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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.
The customers can't tell the difference between the multiple applications being worked on by Linux developers. They can tell that Windows 2003 has all they need, with an easy point and click interface, without semi-redundant applications. The Comp-Sci department at my college desperately wanted to run our server off Linux, but after we installed it there was just too many choices.23 web servers: OK, I can handle that. Apache. 4 media servers, none of which support Quicktime, 3 of which support low-res Real only: unusable. Very little XML support, which is important because our document retrival system is based upon it. Very buggy when uploading to Windows clients, which is very important because all of our computers run Windows, since Linux is so easy to screw up and there's no applications for imaging or like Norton's GoBack.
What open source needs to do:
1. stop focusing on programming the new hot stuff, focus on the stuff you missed in between text-editing and a 3D GUI.
2. look up the keywords of a SourceForge project you want to start on SourceForge before you start it. If there's another similar project, just missing features from your idea, work on that instead.
3. make things easy to use. have your uncle come over and try to work your program. observe what gives him trouble, fix it.
One last final point: Open source was doomed from the beginning. Yes, it's a blanket statement that sounds ridiculous. Keep reading. Open source is based on the very principles of communism: everyone works on it, everyone owns it. The very thing that led to the collapse of Communism leads to the inability of open source to become popular: workers then tend to migrate quickly, and not work hard, since they can't gain anything from working on one thing hard. So, projects die as they become less "hot" to work on. People ignore the basic fundamentals required (a decent media server), and instead work on a 3D GUI for X. God knows how you'll fix this problem. Call me if you do, that way I can start my own perfect county based on Communism.
In typical parlance this means make money go further, however in this context it means 'spend money, spend more money, keep spending money', until the budget snaps like an rubberband when its elasticity has been exceded.
Well, our budget has already snapped, like the rubberband. Funny how budgets these days aren't elastic and don't stretch. Perhaps setting up a demo MySQL or Postgres Linux server might be in order to convince the powers that be that we can get along just fine without.
BTW, I love how Steve blathers on about having a corporation behind their product. Like support from that has not pricetag. We're doing without MSDN because we can't afford that. Google is my friend. Lastly, a customer can go to Microsoft and request a feature? Really? Even one as small as us? Yeah, right. Time for a little off the end?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'd be very impressed if Microsoft actually came out with a command-line only version. The fact that "it's a very tangled subsystem" makes me wonder how possible that would be.
.NET CLI. But if they shipped an OS based on just the CLI, it couldn't very well be called "Windows," now could it?
I could see a version of Windows shipping without the GUI enabled, allowing administration only by remote desktop. But for the entire OS to ship with no GUI libraries would be very unlikely.
On the other hand, they've already done it (sort of), look at the
Mirrors:
com.com link
zdnet.co.uk link
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
So, this command line server, let me guess, the name will be MicroSoft Disk On Server V1.2?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
So just because the basic design is old, it's not "innovative?" I think this guy needs to spend more time with his programmers!
Open source is based on the very principles of communism...
But the biggest difference is that Linus isn't going to send you to N. Finland and have Alan Cox shoot you if you whine on /. about your latest/greatest kernel patch...
;)
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)))();
Yep, Microsoft has definitely made advances in way to snatch away the rights of those who use their products. Well done guys! Can't wait for palladium....
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
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.
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
'our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community'
.net "innovations" seems to have a lot in common with the stuff Novell was doing several years ago with single sign on and single vendor application development etc etc (NDS / Btreave / groupwise / wordperfect suite / ZENworks etc )
Perhaps he is commiting the cardinal sin of confusing market share and marketing speak with innovation and creativity.
As has worked for the majority of M$ innovations, they put a pretty gui on things created by others, and leave the real details to registry entries and third party plug ins.
the
In terms of innovations, Microsoft truly leads (agaist open-source). Microsoft tries to hire people with ideas, for the sole purpose of designing better interfaces and new concepts. I really, honestly, haven't seen much innovation from Linux.
