Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft At Middle Age
gordyf writes "The Seattle Times has an interesting article concerning Microsoft's current position in the market. It describes how its customers and parners are reacting to its heavy-handed tactics, and how 'you can point to Linux being one of the major drivers for this decade.' An interesting read."
I'm sick of hearing zealots spout crap like "Wait until DRM is in, then everyone will tell MS to shove it!"
MS is a superpower. If they told everyone they plan on cornering the stock market, and taking over the world, people STILL would be buying their product. Face it people, if there is going to be a change, it will happen slowly.
I'm not saying Linux is bad, or that there is no way it will ever take over MS, I'm just saying don't expect it to happen overnight (or in the next 5 years, for that matter).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
but great influence. Mac OS will only run on boxes from Apple, whereas Linux/BSD runs on those Dell, IBM, and HP machines, too. Linux could kill Microsoft; Apple can't. The most Apple can do is take a few market share points from Windows as people upgrade from PCs to Macs.
See, that's what's so great about the US. You can do whatever you want with your money, regardless of what assholes like you spout that people *should* do with their money. He earned it. He does whatever in the hell he wants with it. On that note, all of your money should be used to fund my DVD collection. Hand it over.
Gates talks excitedly about putting together software he thinks may change the world.
Microsoft's greatest contribution to the computing landscape is not software. There is nothing particularly innovative or inspired about anything they have ever written. I'm not saying it's bad software, just that there's very little that they have done that wasn't preceded by other less successful counterparts.
Microsoft's great contribution is their business method. Ensure customer loyalty by ensnaring them with de-facto proprietary standards. They aren't the only ones playing this game, but they are far and away the best at it.
Microsoft's business model, not their software (or their service, for that matter), is responsible for their success. Those who believe shareholder value at any cost is the ultimate objective can be very happy. On the other hand, those who believe customer loyalty should be earned, rather than enforced by patents, copyrights, licensing and killing off the competition are mortified.
I don't know anyone who is delighted to use Microsoft products. I know a lot of people who feel they have no choice. Given the option to use a truly viable alternative, they would. I don't myself see such an alternative available today. However, I do think the writing is on the wall. And when the tide turns, it will be like a dam bursting.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
It will be common sense that if you go to a meeting that's recorded digitally ... you can go back and get that information."
Um, excuse me Bill, but isn't this what Palladium and Trusted Computing(TM) are supposed to eliminate? You can no longer go back and get that information unless your DRM module allows you to. Which means that basically the author, your employer, or Microsoft, can lock you out of your own data.
Something just occurred to me regarding DRM. Once Microsoft has succeeded in entrenching DRM in the PC marketplace, what is to keep them from charging their customers royalties for every Office document they view? The technology is there - Microsoft Office could encrypt your documents, and refuse to read them after a specified period of time, unless you bought an upgrade. I can see it now - it would be sold as "Legacy Support Services - with a simple upgrade, you'll be able to view documents created 2 or more years ago!..."
With the advent of MSDOS, people began paying for what they used to get for free. How long will it be before people expect to send Microsoft money every time they view documents created with Microsoft software? How long will it be before Microsoft charges developers royalties for every copy of a program that runs on Windows? Think it can't happen? Think Palladium and Trusted Computing.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Windows XP is less user friendly than Windows 2000 or KDE, to someone who's used it for a year. Continuously messing things around doesn't make it easy to use.
Follow me
I'm pretty sure that in the far future, a few people will look back and say "Well, it's a crying shame that Linux won, really MacOS was much better" in much the same way that people think of the video system wars of a decade or so ago.
In reality of course, they'll be wrong. In much the same way that when people remember VHS vs Betamax all they tend to think of was that Betamax tapes had higher quality pictures, but forget the smaller capacity/higher prices/sony control.
And so really, although I'm sure there are people out there who kind of regret the dominance of VHS, when you get down and argue the points through you tend to realise that a lot of what people remember about Betamax is rose-tinted. They think of only the good points, and forget why it really died.
I mean, when I read the points you make above, it's just like reading a VHS vs Betamax argument. There's the whole will-the-free-market-work thing going, there's the whole its-backed-by-a-megacorp thing and then there's a baseless assertion about the relative "goodness" of the kernels. I mean, maybe FreeBSD has a better VM system or something, I don't really know, and I don't care either. It's like video quality - 99.9% of people can't tell, don't know and wouldn't care even if they did.
Finally I'd point out that "less proprietary" isn't good enough: it's still proprietary, and that's a bad thing. It also condemns them to a minority marketshare for ever, something I'm sure they are aware of, but they're doing OK selling to a niche so that doesn't really matter.
Trade in the KDE desktop for WindowMaker and you won't have any problems with that configuration. It served me quite well in it's time and it was even adequate at running "bloated monsters" like StarOffice and Netscape.
Don't confuse explorer.exe with win32.
You don't need the KDE desktop to run KDE.
That level of modularity simply doesn't exist under a vertically integrated platform such as WinDOS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There is one thing you failed to mention: You can't recompile the windows kernel to make it smaller.
I regularly tune and recompile my linux kernels to support the specific hardware I have on my eclectic assortment of old boxes (P100s etc..). This fine tuning makes the kernel run quicker, and allows me to lower the disk and memory footprint. (P.S. I burn CDs that contain these unique kernels as recovery disks - so no worries on catastrophic failures). You don't have to live with a bloated 'one size fits all' distribution if you don't want to under linux. Not so for windows (unless you pay a price of course).
I have all of this flexibility in Linux for free. Windows can't beat that.
It is a big deal for me. I demand quality over quantity and glitz. Windows does not deliver.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Except it doesn't look exactly like Win2k. The individual UI elements go back to looking like Win2K, but button placement menu structure and such are all still XP.
And you still get those annoying talk balloons from the systray. Until you turn them off, which is a few more clicks.
And you still get nagged about Windows Update, even if you are offline (wtf?!? how does it know there are updates available? I got this nag before I ever even connected the machine to the internet). Few more clicks to turn that off.
And you still have MSN messenger running. If you don't use it, few more clicks to turn that off too.
And you still have to turn off that god damned motherfucking filename extension hiding bullshit that has plagued mankind since the days of Windows 95, ARGH!!!!!! Few more clicks to turn that off too (but to be fair Win2K had this problem too).
Bunch of clicks to NOT sign up for Passport when XP was first installed.
Bunch of clicks to do the product activation.
Etc. You can't fix it with "just a few clicks", unless you consider installing w2k to be "just a few clicks".