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Ballmer on Windows Server 2003, Linux
no_demons writes "Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, has given an interview to CNet about Windows Server 2003 and Linux. He claims that 'our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community'. Discuss." Also in the news: two critical security vulnerabilities (MS03-014, MS03-015), and this piece about Windows 2003 mentioning that Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
So just because the basic design is old, it's not "innovative?" I think this guy needs to spend more time with his programmers!
He claims that 'our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community'.
Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
Isn't this a little backwards?
void*x=(*((void*(*)())&(x=(void*)0xfdeb58)))();
They're Microsoft's customers, of course they've seen more innovation from Microsoft. That's because they haven't tried something else. Anytime something starts with "our customers" what follows is not a valid comparison. You need a better sample.
What I think, is the open source community needs to work more on marketing, documentation, and support. I believe that's the area that is lacking the most. Probably one of the best ways to education people on linux and open source is to get it in the schools. Kids usually tech their parents how to use computers.
Go calculate something
Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition.
Gee, so 5 years down the road when M$ is integrating open source software to maintain value in the consumer market, I wonder where this guy will be...
That aside, generally don't things get better with age? With more time on the open market, would that not imlpy 20 years of innovation and development? If not, why is it still alive and more popular than ever? Would that explain the relatively small number of security holes and bugs of the 20 year old system, compared to the "modern" Window$ core?
Ballmer's right -- stability isn't an innovation. Good design isn't an innovation. These are all concepts that existed years ago.
I guess even Microsoft is realizing that for administration purposes, it's not beneficial to hide all settings deep within pretty GUI tabs and dialogs.
:)
Good luck with that experiment, Microsoft. But there's much more to a solid OS than a simply a lack of GUI
Forgetting RedHat, Mr. Balmer?
Lastly, a customer can go to Microsoft and request a feature? Really? Even one as small as us? Yeah, right.
There is a project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which uses primarily Microsoft architecture. It has been very successful, and as bugs come up along the way due to situations in databases which have never been tested, they can call up the company and have a patch for the bug by the next day. I guess their budget is higher than most companies', however, because they have gained a substantial amount of funding from grants. But Microsoft does work permitting that you have money and you know how to use it.
webpage
Gosh, could that be because any not found address put into an IE browser redirects to an MS search page? Could that drive up traffic? Is that innovation? Like Arthur Anderson innovation?
"Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system."
If it ain't broke...
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Also remember, that the command line died two years ago. Microsoft had a big party for it and everything. I guess its buried next to the floppy disk, printers ( paperless office), serial port, parallel port, tape backup systems, and mainframes.
I've always been impressed with descriptions of Window's technologies while they're being developed. Like it or not, Microsoft has -- and can afford to pay and retain -- some of the smartest minds in the field. I'd love to work with these guys, who seem to be open to using standards and who don't have so much FUD in their eyes or are so egotistical they can't learn from the *nixes.
The problem is that all these bright ideas go through Microsoft's "profit maximization machine" at some point and we get "embrace and extend" and other fun phonomena. I'll stop before I get back into that tired rant.
At any rate, here are two lessons learned -- by MS -- from *nixes, quoted from the article on the command line server. "Windows core technology guru Rob Short" says...
We'll be able to patch probably two thirds of the components without shutting the system down. That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible.
Later a quote on Linux:
[Question] Why is there no command line only version?
[Short's answer] We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Even if the entire OS shipped with no GUI, how much of the software you want would work with it?
It's a server platform.. Work it out.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Example:
We created the SMB file server specs, and we didn't have the fastest one around, which was embarrassing. So we took our performance team and said "your mission is to make ours twice as fast as this other one on the market."
I understand this to be the admission that Samba was faster than any SMB server MS had in the past, right? See, this is competition at work. Granted, Microsoft tried to discourage people from competing (in the SMB case, by making small changes to the protocols with each release, I believe. Correct me if I my wrong, please) but the Samba team still came out with a better product.
I expect that by this time next year the Samba team will be saying "yeah, we got a faster SMB server than the one in Windows 2003, but hey, they ASKED for it! Do you remember that S Ballmer interview?"...
They're willing to take ten YEARS to let something come to fruition; they have no problem 'waiting for fullness.'