I think this might have to do with the premise of open-source. OSS does not really have profit. It is easy to recreate an existing idea, because you know what you have to do and how. It is far harder to create a new idea and implement it, and your chances of success are far lower. For this reason, paid employees are more likely to try and innovate. I'm not saying Linux doesn't have anything new - just that I haven't really seen anything.
webpage
And the best part is, it's so simple to use! It has only one command: "reboot."
Forgetting RedHat, Mr. Balmer?
Yeah... NT was created about 10 years ago which was a clone of Windows which was created in 1981 and was derived from DOS which was stolen from QDOS.
I hate Balmer.
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
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".
If you compare the 20+ year history of Microsoft to the much younger open source movement, I think it may be fair to say that there's been more technical innovation from Microsoft. Of course, the whole open source model is quite an innovation in and of itself.
The first 5 years or so of Linux were mainly focused on replicating funcationality that already existed in non-free Unix OSes. Likewise with the apps. It's only in the past year or two that we're starting to see a good deal of innovation in the form of apps that aren't just clones of non-open-source apps.
Open source is starting to really move, and we're starting to see some truly novel apps and innovations, but I think it's completely understandable that the first decade or so of open source was devoted to bootstrapping our tech to be equal to or better than closed source stuff.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but they *have* introduced some real innovations. Cheap, shared-SCSI-bus clustering comes to mind, as does Active Directory (although AD is certainly inspired by NDS). While Microsoft certainly followed Apple into the era of the GUI, they've made notable improvements to the GUI. There are others, of course; only the most rabid anti-MS zealot could claim that they've *never* done *anything* innovative.
Of course, it says something about Microsoft's insecurity that Ballmer is playing the "Historically, we've done more than open source." Open source is still snowballing -- if Microsoft had a new closed-source competitor that was starting to gain market share, everyone would laugh at marketing material that said "Historically, we've done more than this new competitor."
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Because direct implementation would require a complete rewrite of the codebase, anyone suspecting that the command lines you type will actually move a cursor and click on GUI elements internally, just without video output?
Then in response to the XBox,
Remember, we brought Windows 1 out in 1983...
I love interviews with Balmer.
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.
anyone notice in the bottom link that in 2003 that the listener portion of IIS was moved into the kernel?
Am I the only one that that strikes as a poor idea?
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?"...
We created tools that run across the code and understand almost all the attacks. Microsoft Research built a tool that can find almost all the buffer overflow problems
Yeah, that tool is called "a non-firewalled internet connection."
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.
There are no Linux infidels is in any of the data centers, some of them. They are not within 100 miles. This is an illusion. They are trying to sell people on an illusion.
They tried to bring a small number of web and print servers through the backdoor but they were surrounded and most of their infidels had their links cut.
I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide under the walls of Redmond. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly.
You can go and visit those places. Nothing there, nothing at all. There are DRM checkpoints. Evrything is okay.
NIH = Not Invented Here.
/. joke, Microsoft is dying, being swallowed by their own need to swallow everything.
This myopic view of their business model:
1) Prevents Microsoft from embracing (in the traditional sense, not in how we usually think of MS doing with this concept) the point that UNIX operating systems are tried and true technology, given that they HAVE been around for a very long time in computer years.
2) Prevents Microsoft from generating products that sell to users of UNIX families (Microsoft Office X for Mac OS X is the only UNIX family product I am aware of), and, as a result, generating additional revenues.
3) Leaves Microsoft in a sacrificial lamb situation when businesses have to look at the bottom line in a tech solution where a competing *NIX product simply does the same task for less money or less complex or proprietary technologies and with less licensing hassles.
Microsoft has beaten the dead horse of The Operating System as the Hub of All You Do paradigm for too long now. Operating systems are still important but now revolve around two camps: Microsoft Windows technology, and *NIX technologies (BSD, Sun, Mac OS X, Linux and its many distros, et al.). What many businesses now need revolves less on what you run your apps on, but the apps themselves.
