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META Predicts Linux Software From Microsoft in 2004
trandles writes "According to this story at NYTimes (FRYYY), META Group is reporting that Microsoft will begin selling Linux software in 2004. It also goes on to report that a META Group study comes to the same conclusion as the earlier (MS-funded) IDC study that Linux has a higher TCO than MS solutions for some applications." Remember, this is speculation on the part of META, and has to do with back-end software, not Office. (But if Microsoft wanted to, they could become the world's biggest producer of Linux software.)
Will we finally see MS solitaire for linux?
CAPS LOCK IS LIKE CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
All they need to do is create a free (as in beer) X-semi-compatible, but faster GUI. Then release Word for it.
Embrace, extend, control. After a while, everyone will write software for Microsoft X# or X++ or X-Windows(tm) or whatever they call it, and MS will call the shots.
Un-Free Linux?
Blue Screen of Linux?
Maybe All-Your-Torvalds-Are-Belong-to-Microsoft?
In Soviet Russia, Linu(*BANG!!!!*)
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
This story was written by Reueters, not the New York Times. You can view this story at other sites with no registration. Yahoo.
I'm only in favor of MS Office if they open up the file formats so that .doc is fully interchangable with other office productivity suites. The level of interoperability we currently have is OK a lot of the time, but it could be better, and I won't be totally happy until the original application used to create the file is completely transparent to someone viewing the file.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Naaay, X-Windows.
--
Admittedly, if Microsoft thought that OpenOffice or any other office suite on Linux or other OSes represented serious competition to Microsoft Office, all they would have to do is port Office to Linux and they would own the office suite market, but at the expense of their OS monopoly. The only reason Office for Macintosh exists is to keep the DOJ, the FTC, and the courts off their back.
My journal has hot
My condolences to the Gates family - what does Bill have? Cancer? Alzheimers? AIDS? ALS? CJD?
Whatever he has, my condolences. I know what it is like to hear your loved one only has about a year left. The next few months will be hard, but know that you will get through it, and while it never gets better, it gets easier.
</humor>
Because the only way Microsoft will start selling software for Linux is over Bill Gates' cold, dead body. So the only way you can say that MS will be selling Linux software in 2004 is to say that Bill is not long for this world.
And somehow I doubt Bill is even sick.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"But if Microsoft wanted to, they could become the world's biggest producer of Linux software."
If Microsoft wanted to, they could become the world's biggest producer of fishing lures. Or coffee warmers. Or pencil lead. They have the money to be the largest producer of anything.
MS is currently trying to become the world's biggest producer of game consoles (or at least a serious competitor), and it doesn't seem to be working very well from what I've heard.
There are two kinds of sysadmins: paranoids and losers. I'm both kinds.
I think the point is to stop the MS monopoly by there being alternative products to those of MS, and allowing other software vendors to participate in the market. If M$ Office were suddenly to appear on Linux and every other version of UNIX, it's just possible that MS would kill any last vestage of competition. Luckily, OpenOffice etc. have got some momentum behind them already so that probably won't happen. Can you imagine a world in which you could choose whatever word processor you like as long as it's Word?
Stick Men
As more and more of Microsoft's software is built on top of .NET it will become increasingly easy to move that software to other operating systems.
That is the thing. Most people don't use windows because of Microsoft applications, they use it because of other applications such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash.. etc. If Microsoft started porting their apps to Linux, then i'm sure Adobe would do the same and so would Macromedia. If you could run Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash on linux, then why pay the money for WindowsXP? Once other companies stop forcing you to use Windows to use their products, people can finally ditch Windows.
What is all this hoopla about? Some soothsayer makes some outrageous prediction that is not backed by any data whatsoever, and all the world is acting as if it already happened!
;)
Hold your horses, gentlemen.
Their German subsidiary just sold a well researched and completely unbiased prediction that Linux won't stand a chance against Windows on servers and desktops to the Swiss a few months ago. The study claims that Unix scales better than Linux and yet Unix will become a back-end, legacy OS platform by 2003.
