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How Microsoft Could Embrace Linux
"He goes on to cite the governments of Paris, Munich, Brazil, Peru, China, Korea, and Japan which are all embracing open source software to varying degrees. Meanwhile, when they choose Microsoft software, fast-growing emerging markets like China and India opt for pirated copies. Salkever explains that the concerns for customers like these are the 'relatively high price of Microsoft software' and the 'concerns about buying proprietary software to run critical government operations.' Finally he points to recent moves by Sun and IBM to leave the commoditized software and hardware business behind, writing 'When the world's largest and most respected IT consultancy draws a clear bead on your crown jewels, it's time to mount a bold counterattack.'"
why not offer them a low-cost Linux version of Office?
why would any linux user use MS Office, especially when they have to pay for it?
considering heaps of people use OpenOffice.org and the like on Windows, I really don't see many people using MS Office under linux.
When you can make MSLinux?
If people have already decided to go for a linux OS then finding a good open source office suite to go with it is no problem at all. I think the time for MS to try to gain a foothold in the linux application market was about 2 years ago and they missed it.
I would venture to say that if Microsoft were smart and if they could lose some of their stubborn pride, they would adopt a UNIX kernel the way Apple did.
Before that move, Apple's Mac OSes were a joke - constantly crashing, freezing, etc. They integrated BSD kernel and built their pretty UI and nice apps on top. Good move by Steve Jobs. Apple lost nothing. This is the real reason why MacOS is so popular among the 'computer owners elite' today.
Microsoft could do the same and really hurt all of their competition whose existence is based on the fragility of various/all Windows versions.
Of course, MS could also just make their own Linux distro (MS Linux), make it better than RedHat and 100% free. That's an easy way to get all other Linux distro companies out of business. With their thick bank accounts holding over 30 billion USD, they could offer it for free for a looong looong time. On the other hand, that's Linux distro companies' bread and butter.
Simpy
Why would Micro$oft make the Linux platform more appealing by creating apps for it?
They won't embrace it, because they can't extend and extinguish it as they have done for other software.
Thanks for the most part to RMS and the GNU GPL.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Why is it that an editor of BusinessWeek has no clue about business? If Microsoft embraced Linux by selling a low cost version of Office for it, migrating to Linux would be even easier --> no money for Windows, less money for Office.
With no MS Office for Linux, migrating is a lot harder. OOo works fine for most people (better in my experience, but my experience probably differs), but in some cases you just simply need the original, which means you also need Windows (or Crossover Office).
It really is as simple as that. Office isn't just MS's biggest cash cow, it's also their most important selection of proprietary file formats.
It lists two reasons people are moving to Linux/OpenOffice, but doesn't address either of them.
Quote: In November, 2003, the government of Brazil ordered its agencies to use Linux and other open-source software as much as possible. A month later, Israel's Commerce Ministry announced a decision to migrate to OpenOffice, an open-source desktop suite that runs on Linux and Apple's (AAPL ) OS X system, as well as on Windows. The city governments of Paris and Munich both announced their intention to switch to Linux and open-source applications. In Peru, a state legislature nearly passed a law banning the use of proprietary software by government agencies. And the governments of China, Korea, and Japan have announced an alliance to promote open-source software.
All of these organisations are switching because they don't want to use proprietary software. Providing a Linux version of MS Office won't solve this, as there's no chance in hell MS will release it as OSS.
So that's one of the concerns the article mentions, but leaves unaddressed.
Second is the price. Why would MS offer Office for Linux for a low price, when it can just offer existing products (Windows XP plus Office) for a low price, ensuring a lock-in that wouldn't occur with Office/Linux?
Every year at least once an acticle appears about a rumour or someone proposing that MS should or will release an MS-Office 4 Linux. So far I haven't seen anything. It's just like waiting for Doom 3...
ehm
HEEEEELPPP
It would be nice but I think there is too much speaking against it.
First of all I don't think it would be an easy port to make considering how M$likes to intermingle it's OS with it's applications. Office is bound to be using alot of OS specific API's, com objects etc... If the main selling opportunity would be low priced copies to the third world, then maybe they don't think it is worth the cost.
Thirdly I think it would be to much an admittance of defeat for M$ to aknowledge Linux that way.
Are you implying that Microsoft provided this? If so, that is not correct. The product you're thinking of that brought TCP/IP to to Windows 3.x is Trumpet Winsock.
Why bother.
Congrats on the new section, but the color scheme is killing my eyes.
