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Microsoft Responds to Leaked Memo
AbbeyRoad writes "CNN, has a
story on Microsoft's response the
internal memo previous leaked:
"Microsoft believes many of its efforts to market its products against Linux and open source are backfiring, according to a memo posted on the Internet. ... Microsoft declined to comment on the authenticity of the memo, and did not answer when asked if it believes its marketing against Linux and open source has been effective. ... Microsoft spokesman Jon Murchinson said: ''The document in question seems to suggest that the basis for evaluating products has been long-term customer value, and that's something we agree with. I think our marketing is geared toward that issue, toward long-term customer value.'' ""
Gee, I always thought name-calling would be a sure way to win over customers. There's no way it could possibly backfire and cause consumers to look at other options, of course not. If company A appears scared shitless of company B, there's no way company A's customers would take a closer look at B's product, right? No way, won't happen.
Legal arguments on the other hand still could cause damage. Support the EFF today!
Um, you mean, so we can pay for that OS upgrade every 2 years and patch it every few days? That kind of long-term value??? Puhleeze. I have friends who are STILL running Slackware linux in almost the SAME config they installed back in '94. Show me someone who's still running Win3.1...and getting any decent use of it.
I'm just curious. Let's say MS finds an IP "violation" in the Linux kernel, in some fairly core area. Which of these do they have the right to sue, and who would they most likely sue?
1. Linus.
2. Developers who wrote IP violating code.
3. Red Hat / SuSE / Debian / Mandrake / other distros.
4. Companies selling Linux-based devices e.g. Tivo.
5. Companies deploying Linux in their workplaces.
6. Cowboyneal.
Basically what I'm asking here is this: If Linux were found to be in violation of someone's (MS's) IP, would it be illegal to sell/distribute Linux or just to "consume" it?
...that MS is more and more treated like some political institution rather than a company? E.g., the U.S. v. MS posed the two almost as equivalent entities. I can't imagine all this chatter about "leaked" memos from IBM or Adobe or Apple. Bill Gates is the potentate, MS the Empire, and so on -- at least as this is made out. Maybe Linus Torvald is Martin Luther?
The paradigm is unique to the industry I think.
Sadly, I'll have to agree with this. I'm an NT Admin. I make my daily bread by supporting and using MS OS's. I just can't find a gig that'll pay me to Admin (or even use...) a *NIX OS.
Flame me however you may (not the poster, just anyone who reads these words), but I have to put food on the table somehow, and I have yet to find a way to do that with *NIX. Perhaps I'm not looking hard enough (and that could very well be, but) I have an OK paying gig running an MS shop that is a 10 min drive from my house. That's pretty hard to beat.
Alhough I certainly do not feel passionately about Microsoft, they are the reason I have a good paying job. It's mostly because their OS is crappy and needs constant support, but beside the point. I have a good job because MS exists.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Marketing is also the process, more and more it seems, of manufacturing need where none existed before.
Classic Business 101 concepts of serving customer needs may work on a local widget-manufacturing level, but organizations like Microsoft or Exxon or the old Standard Oil trusts have been working from a different playbook for over a hundred years. The similarities between classic marketing and what Microsoft does are disappearing. MS more or less has a say in who gets appointed to the heads of the DOJ, the FCC, you name it. They can annihilate any small company they desire with lawsuits, if it so suits them. They can sway, with some work, the direction that information technology will take in the future.
They are not all powerful -- witness Tablet PC's and Bob -- but the fact is, they no longer really need to cater to the market. The market increasingly must kowtow to them.
It's a classic dilemma of capitalism. Companies compete, some win, then the winners consolidate control, form cooperatives, and ultimately remove market forces that can hurt them. Even IT, with its mercurial nature, is not immune to this.
Off on a tangent -- the second reason, after threatened profits, that MS hates Open Source so much is a viceral hatred by Gates et al of the cooperative aspects of software development. It's akin to communism, as far a Gates and other really hardline neocons are concerned. It's an ideological nightmare for them.