Oh, and they also pumped out a different study (which is, by the way, also completely unbiased and astoundingly well-researched) where they predicted Linux will grow from 25% to 35% in the next 2 years, only to be outpaced by... Windows 2000?!
ROTFL! Nobody in their right mind can take these people seriously! I don't even have to contradict them, they do it themselves!
BTW: The PDF is in German, but the pretty figures are all English, so you should have no problem understanding what they are saying.
PS: What good luck we have that their study is a PDF! In it you will find the assertion that Star Office has "uncertainties" opening MS Office files and thus you can't use Linux. Um, well...
If you are running a Windows shop and put people with only MCSE training to work on UNIX/Linux machines, they won't know what to do, they won't even know how to find out what to do, and they will hate it. Your systems will run miserably and your TCO will be high.
What does that mean? Your Linux TCO depends on how your run your shop. If you do things right, the achievable TCO is better for Linux than for Windows.
Microsoft's not yet ready for the "join 'em" part of the "If you can't beat 'em..." argument - especially as today's Wall Street Journal has a very long, detailed article on Microsoft's efforts to lure national governments away from open source software, using carrots and sticks familiar to many /.ers. It's worth reading, and good to see the mainstream press like the WSJ taking an active interest on how Redmond deports itself.
... so here (for review purposes only) are highlights of the article - well worth the time:
It's a good piece, but it's subscription only
Microsoft Wages Campaign Against Free Software
By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY and REBECCA BUCKMAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sometimes it seems as if Microsoft Corp. doesn't want government to save money -- at least not if it comes by using free software. Microsoft is waging a major lobbying and public-policy campaign to stop government agencies in the U.S. and abroad from embracing free, "open-source" software, especially the Linux operating system, which poses a growing threat to Microsoft's Windows.
In the past year it has argued with the Defense Department over the content of a report extolling free software. It has organized a world-wide lobby to oppose laws that mandate using open-source software. It has persuaded some congressmen to ask the new Office of Homeland Security not to fund research that uses certain open software.
But even Microsoft is having a tough time persuading governments from Washington to South Africa that getting software free is a bad thing -- especially when rivals like International Business Machines Corp. are telling them that open-source software works just fine.
Open-source software is software whose source code, or base layer of commands, usually can be copied freely and then modified, unlike most proprietary software, which is generally controlled by a profit-making company. It is championed by a far-flung community of programmers, researchers and companies who share their work over the Internet.
Open-source software has grown in recent years to become a full-fledged rival to Microsoft, used by companies, universities and others in their computer rooms. Many open-source programs are free, or nearly so.
The best known open-source software, Linux, increasingly is being embraced by computer companies including IBM, Dell Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. as a way to sell more hardware and services. According to International Data Corp., a technology-research firm, sales of server computers that use Linux grew 6% in the most recent four quarters, while sales of Windows-based servers grew just 1% in revenue.
Microsoft says it isn't against the concept of open-source software. But it is working hard to prevent government researchers from adopting software covered by the general public license, or GPL, that governs reuse of much open-source software, including Linux. The GPL requires anyone who copies the software to freely share any improvements or additions they make to the code.
Because commercial companies often adapt programs written by government-funded university scientists, Microsoft argues that wider use of GPL-licensed software would stifle innovation. Commercial companies, it argues, would have no incentive to sell "free" software derived from the research. What's more, Microsoft worries that its own developers could inadvertently combine Linux or other GPL-licensed programs with Microsoft programs, which could potentially make the Microsoft programs subject to free-sharing as well.
"The GPL, in my view, is bad in all its dimensions," says Jim Allchin, the Microsoft group vice president who heads the powerful Windows group.
In some cases, Microsoft has leaned on government agencies directly. The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency, an arm of the Defense Department, says that last spring it granted a Microsoft request for an exclusive advance look at a report by research firm Mitre Corp., Bedford, Mass., on Pentagon use of open-source software.