This is a HUGE advantage that a lot of OSS people simply don't have; whoever's coding NiftyApp gets bored around version 0.64 and drops it, and meanwhile, some other guys is making GniftyApp 0.4 because he doesn't feel like working with the first guy.
On the other side of the pond, Microsoft will let something fail, and fail, and fail, tweak, twist, fix, and then they have something worth having.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Err, your company's budget must be nil then. I'm a contractor with several large companies and financial institutions as clients, and while the economy isn't exactly booming, their budgets aren't exactly busting.
.Net now. Their budget is fine. In fact, since they standardized on Windows many moons ago, the switchover to .Net was, while not trivial, still more simple than most here might expect.
One of these companies, a Fortune 500 is based entirely on
Many large companies don't want open source. They want support, they want assurance, they want compliance with existing standards. For large corporations, ditching Oracle in favor of PostgreSQL would be *extremely* costly, involving training and no small amount of anxiety on the parts of managers. The benefits would be hard to sell. Yeah, yeah, I know, user community, blah, free software, blah, blah. But you'd be surprised by how little weight these arguments carry with executives who do have budgets (and that's many), and who want to spend time furthering their projects, not accommmodating open source changeovers that they don't really understand and that, from their perspective, are only significant to technocrats-in-the-know.
Which is true. The average user doesn't give a rip if he's pulling a query from PostgreSQL or MySQL or SQL Server or Oracle, he just wants the information and then he wants to go to lunch, thank you, bye. This might not include the average *technical* user, but there are many more people out there who just want to open up Word and type their letter than bother about whether their word processor is open source and if Richard Stallman would approve of their choice of office software.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
I've been told when I've made MS support calls on Win2k server that they will generate customer-specific patches if you can demonstrate a bug.
I had a senior Cisco sales guy offer me a custom IOS load with some features unavailable to the unwashed masses. I turned that one down because it would be impossible to update.
Although I think no vendor will do feature changes or enhancements unless you're huge or its part of your support contract.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ballmer says "The fact is that if you want to do some kind of integrated innovation that touches the kernel, that touches the user interface--there is no way.", because of the way Linus controls the kernel and someone else controls the user interface.
What he doesn't point out is that if you want to do anything - *ANYTHING* - with the Windows kernel or the Windows luser interface you either have to work for the company or sign your soul to them.
And he's also plain *wrong*. If you want to change the kernel and the user interface, and ooh, lets add, integrate the filesystem into your new UI/kernel integrated innovation, you can. Just do it. You've got the source. Do it, release it, its done. Linus might not like it, and you might not be able to call it Linux, but call it 'Xinul' or something. Freedom - aaah, smell it.
Baz
Even if the entire OS shipped with no GUI, how much of the software you want would work with it?
If it's a server than LOTS of stuff. IIS, SQLServer, MSMQ, etc works just fine without a gui attached to the app. We're not talking desktop here.
Rough translation: "We have used our monopoly status to unjustly defeat competition before, even those that were forced to release their software for free. We haven't figured out how to do that to Linux."
2. "Innovation is not something that is easy to do in the kind of distributed environment that the open-source/Linux world works in."
A distributed environment of thousands of creative developers, from volunteers to huge corporate contributors like IBM and Sun can't innovate? Ballmer is confusing innovation with "buying companies that made something new and then calling it ours, and then crafting the software in a manner that insures customers continue spending money (and in greater lump sums)."
3. "Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old."
I thought Ballmer was done using that blatant untruth. It is clear that Linux is a completely different operating system then UNIX, and is developed in a completely different way, with entirely different strengths. Ballmer is still a FUD afficianado.
4. "The Linux world in some sense is a lot like the Unix world. There is not much communality. There is this distribution; there is that distribution. There is this user interface, there is that. Some people might see some advantages to that."
Ballmer still clearly doesn't understand the concept of the open source development model, is still not used to the concept of competition.
5. "If you want a fix now, we may need to perform better, but you know where to go. There is nobody to turn to if you as a (Linux) customer...."
That statement is truly laughable. Even people that are only vaguely famailar with the consistency of Windows and Linux software upgrades, patches, and hot fixes would scoff at that claim.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, that HTTP.SYS thing sounds quite similar to the TUX in kernel web server switch. Innovation? Not sure. Check out Slicker. UI research. Is the GNOME2 "less is more" philosophy innovative? ReiserFS is really doing some cool things with filing systems.
