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Gates Embraces Web Service Interoperability
djh101010 writes "In a CNN article which looks more like something out of The Onion, Bill Gates expresses his interest in participating in interoperability with rival technologies, through common standards. Specifically mentioned are IBM's WebSphere, and Linux. 'We're being as inclusive as we can,' Gates said of Microsoft's role in the cross-platform project. 'This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there.'
I mean this seriously made me think of 99. Obligatory /. .com business plan?
1. Create interoperable standards so users can migrate from one OS to another without rewriting code
2. ????
3. Profit!
Except I have a strong suspicion that number 2 is:
2. Erode competitions' standing in marketplace and watch customers gradually migrate to your software, because migration is no longer a hassle
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
In other words, they are giving so they can get something which in the end they can use to further lock out other applications and companies from being compatible.
A famous quote comes to mind:
"I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." --Virgil
Be curious to find out how they will try to spin this to their advantage while disadvantaging everyone else.
Why do you assume Bill Gates et al. is making the same mistake that a lot of other businesses make? For example, the RIAA member companies and several others. Everybody says, "Jeez, these business people are dumb and are fighting the inevitable."
What if Microsoft realized two things:
- Linux isn't going away.
- You get free shit from them.
Effectively meaning that they can start to actually embrace and integrate services, and actually expand and mutate their business model based on the economy and world, rather than what everybody perceives as their business model.I was chatting with a SCORE member, and he said that a true business plan should be a living entity that evolves with the world around it. Why is it so hard to believe that the most successful software company doesn't heed that advice?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
"Breaking Windows" by David Bank?
The central premise in this book is Bill Gates' philosophy of product development. Although the author presents it as a pragmatic, thought-out business plan that evolved from Bill Gates' examination of the market, to me it always came across as a response to basic insecurities that exposed more of Bill's personality flaws than any understanding of the market.
It goes like this: it doesn't matter how good the product is; it doesn't matter how well a product works; customers are fickle and will switch software at the drop of a hat. Therefore, the only way to keep customers is to 'lock them in', to leverage Office to increase Windows share and Windows to increase Office share by continually tying them together and forcing one to require the other. I am paraphrasing and working from memory, read the book.
My points are:
1. the basic business philosophy of Microsoft is so deeply rooted in the insecurities of it's founder and the founder is still in control
2. the whole idea of "open" standards is completely contrary to the concepts of "lock-in" that has worked so well for Microsoft up to this point
that this DOES sound like something from an alternate universe as one poster here has noted and that this has about as much chance of being even partially true as a snowball's chance in hell.
Because one developer says that MS is using XML standards correctly, does this mean that MS will actually keep it's formats open and backwards compatible?
Keep in mind it's the MS developement team that have created the file format mess in the past that is so horrid that entire countries are moving away from your closed formats. I can't even send an word 2000 doc to my father in-law who has OfficeXP with out it getting screwed up.
Even if what you say is 100% accurate, and MS delivers a compatible format that works with say, OpenOffice and Start Office, you have absoultely _NO_ gurantees that MS will not change the file format on the next upgrade and at that point turn the data to a completely proprietary form that is accessible only to the next upgrade of office.
Very few people in their right minds will trust MS anymore, and for good reasons.
If you want to convince people that Microsoft is becoming more open, you have a lot of work ahead of you learning how to distribute standards, sample implementations, and other documentation:
Until you start distributing stuff so that people can actually download and use it without Microsoft products and without signing their life away, all that talk of embracing open standards is just meaningless fluff.
Wow, got a problem with this business practice, huh? Well, can you name any major software company that has "embraced" standards, without extending them? Not Sun. Not Netscape. Not IBM. Maybe some Linux company?
I'm not defending the practice, just pointing out that it's considered legitimate by the software community at large, and used by some of the largest names in the industry. And that includes, but doesn't consist only of, Microsoft.