Cringley on Microsoft and Linux

brentlaminack writes "Time for this week's dose of I, Cringely. This week the Cringe talks about Ballmer's Orlando comments from this week. He compares Ballmer's comments with Linus's. Nothing new here for the /. group, but a good read for the non-technical."

Comments

Who's ass and what line?

[kidlinux]

"There is no road map for Linux, nobody who has his rear end on the line."

Right, why does Ballmer think Microsoft includes an EULA with their software? To void them of the responsibility for the trillions of damage their software has caused through security vulenerabilites and generally poor design.

Yeah, trillions. We've all seen the way damage is estimated each time a virus grinds everything Microsoft to a halt. Usually in the hundreds of billions, and it's probably happened at least a dozen times. This let alone unrelated individual incidents companies around the world have on a daily basis.

Oh, and don't forget about the kids that get locked up for writing viruses and other mischevious software that exploit said vulnerabilities. They're an easy scape goat to relieve Microsoft yet again of any responsibility what so ever.

I'm tired of this bullshit. The day Microsoft gets hauled in to court to take responsibility once and for all is the day I go skiing in hell. I bet I'll see Gates running the resort.

Re:What MS does provide

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Reasonably consistent consistent APIs across products

Talk to the Samba guys about how inconsistent they are about protocols. They are a huge company, and many things are inconsistent. You do raise valid points tho, and many in the OS community don't want to hear anything negative.

There was a MS funded benchmark a while back, where Windows came out on top of Linux when it came to webserver performance. The great sea of Slashdotters were up in arms, They shilled for MS!!! A few people actually decided to think "maybe they're right" and looked for improvements in Linux networking code. And Linux got faster, and has beat beating Windows IIS's ass ever since. There are advantages to listening to bad news sometimes.

"cognitive dissonance"

[ummit]

Don Norman (who if you haven't read him, you should) has a bit in his book The Design of Everyday Things about a psychology experiment in which the subjects were asked to write an essay arguing against some point they'd ordinarily believe in. Some of the subjects were paid money to write the essay, some were asked to do it for next to nothing. Then, later, they were interviewed to find how strongly their former beliefs held, or how much they might have changed their minds.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the people who had been paid more would be more apt to change their minds, but actually, the reverse was true. The explanation is that the people who were paid could resolve the conflict in their mind between the beliefs they held and the contradictory statements they were writing by saying "heck, I still don't believe this, I'm not writing it because I believe it or anything, I'm writing it because I'm being bribed to." But the people who didn't have that "out" had to resolve their own cognitive dissonance another way, and for some of them, at least, the way was to realize that maybe there was something to the counterargument, after all.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I was eerily reminded of it while reading Ballmer's arguments that Microsoft's commercial software is "obviously" better because it's written by professional programmers who are paid for it.

But if you're getting paid to write code, and the code is (for whatever reason) crap, that you can't take pride in, you can at least feel good about all the lovely $$$ you're being paid. The open source programmer, on the other hand, who is doing it for love rather than money, doesn't have that out, so has a much higher incentive to write code that's not crap, because feeling good about it is the only reward.

Here's what is confusing about open source to some

[angle_slam]

I think the fundamental misconception that MS has about open source is simple--why would anyone program open source?

If you are a good programmer, you program for a living because that is what you're good at. This is something that economists and Ballmer/Gates understand. Might as well get paid to program if you're good at it and enjoy it.

That's what's confusing about open source/free software--what do the developers do for a living? Are they students? Are they unemployed? Are they underemployed (e.g., working McDonalds)? If under/unemployed, why? If you are a good enough programmer to contribute to open source, can't you get a job with MS/IBM/Apple/Adobe/Oracle/etc.? Why would you program for free, in your spare time, instead of getting paid to do so?

Re:C-Class players

[acroyear]

Yeah, its funny, but I'll run with it anyways...

From what I can gather having read Code Complete and other books from M$ Press is that the serious A-Class players at M$ tend to work in the libraries and languages divisions since 1) languages and libraries were their original product to start with, and 2) the libraries are used in EVERYTHING else, from the OS to Office to these little don't mean a thing until they're integrated into Windows itself projects like UPNP. If they libraries are flawed, EVERYTHING they do, and everything everybody else does, is flawed, and M$ can't afford that. Thus, most A-Class players were working on .NET's internals since that's the next generation of libraries for the development environments to work in.

On the other hand, they got crappy people do to the .NET 1.0 packaging and roll-out, considering that the original release required installing ALL of the documentation onto your HD even for just the run time...there's no reason it needed 1.6 GIG except that *SOMEBODY* stupid got involved along the way...

Fortunately, 1.1 fixed that particular issue...

Re:Uhh...

[kfg]

Robert Townsend, author of "Up the Organization" and former President of both Avis Rent-a-Car and American Express, always refused to look at "presentations." He felt that if you couldn't just talk to him and lucidly explain what you were on about in one minute it wasn't going to be worth his time in the first place.

Richard Feynman held that if he couldn't explain a physical phenomenon to someone with no scientific background in plain English in a minute it meant he didn't really understand it himself.

While this may rankle some of the peanut gallery here I'd suggest that if you can't explain the most technically archane subject you deal with to a nontechnical person in plain English (or Russian, or Chinese, or what have you) in a few minutes you don't really understand it either.

Cringley's pieces may contain far more depth than they can appear to have on the surface, even if sometimes he's a little slow to "get it."

So was Feynman, for that matter, but when he got it, he got it.

KFG

Re:Well said

[bninja_penguin]

Maybe it has something to do with brand loyalty. People know the MS stuff will get better so they just buy it, deal with the short commings and wait for the next version to come out.

You maybe have this attitude, but most people don't. It really has nothing to do with brand loyalty for most people, it has everything to do with the fact that Microsoft has a stranglehold on PC makers, through pricing schemes and threats, to the point that no major PC manufacturer will release a system that can be bought off the shelf without Windows. If, say, HP, Dell, or Compaq would offer the buyer his choice of OS on whatever system the buyer wanted, Microsoft would charge the manufacturer at least full-retail price for Windows, and possibly ban them from selling Windows systems at all.
Since every major corporation in the world cares for nothing but money, they would rather sell-out and let Microsoft basically force them to do what Microsoft wants them to than give their customer any choice.

That is the beauty of small business. I build PCs and sell them. If you want Windows XP, I'll make sure you have a properly licensed legal copy. If you want Linux, I'll make sure you get the distro you want, installed and configured, and guaranteed, no different than a Windows box. If you bring in your old copy of O/S2 Warp, I'll get it going for you. If you want BeOS, I'll do that. After all, it is your machine I am building for you.
However, I cannot get the same price for Windows XP as Dell or Gateway, therefore, it will cost you more from me than them. That is fine with me. If some entity comes to me with some "sweetheart" deal, but tries to tell me what I can and cannot do with my business, and there is no law saying I must obey, I ask them to leave, immediately. This is my shop, not theirs. I would rather repeatedly plunge the splintered end of a broken two-by-four through their skulls, then my own than voluntarily give control over to another, especially one such as Microsoft.
So I may never be the next Dell. That's fine. I can live with that. I won't sell myself to anyone, nor will I force my customers into an either/or situation. If you want a quad Opteron box, a beowulf cluster, G5 Mac, or Hell, even a Dell, I will make it happen for you.

The biggest difference between Microsoft and the Open Source crowd is, Microsoft is shareholder and profit oriented, and Open Source people are people and solution oriented.