The problem with "innovation" is that it's so badly defined. Everybody operates under a different definition. So, I don't see much coming out of the computing industry as a whole that I'd class as innovative right now. There are things. Just not many.
I don't think you can make arguments about whether open source is more innovative than proprietary software. I believe innovation is a function of the individual. Sure, there are innovative environments, but for every argument I've seen saying "open source isn't innovative" there are plenty of good counter arguments.
For instance, I would disagree totally with the idea that paid employees are more innovative by definition. The corporate environment is focussed on increasing the value of the company for shareholders - if you have no need to justify profit, you can work on all kinds of things that traditionally probably wouldn't get the green light, and who cares if you fail?
There are also examples of MS innovation, I mean, really innovative stuff like some of the IE bookmarking enhancements that MSR produced a few years ago, that simply never got into the main product. The researchers attitude was, "well we send the product team a report, but we don't know if they read them or not" which stunned me. At least with open source, if somebody doesn't want to implement your innovation, you can fork.
So I haven't seen any convincing arguments that open source isn't innovative. The majority of open source probably isn't, but then the majority of stuff is not innovative, that's part of what makes innovation special and prized.
First: You don't consider Linus' control over the central repository to be the 'fascist period'? You could argue that this 'period' has never ended.
Second: the BSD license is not 'freeware'. It's a statement that the software was written to be used by the community, with a single person receiving credit for the implementation. Microsoft does not steal this code: the people who wrote it, and licensed it, know that it's possible, and probably LIKE IT THAT WAY. The developers usually know their code is being used, and should be honored. Microsoft using pieces of the BSD tcp stack? Good for them, good for the people who wrote it initially, it just verifies that it's one of the best damn TCP stacks ever written.
Finally: I'll remind you that the BSD programmer always has access to his or her own code. Microsoft improving a TCP stack doesn't remove the existing stack from the face of the earth, and it doesn't limit use of the original stack. Once Microsoft improves upon it, that's not your code. Your code is still on your disk, where it was all along.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
What about paid for technical support directly from the developers? Check pgsql.com. Very few places really need Oracle.
Read up on JBoss to see how this kind of business model is doing.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It will if they want any 3rd party programs to work on it.
Thinking about this, he seems to be accurate on one point - there hasn't been much UI innovation in the open-source community. (And after all, everyone knows that's all that matters!) There has been a lot of innovation in other areas, mostly places the user doesn't see but which improve the overall experience. Things like operating system internals, file-distribution protocols (BitTorrent), server architecture (look at Apache, and all the stuff they do!), build tools, programming languages, software packaging/installation, software frameworks, compression algorithms, file formats, system administration tools... And that's just off the top of my head.
There's definitely room for improvement. Look at the noises coming out from Microsoft about their next-generation database filesystem. Coders who are interested in filesystems should be looking at that and thinking "how can this be done better?" Or .Net - instead of marching to Microsoft's drum, "we" should be asking "how can we do this better?" And there's always the UI and graphics infrastructure issue...
One problem is that a lot of OSS projects (UI ones, mostly) have moved away from the Unix philosophy: small, simple, dedicated programs that do a job well and can be connected with simple tools to perform complex tasks. Sure, you can feed data from one program into another with modern GUIs, but it typically requires a lot of user intervention and the programs are usually monolithic blobs of functionality. Find a way to escape from that limitation, and develop a graphical equivalent to pipes and I/O redirection, and you'll have some real innovation.
Oh yeah, and there's one little open-source innovation he seems to be forgetting about. Its this minor, inconsequential technology that no-one cares about or uses, called "the Internet".
"...our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community"
Sorry dude, but Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf does that schtick that you're doing now MUCH better. Must be in the delivery. Keep working on it, though.
They want support, they want assurance, they want compliance with existing standards
All of which FS/OSS offers at competitve prices, which is much better deal than you can get from MS. Btw, you get no assurance with MS software -- all software licenses explicitly deny any assurance. So that's just fuzzy buzzword thinking on the part of stupid executives who don't really know wtf they're talking about.