I see Microsoft losing more revenue due to their licensing model, which still presumes that it's the 1990's and money is everyone. Businesses are finding it hard to justify yearly OS or application suite upgrades. IT managers are just moving to Windows 2000 Server right now, and aren't going to figure in Windows 2003 Server anytime soon.
Meanwhile, many *NIX operating systems are free or lower cost than a Microsoft solution, and does much of the same, if not more. Further, Microsoft tends to develop their software proprietarily, so that third-parties can rarely adapt an MS product to their own product.
Such attitudes killed many a computer company. Usually people think of Apple when pondering NIH, but even Apple is far from those days, with their BSD hybrid OS, stock industry standard ports and protocols, yadda, yadda, yadda.
To use an overused
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I will no longer be performing the monkey dance," said a sweaty, flatulent Steve Ballmer on Friday morning to a confused crowd at a Redmond Dunkin' Donuts. "I have decided to adopt the 'Iraqi Two-Step' as my favorite mode of expressing my inner funkitude." He then proceeded to bounce up and down, slap his chest and slice his head with a small sword.
"It his outer funk that worries me," said Randy Jarvis, a FedEx deliveryman who stopped a moment to watch the early morning spectacle. He held his nose against the olfactorius assault. "Geez, my eyes are watering. Does this count as a chemical weapon? Will I need to be decontaminated?"
Neither Geroge Clinton nor Tarik Aziz could not be reached for comment.
PS: I love how he said, "This is an interesting time." You think he knows that's a curse in many cultures?
--- Ban humanity.
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
"A lot of the tools depend on having the graphical interface. Printing, for example, requires all the graphics subsystems because we have the "what you see is what you get" model. You need to have the whole of the display stuff to render it. It's a very tangled subsystem."
:)
So tangled that this makes no sense. Printing is a really dumb example, Steve. No one needs WYSIWYG on their print server!
For example, Microsoft was notified of the issues, concerning only Microsoft implementation of its JVM, on September 2nd 2002 and after SEVEN MONTHS on April 9th 2003, Microsoft have issued an update to fix the problem.
Such a delay with such a serious vulnerability is so abysmal that it borders on the absurd.
Quality and security are measures which only mean something when compared relatively to another.
There is no absolutely secure, therefore you must expect, that once a vulnerability is made known to the vendor, the vendor should do their utmost to close the Window of Exposure ( http://www.counterpane.com/window.html ) as soon as possible.
For example, with the lastest SAMBA vulnerability, once notified, the SAMBA developer owned up to the mistake and the SAMBA project released a patch within 48 hours. Within aother 24hrs, redhat had already backported the patch into their distributions RPMs. Similarly any major security issues in Mozilla and Netscape browser are also fixed and updateable within a couple of days
Meanwhile, there are currently 13 KNOWN unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer ( http://www.pivx.com/larholm/unpatched/ ).
Some DANGEROUSLY EXPLOITABLE had not been fixed in over a year ( http://security.greymagic.com/adv/gm002-ie/ ). That Microsoft has not rewritten the scripting system embedded with IE so that it is sandboxed by default is bad enough, but to have such major unpatched vulnerabilities exposed for months is abysmal.
Other inherent vulnerabilities, such as the Shatter attack ( http://security.tombom.co.uk/moreshatter.html ), Microsoft has known about since 1994!
Even if the API/call flaw is inherently unfixable, that is plenty of time for Microsoft to implement a safer methord/systemcall/API, adapt it's own applications to use the safer methord and depreciate the unsafe API.
It also appears that Microsoft 's own implementation of SMB is vulnerable and Microsoft has known about it for over eight years ( http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=599 60&cid=5681769 ), but Microsoft either choose not to, or cannot fix the problem themselves.
Microsoft is clearly not closing the vulnerabilities they are aware that exist in their products and services.
A year after after Bill Gate's Email promoting securtiy over functionality, Microsoft by choice, remains neither secure or trustworthy.
Microsoft's attitude towards the security of it's products, service and customers is abysmal.
From Jason Coombs' A response to Bruce Schneier on MS patch management and Sapphire ( http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/315158 )
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.
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.
