when they buy a new PC.
So really, one can only rent the software. This is where the DOJ went wrong - they need to force MS to license users and not hardware or legal entities.
"Hi - thank you from ordering from Dell. To finalize your order, please give me your Microsoft Windows and Office license numbers and we can eliminate that cost for you right now."
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
...giving away... essentially free...
Umm.... No.
If I'm a white-box OEM I have to pay ~$65 for XP Home or ~$105 for XP Pro at _miniumum_. This is for a sticker only. No CD, Manual, nothing. Office SBE is ~$150 and office pro is ~$250. Lets say some random person wants a $650 PC, for general purposes and working at home. The Microsoft tax is 33% of the purchase price. I'd hardly call that giving away!!
Step into the wayback machine for a moment. It is early Fall 1992. I want a commodity PC. I'll have to spend about $2100 to get a reasonable system. Dos, Win3.1 for OEMs was less than $80. Office 4.0 (I think it was out then??) was about $85 for OEMs. This is about 7% of the purchase price of the PC.
Dell, et al, have had to fight with MS tooth and nail to get non-ms products on their machines. Dell has some sort of really sweet deal on windows-- about $40 for the cheap version. Suddenly, MS wants to charge Dell $139 for that copy of XP Home because Dell is bundling RedHat. Or MS wants the volume agreement to include _every_ PC produced by dell to be licensed for MS Operating systems.
And lets not even talk about some OEM copies of NT Server and 2000 Server-- Copies of windows that can not possibly be upgraded to more than 10 concurrent connections. You have to buy the "retail" version and your previous OEM version doesn't count toward upgrade. If by " pretty much Free" you mean "pretty much free" as in the same sense the local neighborhood crack dealer means "free", then, yes, I guess the oem copies of MS's stuff is "free".
Windows XP Pro runs very well on our 3 year old PIII 550/256 mb ram systems. They used to have Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. XP runs remarkably well on these PCs. 2000 was slightly slower than NT4, but more stable, so I don't completely agree with the your apparent assesment that a retail software purchases don't really do any good.
Considering the licensing requirements of SP3 can put a compliant company on the wrong side of the law (1, 2) I would not consider it to be free (in any sense of the term). But considering the number of problems/issues that SP3 supposedly addresses (in the areas of "application compatibility, operating system reliability, security, and setup"), leaving your system as is (in a potentially vulnerable state) is also not something that people would feel free to do. Because of one law, they are in violation if they don't patch, and because of Microsoft's licensing, they're in violation of the law if they do patch.
So forcing users to make/keep their computers ineligible to be used legally seems to me to be a rather significant loss of functionality.
Fast forward to the present. Microsoft Windows, as a platform, is insanely difficult to develop for (unless you are using VB). The learning curve to get started with C or C++ is insane. (eg: COM, COM+, OLE, OLE2, OLEDB, ATL, MFC, ADO, RDO, etc.) Not to mention the cost of getting your hands on Visual Studio.
.NET for free.
.NET lives.
FUD, FUD, FUD. For a start, most Microsoft developers are using VB. Slashbots may flame them as not being real programmers, but they're as much programmers as those Linux people working in Perl and Python. The learning curve for VC++ is no steeper than the learning curve for gcc, but VC++ has a lot of stuff to help newbies that gcc doesn't, like code-writing wizards. MFC is certainly no more difficult than say Motif. And the plethora of APIs where have I seen that before? Look at the arguments between the KDE and GNOME camps for desktop applications. And C# is about as easy (or difficult) to learn as Java.
Yes, Visual Studio Enterprise is expensive, but corporates pay for it; if you're a student it costs about $25. You can get a command line development kit including compiler and VM for
Linux, on the other hand, is easy to develop for. The tools are free, the compiler is free, and getting your code up and running is as simple as make, make install.
Developing is not the same as installing, my friend. After all, installing on Windows is as simple as double-clicking SETUP.EXE. I reiterate: writing a C or C++ GUI application is no easier on Linux than it is on Windows (and writing a tcl/app on Linux is no harder than writing a VB app on Windows).
Also, Java never worked out on Windows. Even with the WFC extentions, Windows developers never used it to code Win32 apps.
No, but Windows is the most common platform for developing Java applications.
Windows is dead.
You're completely right. It's just like when Win32 replaced Win16. And we all know how that turned out.
How is it free? They look in the newspaper and see "I can buy this computer for $1295". They go to the store, and they buy a "computer". At no point whatsoever does it go through their mind that they are buying "a computer and Windows". They bring it home and turn it on. It is running Windows. At no point did the consumer ever think they were "buying Windows". At no point does the average consumer even have the tiniest smidgen of any concept of "I could save money by not buying Windows". For the average consumber Windows is FREE! in that it has no perceived cost!
If MicroSoft gave Windows away for free, *all* computers would go down a few hundred in price because of the elimination of the "MicroSoft Tax". The result would be about the same as it is now, to the end user Windows is just as free as before. The fact that a computer is cheaper may be noticed, but the percieved cost of Windows would remain zero.