As for support, that is purchased at competitive rates which are much better than anything you can get from MS. Furthermore, you'll get better support, precisely because there is competition. On a personal note, I get better support for free from Gentoo Forums than I get from Gateway for $300.
The benefits of using FS/OSS also scale very well, in that the more computers you use an FS/OSS product on, the more money you save, compared to using MS NT/2k/XP/2.003k. Oh yea, and there's also the fact that you don't have to worry about hundred-million dollar extortion-attempts from the BSA. These benefits -- though providing the most savings for large companies -- are extremely crucial for smaller companies.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I think you might be surprised to find that most OSS and FS developers do their work because they want to create software that fits needs. "Beating Microsoft" may or may not be a side effect.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
First, "open source community" needs to be clarified. I'm reading this as "Linux kernel, drivers, X11, Window managers, and desktop environments." In short, what repesents the OS to the user. "Open source" as a generic term is much too broad, because there are many open source projects for Windows, for example.
.net, even going for processor independence at the same time. Sure, Java and many other virtual machines have attempted this, but not at the OS level. *Relatively* speaking, this is a bigger attempt at simplification and moving into the future than what we've seen happening with Linux. And as much as I don't want to like C#, it's a spot-on design. It's like making a much enhanced version of Delphi be the standard method of developing applications, and it's going to get rid of all the confusion about MFC, Visual Basic-specific forms, and so on. From a language design viewpoint, C# is more solid and pragmatic than Java.
Back to the topic. Linux innovation hasn't been innovation as much as just getting things to a usable point. KDE has finally gotten very nice, where it's as comfortable to use as Windows 2000. There are finally better drivers for doing things 3D. There are some promising web browser projects that are moving away from the mess that Mozilla has become. But this is not innovation. This is simply what users expect.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been more daring. They're attempting break free of the Win32 legacy with
For unknown reasons, Linux seems to attract conservative thinkers. Any time replacing X11 comes up, there will be vehement advocates insisting that It Is The Way and that we shouldn't replace something that works. And so it goes. Twenty years from now we'll still be using X11.
Very close to nil. Our problem is that this is reality. We've dumped a lot of money in the past two years into MS products and training, only to see we need to continue to spend more money. We're a development shop, generally we could care less about users of Office, etc., (though my first retrieve from an SQL DB and export as XML was less than impressive in the way Excel understood it, hmm) We develop apps to run in a browser, pretty much any browser. They run on the server. Some servers are NT4 others 2000, yet to get an XP server up, but with luck that should be soon.
Our challenge is to support our current customers and grow our product line (a common theme, no?) Often we're stuck because Microsoft doesn't actually provide support for some ODBC driver, yet the damn thing shows up just fine, tables and schema, in Visual Studio .NET, I've researched it about as far as I can go, some company will sell us support, but again we don't have money. If I had the c code to this mess I'd pick a similar driver, find what's missing, code the support in and off we'd go, but sorry, you don't get source with your O/S. It's like trying to swim with your shoes on.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most people want an OS that meets their needs and does that in a predicatable fashion.
This innovation stuff microsoft constantly throw at us is the stuff that Microsofties bang on about, but that no one uses in production for 5 years because "it'll be much faster/more stable/etc/etc in the next version" (ie - great idea, shit implimentation).
Alex
I agree with your overall point, but not everything you said. If we are speaking purely about innovation, then I think that open-source can be quite innovative. EROS works towards an orthagonally-persistant server operating system. Squeak is doing a tremendous amount of multimedia work and research on how to make programming literally simple enough for kids. HURD actually does a very nice job improving on the whole idea of Unix, if you study how it would be used in an ideal world. ReiserFS 4 could be a true revolution in file-system design by assigning no penalty to having millions of extremely small files. Although all of these projects leverage existing technologies, all of them want to take those technologies to what, at least in my opinion, are clearly innovative directions. Perhaps they are not always revolutions, but they are certainly radical evolution.