I disagree wholeheartedly. 2k has been FAR more stable than XP Pro in my experience. 2k is just about as stable as Linux is, and my applications rarely if ever crashed under it. XP on the other hand has totally locked on me on several occasions and frequently causes applications to crash...the same applications that never crashed under 2k.
That combined with the major speed hit over 2k and the DRM EULAs is enough. MS should've left out the bloat they added to XP...about the only useful new additions are superior Plug and Play and ClearType. Those are not worth the degraded stability and 30% lower performance IMHO.
Maybe what you have is a slight case of Battered Admin Syndrome. The first indicator is a destructive co-dependency on the thing which beats your ass. It's not your fault, and in order to break the cycle of violence you have to stand up to the agressor here. We can't blame Cerf or the NSF for the current state of things, but we can finger a rather monolithic corporate abuser which has fostered and supported an environment of dependency with a cycle of licensing violence that has made it increasingly harder to be an admin when dealing with pointy-haired manager types. I have never heard of any company suing M$ for dammages because they make buggy software. No manager in their right mind is going to tell you that by saving them money and releasing them from license audits that you're causing problems. Nobody is going to value you less if you don't have to work as hard to make them happy.
In the end, it's up to you. Either the monoculture assmonkeys that hold you down have to understand the problem, or you will lead a quiet life of back-up, patch, and recovery desperation.
Everyone has the capacity to be a Bastard Operator from Hell, some of us just don't have to work that hard at it.
Cheers!
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
While your poor attempt at humor is noted, the facts are that many larger businesses / government agencies use the same software for much longer time periods than the typical Microsoft product lifetime. Many systems are custom software - software that usually needs only minor enhancements over its lifetime, or continually evolving depending on business need.
In looking at TCO, the MS numbers begin to fail when you take into the constant cost of licenses, upgrades, re-deployments, re-porting custom software, constant re-training / recertification of staff to handle the "latest and greatest" versions of windows, etc. Many of these costs are hidden, but valid. If you look at any flavor of UNIX, they haven't changed much in how they work or how you interface to them.
It wouldn't be so bad if MS just continued to improve their core (kinda like every other OS on the planet does), but it seems that with every revision or so they replace core functionality, radically change
look and feel, interfaces, API's, management tools, etc. This costs business big money. It's that constant sprial of useless updates and repurchasing the same core functionality over and over again.
Many (most?) businesses were caught blindsided by the true scope of the problem, and many MS pundits STILL don't understand. It's easy to get caught up in the "ease of use" arguments, and the relativly low upfront cost (although the upfront costs is nowhere NEAR as low as it used to be.) Now, many businesses are stuck with proprietary MS based systems and face a potentially HUGE cost of migrating to other platforms. It's no wonder so many balk, especially in a down economy.
On the good side, businesses and governments world-wide are beginning to wake up and realize that MS's answer isn't as good as they were led to believe. They are finding that they don't have the flexability, reliability, or control that they want, and the price is much higher than they expected.
OK, so read the above carefully. In NO place did I say MS is bad, or that MS software is bad. I AM saying that if you buy into the MS paradigm, you are going to pay, and pay, and pay many times over for only incremental improvements in technology, and the true total costs of doing this is much higher than other competing systems.
What does Microsoft expect when they are practically advertising for Linux.
;)
You have a lot of companies that are blissfully ignorant of Linux and then Microsoft comes to them and assures them that they are much much better than Linux and that those companies needn't bother even looking at Linux as an option.
All Microsoft is doing by claiming they are infinately superior to Linux is getting companies to examine the potential use of Linux who wouldn't have otherwise.
In other words, they are advertising for Linux, isn't that nice of them
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like +5 funny outranks +5 insightful. Some sense of poetic rather than prosaic.
I think Microsoft is using "long-term customer value" in the sense of long-term value from a herd of sheep. They are referring to the value *from* their customers rather than the value *to* their customers.
Again, when MS stops releasing security fixes for you product, then you will have no choice. That is not an issue for open-source systems, and other vendors of commercial OS's generally support their OS's for MUCH longer than MS does. Sun is still providing updates for Sunos 4 which is something like 8 years old, IBM still supports mainframe OS's from over 20 years ago, HP does the same.