After Ira Rubinstein, a Microsoft lawyer, detailed Microsoft's objections, Dawn Meyerrick, chief technology officer at the agency, says she asked Mitre to make changes in the report. Among them, it dropped the conclusion that open-source software was more secure, and it added cautionary words about the GPL.
Open-software advocates also perceived Microsoft's influence in a letter from a group of congressmen to Richard Clarke, who heads cyberspace security for the newly created federal Office of Homeland Security. The initial letter urged the government to continue past practices by "explicitly rejecting licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption" of software developed under federal contracts.
But as the letter was being circulated, Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat -- who receives the most donations of any representative from Microsoft's political action committee -- added a "Dear Colleague" letter to further explicate the original. That letter said that "licenses such as the General Public License (GPL) are problematic and threaten to undermine innovation and security," and suggested such open-source software shouldn't be developed by the government at all.
That echoed Microsoft's position. A Microsoft spokesman acknowledges that Rep. Smith met with its chief technology officer, Craig Mundie, before the letter was sent, but only for "informational" purposes. Mr. Smith's press secretary says that the "dear colleague" letter was meant to clarify the original because "we believe in innovation."
Open-source fans believe Microsoft is bringing its political power to bear because it sees a market threat to its desktop-software monopoly. But in some cases, Microsoft's appeals have fallen on deaf ears. Last year, according to people familiar with the situation, Microsoft objected "vigorously" when the super-secret National Security Agency developed a secure version of Linux and then posted it on the NSA Web site for anyone to download. But NSA didn't back down and the software is still available.
In the developing world, where free software like Linux may have its greatest appeal, Linux advocates say they have "noticed that Microsoft has made a substantial portion of their quote 'gifts' to developing nations that have indicated a strong preference for open-source software," says Mark Webbink, general counsel of Red Hat Inc., a Raleigh, N.C., company that sells versions of Linux.
In India, where at least one state government endorsed Linux recently, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates last month announced a $400 million gift of donated software and business-development aid.
In South Africa, a Microsoft offer to provide software for 32,000 schools came just days after that country's National Advisory Council on Innovation called for the government to adopt open-source software to build local programming skills and avoid sending hard currency to the U.S. to pay for Windows. Nhlanhla Mabaso, a government chief information officer, says that while the free software from Microsoft is tempting, "Personally, I believe this is not good for South Africa."
Bradford Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, says any donations "are made to meet a social need" and not to counter Linux.
Microsoft concedes that its opposition to open-source software has sometimes backfired, and it says it intends to move the battle to more straightforward commercial issues.
* * *
OK, I'm replying to this even though it seems to be a troll, because some of the points stated are very widely believed to be true (outside /. mainly).
... Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Theoretical mumbo jumbo aside, let's talk about personal experience. At our shop we have a few Windows servers and a few Linux servers. One of the Windows servers is always down. OS code and design aside, it's hard to automate housekeeping system tasks in Windows - that's why Linux will run a lot longer.
Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly.
All non-journaling filesystems are prone to interruption errors (like FAT32, too). Luckily there are many other filesystems available that are native to any decent Linux distro (I like ReiserFS personally). My impression is also that systems like ReiserFS store files much more efficient than, say, NTFS - but a minor gripe is that you can't have compressed folders just like that (like on NTFS).
Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices.
Linux should theoretically be more stable than Windows and many other unices. But there is indeed a problem with Linux' fault tolerance regarding hardware. This is more a philosophical problem, as Linux developers tend to say things like "if the hardware isn't 100% reliable my software won't run and you shouldn't have faulty hardware in the first place". Reality is, many hardware pieces are partly broken (be it some circuits on the board or a few faulty sectors on the harddrive) and Linux reacts very badly once it encounters those errors. But looking deeper that's not so much an inherent kernel problem as an issue in device drivers and filesystem code.
The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right.
