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Miguel de Icaza on Mono, Ximian/Novell, XAML
moquist writes "Netcraft has an interview with Miguel de Icaza, of Gnome and Ximian fame. Icaza expounds his thoughts on Mono (the .Net framework for open source), the current direction of Microsoft's .Net, Novell's acquisition of Ximian, Novell's Linux desktop environment, Linux for grandmas and kids, and "the greatest danger to the continuing adoption and progress of open source" (Hint: it's pronounced "XAML".)."
(Score:-1, Incredibly Stupid)
sorry, but i read your sig and it didnt register for a while that you really werent modded that.
"Maybe thats what Microsoft is most afraid of, to loose control over the heading of the software industry. Open source have control over web servers and can take control over the protocols on the web if we just do our own thing. If we only follow what Microsoft do we will always be number two and thats no where to be."
If they (Microsoft's management/people who make the big decisions) are really afraid of losing control of the heading of the software industry, they certainly don't show it. The software industry is ultra-competitive. Microsoft is an ultra-competitive player in that market. They always have been. Bill Gates started by being a key player in the way people developed software for what we think of today as toy or hobby computers. He made the compiler of an easy-to-use language. BASIC became the first programming language that millions of people ever used. And they used Bill's BASIC.
Bill didn't invent BASIC. He just implemented it, marketed it, and was the first to sell rights to use an implementation of it. That concept of licensing a piece of software was what *made* Microsoft what it is today.
Bill didn't invent the Operating System, or the Word Processor, or a Web Browser. What Bill did was to enter each of those spaces and offer what people were looking for at the cheapest price with some innovative features. Linux/OSS may be offering an interesting proposition, but the products speak for themselves. Linux/OSS is like the imitation product made by people who are smart enough to figure out how to make a clone and tweak a few things. Now, imagine you are at a counter of a camera store. The salesperson behind the counter shows you a $300 Canon camera, and a $50 Kanan. Do you buy the Kanan, made by people smart enough to roughly clone the original and maybe add a few differences?
Are Microsoft managers worried about how to keep up earnings and revenue. Sure. Every successful company has leaders who worry about that. But you will note that Microsoft hasn't been firing off its employees like Sun, IBM, et all. Basically, the strategy at Microsoft is to have a deep development pipe. Build it, and sell it, and build it, and sell it. That's what Microsoft is. It's a highly organic code factory. Microsoft has 2 strategies.
1) Make it work.
2) Make it depend only on Microsoft technologies.
Microsoft will never lose control over the heading of its own industry (no, I'm not saying that Microsoft is the whole software industry, just a large industry within it).
Let me make an analogy. Say I buy a Canon Digital camera. It comes with Canon software. The store that sells me the camera may or may not sell me Canon lenses for the camera, but most people will buy Canon accessories for their Canon camera. In the case of the Digital SLR, Canon Lenses, Canon Flashes, and Canon accessories out-sell the 3rd parties in the Canon market. Now you can say that maybe that is because Canon is better than its 3rd party vendors, or maybe it is because people are afraid of breaking the device with third party stuff, but most people buy 1st part accessories. And if Canon is (as www.dpreview.com's statistics seem to indicate to me) the leader in the market (I own 3 Canon cameras, so I'm quite biased in this regard, but please ignore my bias for argument's sake), then you can imagine that being the leader, the market will follow you. Of course, the only way to stay a leader is to produce more of what people want to buy. Canon's offerings in the digital camera space match Nikon, Kodak, Olympus, Sony, Fuji, Sigma, etc.
Similarly, Microsoft's offerings match IBM, Novell, Oracle, Sun, etc. Granted, each of these companies competes in different segments of the markets, Microsoft is vertically integrated (depends on products produced by itself) and horizontally integrated (offers products in most/all categories in the industry in which it competes) specifically with regard to software.
Sony is an example of a company which is similarly vertically and horizontally integrated in th