Color scheme looks okay to me, nowhere near as bad as the Games ones but I'm wondering whether they really have enough Italian readers to justify a special 'it' section.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
Actually you are incorrect, it was available for Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It wasn't a dialup stack, it was for NICs. The primary reason for its existence was for those who were only running TCP/IP on their networks, so that they could use the WFW clients for SMB networking over IP, which was supported in the versions of NT available at that time, as well as LanMan.
You can still find a copy on an old install CD of NT 4 as well as 3.51 in the CLIENTS directory.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
They only make money off of their OS and office suite. If they offered a low-cost office suite, no one would need the expensive operating system or expensive office suite. Who really wants to pay $750 for Longhorn, and then pay another few hundred for an Office suite? Then, 5 years down the road, have to upgrade again because MS stops offering bug fixes. Multiply that by 500 workstations and you have a large budget that you're basically giving MS. That probably funds upgrades to calc.exe and clock.exe.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
There are really three scenarios here:
You want a low cost, or free, system.
- In which case you use Linux and OpenOffice.org both of which are already proven products.
You want a UNIX based system as your using legacy UNIX products, but need Microsoft Office.
- In which case you use MacOS X and Microsoft Office.
You need Microsoft Office for office productivity and compatibility with other products.
- In which case is the $100 for a Microsoft Windows license really an issue?
I agree developing nations should find better and cheaper ways of doing things, but doing the same things a different way just for the sake of it doesn't seem justified to me!
Just one word ... cygwin. It leaves my boss with the appearance that I'm using M$.
No. Microsoft did provide TCP/IP for Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It didn't have PPP or dialer software, which Trumpet Winsock provided... But again, Microsoft provided the same starting with MS Internet Explorer 5.0 (which isn't really relevant though.)
To do so they would be admitting that Windows is on the way out and they'd never do that. While they have Windows they control everything else in the software market - they will never give that up under any circumstances.
The sad fact is that the desktop market is owned by Microsoft and this will never change. Corporations, who are ultimately the ones that decide on standards through their software purchasing habits, are more interested in playing it safe. Most corporate IT decision makers are more like politicians in their laziness and inaction - they're more interested in their pay packet and their reputation.
The smart corporations have seen the way MS react to the threat of a Linux deployment and will start their own. It is clear that the threat of a large scale Linux deployment is a way to reduce MS software licensing costs. Unfortunately most corporations do not follow through on the deployment.
In any case it's much easier to sack IT people in western countries and rehire them in India than to retrain your entire work force to use a different OS. I mean how many people who ring the help desk would even notice the difference?
</rant>
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Note that the article points out that being in the position to dictate file formats and to control the flow of data is far stronger than what Redmond envisions now. I would say that if they really want to tighten their grip on the global market, they can do one better and stop thinking of "products" as their cash cow and start thinking of "services". Back in the days when the software cost was a small fraction of a PC, they could get away with it. But in light of a study a few years ago that indicated that they could slash prices across the board by 90% (yes, that is EVERYTHING) and still make money, and in light of the fact that price erosion of PCs has commoditized the market, they must shift their direction to providing software services (i.e. customized solutions for businesses). It doesn't really go against their overall strategy (in fact, you hear faint echoes of it in the ".NET" framework), but they have to adapt quickly to lock steps with Linux and other open-source initiatives.
MS has already figured some of this out and it wasn't by adopting linux or porting to linux. Look what they did in Thailand. They build a one-language (i.e. country specific) stripped down version of XP and sold it for cheap. They did this specifically to keep Linux out. If they did it in Thailand, they could do it in Brazil, India, China...etc. It's just a matter of how much money they will make on licensing the traditional way versus licensing the stripped down version.
Secondly, Windows and Office are mutually supporting monopolies that are enhanced by the "net effect". You run Office because its the standard on Windows and you run Windows because you need Office. And everyone else you share files with run Office and Windows, so that reinforces the matter. If any cracks appear in that ediface, the whole thing more or less collaspes. MS will never chance that. MS could afford to make Office for Mac because Mac never a threat because it costs more than a PC, so it never challenged MS's model of being the low-cost solution. But Linux *is* a threat. Linux is cheaper and it has the potential to eat Microsoft's lunch in MS's native environment (i.e. low-end workstations, PCs, and servers), so they will never give it an opening.
Don't count on it. Monsanto ... uh I mean Microsoft ... can muster lots of support for such a campaign.