20+ years old hrm, Windows 1.0 was released on November 10, 1983, making windows just 6.5 months short of being 20 years old.
Of course, the internals are totally different now, but then so are the internals of Linux to the original UNIX code...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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".
Basically, I realize I am not an IT department, and the company I have purchasing influence at wouldn't even qualify as a wart on the ass of a company MS cares about, but hear me out:
:)
The Licensing bit is really all that matters to me. I don't 'license' software, I don't 'license' any media. I buy it.
I refuse to accept the legitimacy of EULAs or any other licensing terms. Because of this I will ignore them when I have to until I am forced to otherwise.
Since I think its ridiculus to buy a product and then post-purchase agree to terms that are restricting I try to avoid it at all costs. In the few cases that I don't I'll use the software as I see fit and wait for a court to force me to do otherwise.
This is why I like the GPL. This is why I use the GPL. No one is asked to accept a license agreement, regardless of its validity, unless they want to do things that require extra permissions. Simple easy to remember concept, basically "I can do whatever I like and consult the GPL when common sense tells me I need to"
I know what you thinking, that this "common sense" isn't common, that I should accept licensing terms for all uses of all media. I contest that its an obvious boundary from running Visual FoxPro (or whatever) on any hardware/software combo I see fit, to giving away copies to other people. This boundary IS common sense in my view, and an added bonus of the GPL is that in dealing with this extra rights it wont let someone curtail future uses with a changed license (again regardless of the legitimacy of said license).
This doesn't even touch on the available source issue, which, while I personally have only used the source from a small percentage of the software I use, gives an added security knowing that in all likely-hood at least a few other people have glanced at the authors code and not publicly complaigned
So to sum it up, I don't agree to the legitimacy of licenses tacked on to products I purchase. Because of this I will A) Aviod having to use products with them, B) Ignore them where I see fit in a minor act of 'civil disobediance' - not to be confused with violating any common sense applications of so called 'copyright'
"...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.
I've been various non-MS OSs for 20 years, and running a Linux-only cybercafe for 18 months. I installed my first Windows server last week. W2K Server (yeah yeah, I know, it took me 6 months to get round to installing it...).
I haven't seen anything radically innovative yet, but then I'm not sure that there is much radically innovative about Linux either. But I have had a few surprises:
Doing everything with the mouse is driving me mad, but I expect I could get used to it. I don't see me ditching Linux as a result of the experiment, but some sites, especially chat ones, run ten times faster than with Linux on equivalent hardware, and don't keep hanging.
All of which is to say that I have now met with the enemy, and it doesn't seem quite as bad as the anti-MS propaganda suggests, and even has a few endearing features...
Virtually serving coffee
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.
You can patch a file in use on UNIX without shutting down because you can delete an open file and the applications will still be able to map/read/write to that inode, which will magically disappear when the last application closes it.
Example:
Symlinks are cool, and it would have been nice if Microsoft implemented Shortcuts at the file system level, but they aren't what save us from rebooting.
putting the full-stop *before* NET.
WTF is Ballmer on. 4 years ago i paid $2500 for a P2 system. I can get a PIV, or Athlon XP system for less than $1000 now. How the hell can he tell me that prices havn't gone down? What about Walmart's PCs. Cheapest things I've ever seen.
(CDN funds btw)
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.
...and dang, it was decent money but I just despised it. All the uber leet sales guys talked just like this Ballmer guy, whatever they are selling, it gets to be so "cultish" they can't see the forest for the trees sometimes. Their manure has no odor and the other guy's is covered with flies.
I think when you get to the point you are as brainwashed as this guy that you need serious therapy. He may be a billionaire,but it doesn't mean he isn't rubber room crazy.
He's desperate, suffering from paranoid delusions of grandeur and megalomania, you can tell that from his sentence structure and tone, let alone the words.