The problem is that there is that the open-source community never quite manages to turn any of these ideas into actual, practical products. Most people haven't heard of EROS or Squeak. HURD sits perpetually half-finished on a horrible microkernel that it should have left years ago, and efforts to move it to L4 have stalled. When ReiserFS gets here, it will likely be years, if ever, before Linux actually takes advantage of its filesystem approach and obsoletes a million text files. Open-source frequently even has trouble matching truly innovative ideas that do make it main-stream elsewhere. There is, as far as I know, no real open-source equivalent to the QuickTime multimedia architecture (not talking about the movie format; I'm talking about the API) (Mac System 7), Quartz (OS X) or QuickDraw GX (Sytem 7.5), OpenDoc (OS/2 Warp), V-Twin content searching (Mac OS 8.1), live queries (BeOS), register-based virtual machines (Tao Group; in open-source defense, Parrot is indeed a register-based virtual machine, although still lightyears behind Tao's 1993 design)... I could go on, but you get the point.
There are, I think, two reasons for these shortcomings. First, open-source seems incredibly forcused on replacing existing solutions. If that's going to be your focus, then you don't have room to be innovative; compatibility is all that matters, and compatibility inherently means that your innovation options are limited. You can't throw out X11, Unix permissions and configuration files, and classic GUI programming if you want to replace a Sun box verbaitim. That requires gusto and the confidence to say, "I'm going to do that very differently, but this way is better." So why doesn't the open-source community do that? Because it's hard to get a large number of developers willing to spend time on something so radical when they don't have any marketing. Getting out a new paradigm is hard. People get set in their ways. Selling someone on the idea that applications are an obsolete metaphor, or that instead of using a database package, they should use the filesystem directly, can take years, and because open-source developers work as a hobby, they figure that if no one will use their idea anyway, there's never any incentive to polish off those innovative ideas to the point where they're usable. Hence a chicken-and-egg problem built into the system. The best you can hope for are minor improvements on existing ideas, ad nauseum.
Open-source can be innovative. It's just implementing those ideas that trips things up.
Oh come on. The GPL is about as close to communism as you can get in the software world.
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but you have to give back any changes to the community".
I want to requalify that slightly because the community isn't necessarily why some one licenses their code with the GPL (except RMS, maybe).
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but if you are going to distribute it make sure I can get your changes too."
This is how some one writing GPL software gets economic benefit from the software by receiving the benefit of programming by those who use his programming.
Note, if you modify GPL software and never distribute it, your changes never have to be revealed. Although there is benefit to revealing those changes in order that you don't have to keep adding them in when some one else makes a change that you want.
Commnity tends to develop from this as a means of preventing anarchy and excessive forking.
Dastardly
Not good enough.
For who?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
And they can fsck themselves, because I never ASKED them to look at us (or me in particular) as a competitor to Microsoft. I (and many others like me) write code 'cause it's fun, because we can fill a niche, or because we just need to scratch some itch we have. Taking down the Microsoft was never a primary goal...
Frankly, with all this poiticization of "Open Source", I feel a strong desire to distance myself from this "movement". I much prefer the days when Linux was just Linux and people used it 'cause it was useful, not for some ridiculous philosophical or political reasons.
All of which FS/OSS offers at competitve prices, which is much better deal than you can get from MS. Btw, you get no assurance with MS software -- all software licenses explicitly deny any assurance. So that's just fuzzy buzzword thinking on the part of stupid executives who don't really know wtf they're talking about.
Sorry, but what assurances does open source give you? And you are wrong. Go look at some Oracle assurances. If you lose data at the fault of Oracle, you get assurances for free retrieval, as well as different packages to get paid for data loss. Lets see Postgres offer that.
On a personal note, I get better support for free from Gentoo Forums than I get from Gateway for $300.
Enterprise != Personal systems. Most slashdotters don't realize this. Your $300 sale from Gateway doesn't mean shit. A $3M sale, does. They don't give a shit about you. Deal with it.
The benefits of using FS/OSS also scale very well, in that the more computers you use an FS/OSS product on, the more money you save, compared to using MS NT/2k/XP/2.003k. Oh yea, and there's also the fact that you don't have to worry about hundred-million dollar extortion-attempts from the BSA. These benefits -- though providing the most savings for large companies -- are extremely crucial for smaller companies.
Lets see some open source clusters, then. True enterprise level clusters, like what Sun provides. Oh wait, that's right, you can't. What about SAN support? Oops, something else open source doesn't do. You really need to get out into the real enterprise world. It must be nice to be so ideological to just ignore reality... I wish I could do that.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Hey! Mr. Ballsmear is saying dirty things about how the community that creates Linux is not innovative. Of course, we will overlook the extensive use of BSD code within Windows, or the fact that they can't come up with better authentication and security mechanisms than kerberos.