In fact my experience with open source projects in general suggests that standards and specifications are implemented VERY strictly and correctly.
On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
Yeah, some messages are a bit silly but hey, its not as if system messages have to be presented to the CEO each morning or something ike that. I think more serious problems are cryptic messages that defy any meaning (every system has them) and bad/lacking documentation.
Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
And yet, Linux is deployed on a large scale for many environments, in some areas it pervades even more than MS and other unices combined. Why do you think IT people do that?
"Inferior/superior" are such loaded words. Let's try to be a bit more objective. The design of NT is more "advanced" (incorporates more recent design concepts) than the Linux kernel (which holds to older and more "traditional" systems software designs). It is more "sophisticated" than the Linux kernel (again, a microkernel design where the "monolithic" part of the kernel handles only processes and interprocess communications) and thus permits a more modular OS that can be transformed, expanded, changed, with theoretically much greater speed and much smaller chance of unwanted side effects from those changes.
All of these advantages are theoretical. They also carry some disadvantages, notably in performance.
People have argued for years that traditional monolithic kernels must reach the point where network effects in the code make every change too expensive to make (too much chance of side-effects). So far, this hasn't happened with the Linux kernel. I'm only an amateur kernel hacker (working on reverse engineering an old framebuffer video card so I can make a kernel driver for it) and I don't claim to know much of the Linux kernel code (apart from the framebuffer), but it sure looks to me like the Linux kernel has managed to acheive a similar level of code independence by using good structure programming practice.
As for the superior "security" of the microkernel model, this comes from that same separation of service processes. Compromise a microkernel service and you cannot (in theory) leverage that into a compromise of other services. At the service level, this is true. A Mach or NT microkernel has this feature. The problem is that the Windows kernel isn't the Windows OS. The Windows OS is the gigantic flabby shared APIs written as DLLs. These are the things that are attacked and compromised. These sit on top of all of the sophisticated kernel plumbing and they provide a path to blithely leap between unprivlidged and privledged user space in the stuff that matters: network, file, and directory services. You don't need to compromise any kernel service to own a Windows box because it the is the Win32 APIs that have the holes, not the kernel services (Yes, I know I'm making rather broad generalizations, but the point is still true). Much of "Windows" privledge/authentication/authorization is in "user land" code. Microsoft emphasizes the sophistication of their underlying microkernel architecture. And I agree. The trouble is they have carried over the top much of the cruft from the design of the win16 and pre-NT win32 APIs in the name of backward compatibility and this has carried forward fundmental design weaknesses from those systems.
To be fair to Microsoft, these weakenesses weren't particularly problematic when they were introduced. At the time, each machine was an isolated, single-user device. Little or no networking was done with them. Also to be fair, Microsoft really didn't have a choice but to be backward compatible. They never would have got any users for NT if it didn't run all or nearly all existing software. I'll go further: they never would have got ISVs to switch to win32 if they hadn't done Windows95, marketed it like the second coming, and required ISVs to use win32 if they wanted the "Works with Windows95" logo. The much-maligned Windows 95 was the only reason every major piece of Windows software came to run well on NT.
So feel free to bandy the words "inferior" and "superior" but I defy you to provide and objective criterion by which you may fairly apply those words to the two kernels. "More advanced" v. "Less advanced", yes. "Sophisticated" v. "Simple", yes. I don't buy "superior" v. "inferior," unless you believe that newer necessarily means "better," which, obviously I do not accept.
I also do not buy the statement that these weaknesses "are a thing of the past." They have done a great job of cleaning up many of the holes, but the DLL hosted APIs are still a bridge that just circumvents the good kernel design. They have plugged thousands of holes, but the system design is still subject to them, just as the Linux kernel is.
I do agree that 2000 and XP are vastly more stable than any previous versions of Windows, but this is a product of API cleanup, not the inherent "superiority" of the NT kernel. The "NT" kernel has had these "superior" features from day one and it conferred no magic "superiority" or stability on early versions of NT.