What I got out of this interview is that microsoft has seen the light and is now seriously running scared. It didn't seem like it before to me, but now I can see it. They won't intellectually admit it, but their actions speak otherwise, it's like someone living in a high crime ghetto and not moving when deep down they know they should, but thinking they will be safer with another lock on the door, when they already have 5 of them installed. The race is still on, but they are dragging butt now. They are having to resort to tricks like lobbying to make open source illegal, or get countries and corporations and governments to not even look at it. That's a serious desperation move. It wouldn't even be attempted by them if they weren't scared, and I mean scared.
Even his demonization attempts are transparent, using the obvious buzzword "communism" sure to get the appropriate knee jerk reaction from jerks who allow their knees to get thwacked.That word was carefully picked, no other word like that strikes fear into any CEO, no way does he want his golf buddies to even *think* he might have once even read it. I bet microsoft sales people use that word constantly in all their raps now, probably under orders. Bet one dollah on that. I'm surprised he didn't just say "terrorism", seems to be the new 1337 speak from scandal plagued politicians and CEO's when they want to quick change the subject.
People talk about open source being a "cult"....well, if you want to see cult like behavior, re-read that article. That's a serious dangerous cult true believer, absolutely no doubt of that. Makes the next ayatollah or TV preacher look like an atheist.
Free and Open source is the BEST idea to come down the computer pike EVER. Can it get better? Sure! Is it perfect? No! I doubt you'd see many proponents say that. Does it kick butt on closed source, and is it catching up fast in most areas, and will it over take it and change paradigms? Yes,yes it will, unless it's actually made *illegal* by these rich cultists using bribes and threats and buying governments and mandating what is in essence "microsoft solutions" and disguising it as "security" and "trusted"..
The net and computers and IT are not about one company being the dominant player for ever and ever, that has NEVER worked in any other industry ever invented by mankind, and so far, what they have done just goes to show that that universal principle still holds true.
Rome never appeared stronger until right before it collapsed, when they so much believed their own hype they couldn't see "heathen" reality staring at them. They even resorted to the same sort of demonization efforts.
It's too bad to see what happens to people once pure raw greed takes over their lives, and becomes in essence their religion.
I am certainly way down the list on slashdot for "yearly income", but tell ya what, I would not trade my life for this ballmer guy's, despite his power and money. There's more to life than greed, too bad he never learned that lesson when he was a kid. And greed coupled with insanity? I feel sorry for him in a way. Not a lot, but some.
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
Because I see two different media servers available for Linux- one costs money out the wazoo, the other costs nothing.
Darwin Streaming Server which supports QuickTime, MPEG4, and MP3 streaming.
RealNetworks Server which has supported Linux for some time, supports all Real media formats, MPEG4, etc.
In the case of the RealNetworks server, they have a free version that's crippled to 1Mbit bandwidth.
Now, it depends on when you tried this. If it was within the past few years, Darwin's streaming server has been available during that time. If it was before that, I can't understand as RealNetworks HAD a streaming server. Oh, I've figured it out, you wanted something that was "free". Sorry, the only free, uncrippled stuff as in "free beer" stuff has only shown up on the scene fairly recently.
If you did this in fairly recent times, all I can say is that you didn't try very hard. If you did this a while back, I will say that you pay for bandwidth capacity (and proportionately the same) in the case of RealNetworks' server and Microsoft's- and that there's really only players for Microsoft's on Windows. If you use the MS streaming server, forget supporting MacOS and Linux machines.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Also: Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
So to sum this up: Balmer is going to demonstrate the innovative advantage of his company by producing a "command line interface". How could a command line interface be made work on a computer? What might it possibly look like? If we in the linux community do not want to be completely left behind, we'd better get together and figure out how we could possibly come up with such an interface and somehow integrate it into the OS. Time for some serious hacking! Stick it to the man!!
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Wouldn't it be funny if he had then said:
Then we're going to go totally nuts, plug in the network cable and run something on it. Oh shit, I wasn't talking out loud just now, was I?