Of course if you LIKE getting hacked and your business doesn't depend any info stored on these old systems, then stay with the old stuff. No big deal to ME.
"Linux and the various other nixes don't require the large amount raw manpower for maintenance that Windows requires, at least, not after things shake down. Therefore, a whole industry is threatened."
This is one of the stupidest comments I've ever seen. I work at a company that uses Solaris, Linux, and Windows, and there's no way our sys admin spends more time with windows than either solaris or linux. All 3 OS require tech support. Get off your high horse and get back to reality.
Vote for Pedro
Where in the Windows 98 license agreement does it state that Win98 will be EOL in under 4 years?
Where in the NT4 license agreement does it state that it will be EOL in 2? (I last bought NT4 in 2000) Win2000 was only 1 year old before XP came out. Please. At this rate, the lifespan for MS OS's will drop to 1 month in a few years. Yeah, that's a little silly, but so is MS's expectation that customers will replace a perfectly good OS every year just so they can keep their sales revenue up.
To answer your question, YES. I STRONGLY believe that OS manufacturers should continue to maintain SECURITY FIXES for their products for a MINIMUM of 6 years from last date of sale. Note that I did NOT state that they must be FREE (but that would be the Right thing to do IMHO.)
Why 6 years? That is a reasonable term that people can reasonably expect to be able to run their systems, get repair parts, etc. I would be in favor of letting companies out of that requirement if they release source allowing customers to maintain their own systems when they discontinue support.
Auto manufacturers continue to release saftey related fixes / recalls long after the next several model years cars are out. I just got a saftey recall for a 5 year old volvo as an example.
We have a real problem in the industry. Software almost always comes with no guarantees, warranties, etc. (rare case when they do is Very high end software with custom contracts.) Software companies have NO requirement to produce code that works at all. About the only thing they DO guarantee is that the CDROM is readable. I can't think of ANY other type of product that we buy where we would be willing to put up with the shoddy workmanship, instabilities, constant problems, etc. Hell, we have lemon laws for cars, why not software? It's obvious that the industry won't police itself.
I'm not letting ANYONE off the hook here. I think Apple needs to be better about this issue too. I think they have pretty much said "stuff it. Upgrade to 10.2" which is a paid update.
So what would you say if MS no longer offered ANY security patches unless you had a PAID subscription to Windows Update? What if they only released fixes by reving the OS therefore requireing you to buy the new version? These are all things MS COULD do. The percentage of people that would bitch and moan would be MUCH higher than it is today, which is why MS doesn't do that. People bitch and moan now, but only those that NEED to stay downrev for one reason or another. Patience however is beginning to wear out.
I work as a tech for schools and educational institutions. For many of these, they are still using windows 95. There are some 98 machines, but licenses are limited so the 95's tend to be prominent anywhere outside of a lab.
Trying to deal with an OS which is no longer supported by the vendor, or many software/hardware manufacturers, is just plain ugly. While I never liked 95, the cost of licensing 100+ machines just tends to be a bit prohibitive, when hardware, etc is also very expensive.
And it's not just licensing the OS, but accepting all the terms of the license agreements. We don't want to sell our souls to MS (or any other big corp) to save a few bucks. Thus, we are looking at alternatives, and open source becomes increasingly tempting solution, even though we know many will not be happy with such a changover into unfamiliar areas.
The point is, you're right. There is quite sparse "long-term" customer value, unless there are a lot of "long-term" payments being made. This isn't to say that everything should be free, or dirt cheap, but it shouldn't be as painful as it tends to be when done in bulk.
You also have to consider system requirements, and how much they have hiked for OS to OS. XP needs RAM, 2K isn't so bad but it can be a RAM pig too. Unfortunately linux desktops also tend to wallow in the mud unless fed something over 64MB as well (Gnome on RH8 runs, very slow in loading apps though), but at least you don't have to buy an OS and hardware too.
This is factually incorrect. The last time the .doc format changed was between office 95 and office 97. After office 97, going to office 2k, there were some minor changes in the format, but nothing grand, and nothing that has to spark a major format-transition.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.