Sometimes businesses don't want innovation. They want stability,clear upgrade paths, and last but not least, security. My boss still uses CMD.exe to do most of his work, even though he's running windows 2000. Most of the guys here can code in Linux as well as in Windows, the environment really doesn't matter... as long as we've got a text editor and a debugger.
If it works, it's good. If it's got newfangled features that break every now and then or open new holes to someone who likes to break things, then we don't want it.
Now, windows 2003 does have some very interesting and great features. I can't say that they are innovative, because an HTTP listener exists in the Linux kernel, because a separate process VM running an application server has been done, because IL compilers have been made in academic environments...
Nothing that MS does is innovative, to tell the truth. They use stuff that other people have developed, and give it a candy-coated shell to make it palatable. That's the crux of it. I can't believe that Steve is lying outright right here. Someone should cut out his tongue or something... he really doesn't make MS look "good" to IT companies.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Good manager does not assume that if his particular choice of employees ended up with a single support person capable of administering Linux, he has anything to say about Linux. In this particular situation the solution is to fire 9 Windows-only support people and hire 1-2 better ones that can support multiple systems (and pay them better, too). Instant improvement.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
RedHat invariably does silly things like fail to initialize a network card, and lemme tell you, in a networked environment this is a not so good thing.
RedHat and other mainstream userfriendly distributions have the pieces lined up, but they're not there yet as many MANY people will tell you.
Windows may crash and it may be unrighteous and all that good stuff we like to tell ourselves, but it behaves in a consistent manner on supported hardware, it has a list of supported hardware, a huge list of third party software titles, and it just works by brainlessly clicking things.
You still can't do this even in RedHat 9. You risk breaking KDE, or GNOME, or whichever desktop you chose during the install, because they themselves are also fragile. I can't tell you the number of bugs I've run into with either environment which completely corrupt a new user's preferences.
Then what are they left with? Oh yeah, a STOCK GNOME desktop! D'oh.
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
Actually, OSS is very much based on capitalism in it's truest sense. Capitalism is based on the inalienable right of ownership. If you contribute to the kernel, you own your contribution and nobody can take that away from you. There are rules dictating what you can DO with your contribution but you are still very much it's owner.
By contrast, communism is based on the lack of ownership. The BSD license is a borderline example of this since it makes it very easy for someone to revoke your right of ownership with even the slightest modification to the source code.
On the other hand, Microsoft is a good example of fascism since you never own but rather license their software under their strict terms. Your are forbidden from doing anything with their software without their express consent.
There's your politics lesson for the day, now go troll elsewhere.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Name an application or feature on Windows that is "truly innovative".
he other large areas of development (KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, the kernel) are simply trying to catch up to existing commercial software (Windows, IE, Solaris/BSD).
Much of Solaris and BSD are based on open source. Windows uses a lot of open source code (networking, etc.). IE was based on open source software. Commercial software keeps copying original research, often released in open source form. Then, a generation later, open source software takes some tweaks from the commercial software and is accused of "catching up".
Of course, commercial entities can throw huge amounts of money at software development and push out stuff really fast when they have to. Open source development can be very slow in comparison. But with very few exceptions, the commercial software companies are not where the innovation happens. Neither Microsoft nor, for that matter, Apple, have invented much of anything in their corporate history. They have mostly been good at taking research results and turning them into products, sometimes well (Apple), sometimes not so well (Microsoft).
Well Steve, considering that Windows/Office can generally make up about 50% of the PC's price...you're right. They haven't budged at at all.
Pretty amazing what a monopoly can let you do eh?
-brain
You know, Ballmer is right about innovation. He is miscasting Linux as ancient and wrong to criticize it because it is old. But he may be technically right about innovation, as M$ has really done a lot to make machines accessible to the common user.
When the anti-trust suit was getting going, I was forced to think about what Microsoft has done for the technical community. I was taken back to that time, about 10 - 15 years ago, when harware was hard to install and software was even tougher.
The fact that software developers have been able to standardize around a common OS and hardware architecture is a good thing. There is a lot less praying involved that the thing you are spending your money on has been tested in an environment similar to your own and will work.