Sigs are bad for your health.
our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community
That's certainly true. They have come up with far more innovative ways to introduce fatal security holes, integrate flawed and overly restrictive DRM into their products, and come out with countless patches and service packs that sometimes even break basic system functionality. On top of that, M$ continues to complain that the very existence of open source might actually force them to improve their products! Sorry about that Bill, we obviously miscalculated what a burden we were placing on you. Please let us know what we can do to help your business stay the way it is and keep pissing off your users.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
According to this news story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (the local Seattle paper, the Seattle Times is for the suburbanites), Microsoft is in severe danger of losing their shorts to Linux with their release of Windows 2003.
...
Maybe Paul Allen was right in diversifying out of Microsoft stock
> --- All Of The Above --- >
"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. (Java was hardly the first VM. And yes, other VMs have attempted this at the OS level, including Java, and even non-VMs, like Lisp.) "Catching up" and "doing things you haven't seen from us before" seems to be the MS definition of "innovation," but it's not the well-accepted one.
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. Standards like X and OpenGL are misunderstood; there are mechanisms for extending them with the fancy new features. There is no need to replace them, particularly with poorly-thought-out designs by people who don't truly understand windowing systems.
People who do understand them realize it's a lot easier to extend X than implement a new system. ;-)
It's better to stick with X than be subjected to an inferior attempt at a windowing system.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Keep in mind that Ballmer holds a Senior Management position at Microsoft, and that everything that's being said from the top level PHBs has to be translated first (top level management lives in a different universe, and possibly in a whole different dimension as the rest of us). Since my job at $BIG_CORP unfortunately involves contact with higher management levels, I can offer you the following helpful translation of some of Mr. Ballmer's quotes. This is not Microsoft-specific BTW, we just dissected a message from the CEO of our employer today and it wasn't any better.
Quote: "I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition."
Translation: "It's a big fat blimp on our threat radar. We're out to fry their asses before they get ours."
Quote: "On the other hand, in terms of putting a clear, simple proposition in front of the customer, I think we have a leading edge proposition."
Translation:"We'll make them an offer they can't refuse."
Quote: "I do think there are things that people don't understand very well about the new alternative, where it is important for us to help customers understand the issues."
Translation: "Our FUD tactics worked well in the past and I don't see why they shouldn't work as well in the future."
Quote: "[...] some people are choosing Linux. I don't think that is going to continue to be the case."
Translation: "Yeah, we're pretty scared about customers considering a switch and haven't really figured out how to counter that threat yet, but why admit it?."
Quote: "If the lead developer for this component chooses to do something else with his life, who will carry on the mantle for that?"
Ballmer's thoughts: "Let's hope the interviewer doesn't ask what happens if we decide to discontinue a product."
Quote: "There are still challenges in parts of Asia. We have seen improvements in Latin America."
Translation: "In Asia, they steal our software like there's no tomorrow. Latin America isn't really much better."
Quote: "By hook or by crook, so to speak, there will be 5-plus million servers, roughly, sold in the next 12 months."
Translation: "If this server consolidation thingy that's been going on lately is just a fad, we'll be doing fine. Otherwise, well..."
Quote: "everybody likes to talk about Google, which is fine. They are doing a good job as a company. But for traffic, Yahoo is doing quite well and we are doing quite well."
Translation: "Google is kicking our collective pasty white rumps so hard you woldn't believe it. Let's just hope they go public so we can buy them out."
Quote: "No, I don't anticipate making a change of that ilk [Licensing 6] in the foreseeable future."
Translation: "Our vendor-lock-in strategy worked, and now we have them by the balls."
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Classic Mac OS also had a CLI available that ran on top of their GUI, actually. It came with MPW, or the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, and is still available from the Apple Developer's area. My understanding is that Amiga also had a CLI on top of its GUI.
our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community
Yes, those restrictive, expensive, perpetual licensig agreements you force your customers to sign now would never have been thought of by the free/open source community.
--Mythos
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.
In case you were trying for a complete list, here are the ones you forgot:
Windows/386
Windows 3.0
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 3.51
Windows 95 OSR2
Windows 98 SE
Also, what you list as "Windows 3.1 for Workgroups" was officially titled "Windows for Workgroups", but internally it was actually Windows 3.11. And Windows NT 4 didn't come out until 1996, after Windows 95. And "Windows 1" was just called "Windows" at the time.
