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Microsoft's Platform Strategist Speaks On Linux
prostoalex writes "Martin Taylor, general manager for platform strategies at Microsoft, was interviewed by CRN magazine on Linux, open source development, and Microsoft's official stand on it."
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No troll. Just curious. Anyone have pricing info?
So right away he takes a jab at Linux by comparing it to a Diet Coke, while comparing Windows to the full meal.
In credible. Big balls or no brains, you decide.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I think it's more of allowing anything with a file extention of
Does that sound like a workable solution to your problem Bill?
Anyway, Iw ould like to hear waht you think of the tone of this article
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Our value-add is really in the R&D in the technology.
A disconnect with customers happens when Microsoft confuses who should be the beneficiary of added value from R&D. Have the enormous sums spent annually on R&D resulted in superior performance in areas that are most important to customers: security, reliability, affordability, and flexibility? Or is it the case that R&D spending is concentrated on technologies to displace existing products and vendors from the marketplace (Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, .NET vs. Java, etc...) in favor of Microsoft, but without seriously addressing the needs of its customers?
Have you ever used Microsoft's "support?" The Network Operations Center I worked in for a while had one problem that just wouldn't go away. I don't even remember what the problem was, but there were at least 6 guys working on it and nobody could figure out the problem. Microsofts solution: Reboot it every night when not very many people are using it. I can't believe they charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for that. And they were YOUR dollars (if you're an american) because it was government work.
I doubt that many developers would work pro bono on mSFT code base should it ever become open source. Fact it, most OSS developers contribute for their own benefit, be that notoriety, experience gained or the sheer pleasure of it. Having mSFT comoditize their work would certainly lend to a very sour turn.
mSFT recognizes that they are a slowly sinking ship, and are rabid rats scrambling greedily to retain their mighty market share. They cannot compete with OSS; Ballmer has grasped the benefits (he's not as stupid as he dances) and must now obfuscate the issue.
Fear not, the mSFT heyday is over. Although very eloquently put, Taylors comments are but a shallow attempt to paint a happy face on Dorian Grey.
>It's probably only a matter of time before Ballmer finally grasps the true benefits of Open Source.
I doubt MS would gain much by Open Sourcing Windows... for a few reasons:
1) OSS would put Windows on the same playing field as Linux and BSD. On the same playing field, Linux is just flat out superior to Windows in most respects.
2) It would be easy to make Windows API clones, given that there could be no more secret APIs. Microsoft would no longer have platform "lock in" to force things like Internet Explorer
3) The code is likely just plain bad. It may need a major rewrite before others in the community could start to contribute.
4) Making something OSS does not necessarily reduce your payroll. Someone has to do the development in OSS, and quite often those people are paid. Witness RedHat, VA, and IBM contributing to Linux.
I don't see MS open sourcing Windows until they're smaller in market share than Linux. Then they'll get desperate, but it will be too late.
You have to love this shit.
CRN: Where do you see Linux being successful today?
TAYLOR: Definitely on the edge. You're just seeing edge services continue, such as firewall, appliances and those types of devices. Obviously, Unix migrations are happening. That's where, primarily, custom applications that people have written in-house are being moved over to Linux. But you're not seeing this huge ISV community created. Yes, some ISVs are being created, but not any massive ones. And the other place we see it is high-performance computing, scientific computing clusters that have lots and lots of servers.
Huge ISV's. Hmm... Wall Street. Amazon. Yahoo. Google. IBM.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
This is a a thread response, not necessarily a parent poster reponse:
Well, considering that Linus *did* write the original from scratch (and therefore can lay claim to creating it) and has also remained active in it's development for more than 12 years *and* that he holds the original copyrights, I think that your comment, while not necessarily inaccurate, is still irrelevant when the comparison to M. Gates is made - after all, Gates stated a while back that he has little to do with the day to day operations of "his" company.... didn't he?
Oh, and I have yet to see Bill state categorically that he has done any serious coding since the early days of DOS. One can't say that of Linus, eh?
Plus wasn't a lot of the code that Bill started his company on bought from someone else?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
One night on a whim I decided to install jabberd2 on my freebsd box. The port did not build (I foget the exact error). Included in the error message was the email address of the package maintainer who happened to be in russia. I cut and paste the error message to him. A short time later he replies to the email with a patch. I apply the patch and install the thing no problem. I let him know about the good outlook and that night when my system does a cvsup the fix is in the port.
Beat that MS.
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
You're not distinguishing between Linux the kernel and Linux the OS. The parent was almost certainly talking about the latter.
Userland backwards compatability on Linux is OK but we've certainly had our fair share of cockups. The rollout of the new threading systems (NPTL and the new TLS system) was pretty much a backwards compatability disaster. I currently have to run XMMS of all things with LD_ASSUME_KERNEL because of NPTL. Oh sure, I tried to debug it. Doesn't work when gdb pukes and dies - again due to threading. Don't even get me started on the breakage Wine has had to deal with.
The glibc/kernel guys claim they know how to write backwards compatible software but in reality they don't. They don't, because unlike Microsoft they treat backwards compatability as a science, as a fixed set of rules that if they follow they think can be held blameless. Of course when you get situations like NPTL where the old system was so broken everybody had workarounds which stop working in obscure ways when the underlying bugs were fixed, this logic breaks. They still break backwards compatability, they just end up playing the blame game instead, which is stupid.
We could have much better backwards compat without the huge hacks Microsoft use with even a few small changes to process, but I'm not seeing people interested in making those changes.
Given the intensity with which it is probably being scrutinised, I'd imagine any "obvious" embarassments would have already surfaced by now.
Hell, if you want a laugh (and if you're a win32 dev you will learn something too) go read Raymond Chens blog. Not only is this guy a near-genius level coder, but he's been working on Win32 (and USER in particular) for a very long time now. Yes, I know some of you think that's an oxymoron. He often posts interesting stories about its development and about the bizarre hacks they put in to work around broken apps (some parts of windows even go so far as to detect and correct stack corruption).
Looks like its simply a market segmentation approach through increased componentisation that they are doomed to adopt.
In plain terms this means taking their one product and de-featuring or crippling it to suit what Microsoft thinks is best for a particular customer. They will always get this wrong for two reasons:
because everyone has unique demands on technology and
all GNU/Linux distributions are highly componentised from the very first day because thats how they are created using very different development teams.
A typical Linux distro is intrinsically componentised and so is years ahead of Microsoft. A typical full-fat GNU/Linux distribution will always be the whole product and will (nearly) always provide the right product offering to its customers without having to crow-bar your requirements to fit Microsoft's view of who you are.
Who do you want to be today ? - I just want to be me not what you tell me to be !
This is why Microsoft just can't win by using market segmentation against Linux. It may work if the competition was commercial e.g. Microsoft verses Apple, but Linux development is user-demand driven not marketing-demand driven.
No mention is made of GPL/LGPL in the article. In my books this is also a key customer requirement of derisking single-suppliers through open source licensing. Shared source is not the answer as you cannot build from that source whereas I can, and do, build from kernel.org (now at 2.6.3 and very happy with what I see on my SMP machine).