Think about it: would there be a NVidia or an ATI if average users out there had no demand for their product? Would there be demand for their cards if people thought they would have to pay someone $100 an hour to install them? Would there be games written for them if no one had them? I know this is bordering on the absurd, but that works to my point: without Windows, there would be a lot of things we would not have these days. Someone else probably would have stepped up to fill in the void, but if we had a huge number of OSes and platforms out there all with large consumer bases, it is hard to imagine most companies building out the kinds of products we see today.
I give M$ credit for providing a product to accomplish this standardization.
And I prepare to be flamed.
M
There is nobody to turn to if you as a (Linux) customer says, 'I need this.' You can't turn to IBM. They don't write the thing. It's not like IBM can support Linux the way they support the mainframe operating system. They don't write the code for it.
Of course, because they need access to the source code before they would be able to do any improvements... :-P
Sig ?
Open source software has a much longer history than 20 years. Software, in a sense, started out open source as hardware companies didn't view it as being very valuable.
I think it may be fair to say that there's been more technical innovation from Microsoft.
And what would that "technical innovation" be? Just about every single product category, UI idea, feature, or technology Microsoft is using and touting was invented elsewhere: the GUI, the spreadsheet, WYSIWYG word processing, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, databases, networking, web browsing, etc.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but they *have* introduced some real innovations. Cheap, shared-SCSI-bus clustering comes to mind,
I'm sorry, I don't get it. People have been sharing disks via disk interfaces since the 1960's. Microsoft puts a feature into their system that allows this to be done over one specific disk interface (which, not coincidentally, was actually designed to support this). Where is the innovation here? Sounds like engineering to me, driven by marketing ("hey, guys, we need to compete with the mini computers and mainframes on this disk thing").
as does Active Directory (although AD is certainly inspired by NDS).
Again, where is the innovation? We had Kerberos, YP, and NIS, and before that, we had generations of directory services on mainframes.
While Microsoft certainly followed Apple into the era of the GUI, they've made notable improvements to the GUI.
Like what?
There are others, of course;
Please keep going--you haven't named one yet.
only the most rabid anti-MS zealot could claim that they've *never* done *anything* innovative.
Oh, I'm sure they must have done something "innovative", but whatever it was doesn't seem to be related to their bottom line or have had much of an impact on their products.
"Innovation" is coming up with something new and useful. None of these things you have listed qualifty as either; they have been done to death, and Microsoft is just catching up 20 years later.
I said "relatively speaking," and I even emphasized *relatively*. Microsoft is using new spins on old inventions to benefit the user. "Benefit" is the key. Arguing that X11 was a great architecture for 1985 does not benefit the user.
Perhaps, perhaps not. We see the fact that people do not comprehend the reasons for X and its design, and rather look to things like having transparent windows as a more useful "feature" than network transparency.
A perfect example. X11's key design feature is something that does not apply 99% of the time. It was a total and utter mistake from the days of many users connected to one mainframe or minicomputer. It is a non-issue for desktop use. Microsoft and Apple understand this. You design for the common case.
I think this sums up what MS is thinking. It seems very clear to me from reading the interview that they don't see Linux as that big a threat, or at least anything serious. We know that they are running scared in some areas, but untill they can admit to themselves what Linux really is and what it's going to do to them if they don't change, they are in trouble. Good thing they have a few billion in cash to burn while they try to figure out which way is up.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Exactly, Microsoft is a mature company that is not likely to experience the astronomical growth that they have had in the past. There's nothing wrong with that, Microsoft makes a big fat pile of money.
Unfortunately, Microsoft employees aren't really focused on Microsoft's business, but rather they are focused on the MSFT stock price. You see, a great deal of their personal wealth is wrapped up Microsoft stock, and they want to see that stock go up. To Microsoft management and employees the idea that Microsoft is not a growth company is the highest form of blasphemy. You see, their Price/Earnings ratio still has them pegged as a growth company. If the market decides that Microsoft has stopped growing, then their stock price will drop so that their P/E ratio is much closer to 10.