Finally, ME is an acronym for "Millenium Edition", and XP is a contraction of Experience.
It seems to me that the interview contained some very interesting questions and got fairly lame answers.
1. The cost of systems is going down, and Office can cost 1/3 the cost of a physical system.
It seems crazy to me that consumers are willing to pay $800 for a $300 computer with Windows and Office. Eventually consumers will figure this out too. Ballmer basically sticks his head in the sand and claims the two things aren't related. But when the price ratio of going Linux/OSS + PC vs. Windows/Office + PC goes up and the utility of the systems approachs par, this has to be bad news for MS.
2. People selling Linux-based PCs in developing nations and installing pirate copies of Windows...
Obviously, this is an ongoing problem for Microsoft. The real problem will be when the users don't immediately install Windows on the computer, and are happy with Linux. Indeed, this is the acid test for desktop Linux.
There is no Linux. This Linux is a conspiracy, planted by stupid...Finns? What? This is a conspiracy! This Finland was built by the Americans to confuse us and sap our precious bodily fluids etc etc etc...
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
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.
"We keep burying it and it keeps coming back to life, goddamnit, and it's multiplying. So we keep it in barrels on a toxic waste site. Don't let it bite you or you're dead."
(Ol' Lady Hopper musta exposed her language to Trioxin 2-4-5 by mistake.)
Finding God in a Dog
Microsoft Bob.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
Okay, maybe I'm just missing the big pic here, but what exactly has MS innovated again? (Apart from massively restricitive licensing, anti-competitive "bundling", etc.) From what I can see:
MS has a GUI. Apple and Xerox did it first.
MS has multi-tasking. OS/2 had it before MS did, and many OS's did/do it better even after MS finally got around to it.
MS has Word. WordPerfect, among others, did it first.
MS has Excel. Anyone heard of Lotus 1-2-3? Or VisiCalc?
MS has IE. Netscape, Mosaic, et al. all came first.
MS has Outlook, and I know for a fact I got e-mail on various clients long before Outlook was a glint in the e-postman's eye.
MS has "Age of Empire". Microprose already did Civilization.
MS has X-Box. Sony and Nintendo already had products in this area.
MS Money is a Quicken clone.
Visio was already Visio before MS purchased them.
MS NetMeeting was innovated by another company (Databeam) and purchased by MS.
MSN Instant Messenger comes from IRC by way of AIM and ICQ.
For that matter, MSN is basicaly a value-added ISP, essentially AOL with butterflies.
Windows NT was really IBM's OS/2 technology for the most part.
DOS was purchased, and was, in any case, basically CP/M.
Windows post 95(b) provides Internet Access via TCP/IP, but they were probably the last player to enter that game.
Media Player is basically just RealPlayer.
Someone please enlighten me . . . apart from legal and marketting ploys, what has MS actually innovated? What technology did they come up with themselves? (As opposed to either buying someone else's tech and rebranding it, or cloning someone else's idea.) So far, only ones I see as possibles are MS Project and MS PowerPoint, but I have a feeling that these are purchased technology also. (I seem to recall reading as much, but can't find the reference at the moment.)
Any MS apologists care to give us a list of MS innovations?
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
Forget all of Ballmer's statements. I'm more interested in the questions asked by the "reporter."
Did it seem odd to anyone else that these were all predicatable, softball questions? "How come you're going to beat Linux?" doesn't lead to an answer that qualifies as news. A real question would be something like "If an organization is moving an app from a Sun/SGI/HPUX server to x86 equipment, why would they move it to Win2003 Server instead of Linux?" Make him think and/or squirm.
Down with the Press-Release-As-News publishing paradigm.
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.
I think we need a new version of Steve Ballmer. At least a release version, please. We've been limping along on v. 0.46 too long. I hope the new version will have networking, instead of thinking of itself as a solitary god.
Ohter new technology we need from Microsoft:
TrueSpeak: So we don't have to hear the same old baloney.
WorkWell: Get rid of that mountain of sloppy code!
PlayTogether: Stop trying to run other people and technologies out of business. $20 billion is enough for one person. Why do you want more?
The truth is that we (the general public) really have no idea how innovative Microsoft Windows really is. This is because the OS is closed. Ballmer is correct when he disparages Linux because of its 20 year old design. There have been a lot of improvements, but the basic kernel and OS design decisions are the same as ones made 20 years ago. What would be innovative would be the inclusion of OS research over the years. I'm afraid Linux hasn't made huge strides there, although I'm no expert on Linux so I couldn't say that with a high degree of confidence. The internals of Windows could be very innovative from the perspective of OS researchers. Only the researchers who work at or with Microsoft could say.
Remember, UNIX (monolithic) was first, and there have been lots of other approaches to kernels since then. Microkernels (e.g. Mach, now in Mac OS X), Extensible, Exokernels, Virtual Machines, etc. Linux is still essentially a monolithic kernel, since if you want to change how something like VM works, you have to recompile new code in and reboot.
developers?
Still hilarious after all these years.
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.
Rumors are that the US goverment is going to appoint Balmer as the new Information minister for Iraq. "We need someone to match the format of former information minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf in his formidable communication of current events" a spokesman for the Bush administration comments...
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
Okay I have had this beef with Microsoft for a long while now and have even posted the feature request about a dozen times over the past three years.
/trash" so why can I not do the same simple thing in Windows.
How difficult would it be to change the Windows File Server's interpretation of a connecting Client's "delete" command to translate as "move." As head of an IT department for a very large company with a lot of corporate executives and administrative staffers I must get close to 100 requests a week for file retrieval due to accidental file deletion. It some times takes an hour to recover a single file from the backup tapes. I have three simple words for the Windows Server development team "Network Recycle Bin."
I have tried third party software like "Undelete" but it is just crap and never seems to work the way we need it to. Why is this simple to understand pain in the butt for SysAdmins of a Windows box not available and continually overlooked on the release of every Service Pack and new version? My staff and I have much better things to do with our weeks than file retrieval from backup tape.
I have been personally using UNIX for years now and I can easily change a users profile to redefine the "rm" command to mean "mv
"Help me Obi-/.-Kenobi,your my only hope!" -$
Slowly phase out the MS stuff and slowly introduce OSS.
And that's exactly what most organizations are doing: First, Linux is only used as the webserver and nothing else. Later the fileserver, later the printserver. In the meantime OpenOffice is introduced and when it's time to replace hardware, the switch to Linux is done.
It takes a long time, maybe 10 years to fully make the transition, but it happens. 70% of domains (actually 75% of active domains) are already running Apache
You can enter the following command at a prompt:
NET STATISTICS SERVER | MORE
The first line or two tells you when the server service was started. (Technically, you can also use WORKSTATION.)
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".
That's where I'm coming from, mainly. That's the angle from which Microsoft is going to come and attack Linux, too. They're going to present Linux as though it tried and failed miserably to appeal to the userbase.
This and your other points are valid concerns of the GPL phenomenon.
But the one thing that Open Source has that a For Profit doesn't have is time. Time is an endless resource. It allows a programmer to design a system correctly the first time (and if not keep working on something until it works)
Open Source doesn't have to answer to Stockholders and isn't rushing to put out a product. It can do what all programmers want to do...release code without bugs. I want perfect(TM) code. And if someone then takes my "pefect code" and in typical UNIX fashion mixes it with other tiny pieces to build another application, that programmer has the guarantee that my program does what I say it does and if they find a bug (s)he can fix it.
A problem with a lot of people and businesses today is that they want the quick fix now and won't invest for the long term. As with sports, you have to focus on fundamentals and if the fundamentals are strong, you'll succeed.
Investing in open source will always give you back what you put in and most often it will give back many times as much effort as you put in, as others see a benefit in what you are doing and want to help.
Investing in MS will give you software for 2 years that (historically) has been buggy and takes the control away from the user. You're burning your money.