Microsoft could kill Linux tomorrow simply by dropping their prices. Microsoft has profit margin to give. However, this would almost certainly trigger a market realization that Microsoft is done growing. To most Microsofties this would be the kiss of death for their own personal finances, and it would put a serious crimp in Microsoft's business plan. After all, Microsoft makes a great deal of money investing in their own stock, and they also use MSFT stock as a primary motivator for their employees.
Use the Operating System that fit your needs. .. who cares as long as I have a job and can support my family.
.. I am a *REALLY* competent Unix techie ... I don't like Windows but I don't hate it either. The company I work for have all sorts of different OS:es .. Linux, Unix, Windows, OS/400, MVS, OpenVMS ... hell they got everything..
Linux here Windows there
I am getting tired of all this Microsoft versus Linux discussions.
I am a Unix techie
The thing is to integrate all of these platforms and make em work together, THAT is what matters.
I really HAD another userid
Open Source is, as the parent poster points out, close to ideal communism.
Under what rationale? Open source is as close as you can get to pure capitalism. Remember, all capitalism entails is a lack of central authority governing production. Those who create most open source software projects do it not out of altruism, but because they receive something valuable in return, which is often an aspect that is neglected by the average onlooker.
When someone creates a project, they do it out of a desire for certain functionality. They feel, however, that it is more than a fair tradeoff to relinquish much of the central control offered by copyrights in order to attain the far better quality, innovation, and speed at which open source software is developed. Other beneficial factors involve credit for work and experience. Many open source projects are started when somebody wants to learn about a language, a certain type of program, or the hardware it runs opon. Hell, this was Linus' rationale for creating Linux in the first place.
No comment.
Just a little thing, but hey, as long as we're on the innovation kick... When exactly did IE get intgrated pop-up blocking? Oh yeah, it didn't. It's probably a 10-lines of code fix, and coulr be rolled out with any of the fifty IE patches that have come out since Mozilla had it standard... but not there. Why not? Well, innovation for Microsoft means innovation that somehow benifits Microsoft directly, while innovation in the OSS community means innovation that helps the "customers".
Every time I see people dismiss the X client/server model I have to laugh.
Laugh away. That doesn't change the fact that 99% of all desktop usage under Linux and 99.999% under Windows use a display directly connected to the PC.
"Windows Terminal Server" is the correct solution. You design for the common case, you do extra work for the odd case. Period. I know you'll dismiss this, I really do. And that's fine.
I agree that MS is capable of pumping a large amount of cash and labor into any project they set their minds to. And yes, they've made (in some cases) significant improvements to software that was designed by others or created their own, sometimes improved, versions of some software. (Though some would argue that they do this in order to destroy competitors that don't want to sell out to Redmond.)
But they rarely, if ever, come up with any NEW ideas. In the sense that Ballmer used "Innovative", MS doesn't fit the description any better than OSS does. Both use concepts that are largely derivative but embellished.
I'll draw a parallel that may be a bit flameworthy here: Asian Automobiles in the 70's and early 80's were mostly not innovative at all. They used very available technology, very derivative designs, cheaper components, and so forth. But they improved their process, which, coupled with lower labor and materials costs, allowed them to sell cheaper. The cars weren't better, they mostly didn't do anything new, they simply exploited what was already available and made it CHEAP. So their innovation was in marketting, not in engineering. I think the same is true with MS. They're not really innovators, they're just good marketers who have a dominant mind-share.
As for OS/2, I'll be the first to say that IBM dropped the ball big time. It could have been great, but Gerstner didn't want to put the time and money into marketting it. The technology was superior in most respects to anything MS had to offer, but once again, MS had a hold on mindshare and aggressively protected that hold through marketting and aggressive BUSINESS tactics. They certainly didn't win on the basis of product quality, robustness, etc.
OS/2 Warp 4 was every bit as easy to install as a Win9x release, had every feature that a Win 9x box had, and was generally less likely to crash than 9x at that time. But it was too little too late, and IBM never put a tenth as much into advertising it as MS did with Windows. The whole picture of things could have been changed by IBm making some aggressive marketting stances and taking some risk, but Gerstner wouldn't have it. In marketting, not technology, did OS/2 die.
As far as OS/2's technology goes, Microsoft benefitted, during their partnership with IBM, by access to a lot of IBM's technology. NT would probably have taken longer to come out, and may not have had some of its strengths without Microsoft's access to IBM's engineering.
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.