The United States forbids poor countries from making generic versions of antiretroviral drugs for AIDS treatment. Given the limited financial resources involved, this will certainly cost lives.
Monsanto Company is suing farmers for re-using seed where patented genes have been found, whether said farmers wanted them or not.
How will software be any different? Countries developed enough to need office suites will be signing trade agreements with the United States. Undoubtedly there will be intellectual property conditions.
So, how do you like working for Microsoft? Do they still have free sodas in the lounge?
You made a pro-Microsoft post that got modded +5 on Slashdot of all places -- you'll probably get a big raise at your next performance review.
India has such a HUGE variety of languages that almost 100% of computer users know English and are often unwilling to use PC's in their native language. (I belong to this category). A Hindi version of WinXP would suck totally ... in the market and everywhere.
I was involved with a bit of work on Pango rendere r for my mother tongue ... the unicode renderer was fairly easy to handle - but the translation was a horror . Imagine translating Abort :)
Look at all the scripts available in Indic languages , and that's just the first grid. You might realize why India reads , writes and speaks english.
It ain't easy, it ain't viable ... but a blind eye towards home-piracy and a watchful eye on corporate licensing has been MS's ploy in India.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
This is the mechanism by which MS can keep Apple in check. At any time, Apple knows that MS can stop providing Office for the Mac, neatly pulling the plug on any problematic growth in Mac user share.
If Microsoft cares about keeping Windows on desktops, it would be utterly foolish to release a version of Office for Linux. Unlike OSX, Linux is free, removing one of the barriers to acceptance. If Office were available for Linux, corporate types (and Universities) would very quickly embrace Linux as the desktop standard. It's a no-brainer.
The Win32 threading and synchronisation models are ridiculously powerful compared to *nix, which is precisely what makes it so hard to port a lot of Win32-based software to other platforms. The fact that you can't do a simple operation like "wait for a mutex to be released or a socket to become readable" deserves to be a joke about legacy operating systems, not a persistent reality. At least BSD's kqueue comes close.
If that is true, then it's a shame that the performance of the Win32 sockets are so meagre compared to the Linux implementation. Take a look at this article on Developerworks. Maybe you can spot the changes required to close the performance gap between Windows and Linux (Linux running about 2 and a half times faster on the same machine).
And I think I'll take you to task for your blind assertion that "you can't do a simple operation like "wait for a mutex to be released or a socket to become readable" on a Unix platform. If you call pthread_mutex_lock in 'fast' mode it simply waits for the mutex to be released and will pick up as soon as the mutex becomes available. And there are plenty of other options around. It's also totally trivial to write a spin-check to check the TCP status of a socket.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Yes.. You're right. David Cutler's kernel is slightly more modern than the Linux/Unix design, but it has a few severe drawbacks:
:-). What makes porting Windows-apps extremely painful is mostly all the GUI stuff which has to be redone from scratch if it was written using native Windows calls.
The kernel behind Windows 2000/2003 is as solid as Linux.
The NT-Kernel is about as solid as the Linux kernel (most of the time it's accelerated 3D drivers that trash both systems). The real question today is, is it as solidly secure as Linux is?? I say it isn't because it has only received scant review outside of Microsoft.
The Win32 threading and synchronisation models are ridiculously powerful compared to *nix, which is precisely what makes it so hard to port a lot of Win32-based software to other platforms. The fact that you can't do a simple operation like "wait for a mutex to be released or a socket to become readable" deserves to be a joke about legacy operating systems, not a persistent reality. At least BSD's kqueue comes close.
Most apps don't need that in the first place and btw, waiting with select() call on a socket works just fine for me, I can poll and I can block on a socket so what more do I want
There are many other places in which the *nix kernels show their age compared to the design of Win32 (not to mention MS's ability to maintain a consistent API over 10 years of product developments). 30 year old technology may be "mature", but its not always The Right Thing To Do for the future. So let's see... guess what I agree with you that there are a lot of things in the NT-Kernel that would be cool to have in Linux.. (and a lot in the overall Linux/BSD/Unix codebase Microsoft stole without giving credit and violating licenses)... but we don't really need it to accomplish our mission.
The real battleground is now definitely in userspace and not anymore in kernelspace. If you ask me what we absolutely need is to adopt a standard in userspace like Microsoft did with COM, their Component Object Model which allows their applications to integrate with another.
We use kParts in KDE, Corba/Bonobo in Gnome, UNO in OOo, XPCOM in Mozilla but a Mozilla-XPCOM component can not be inserted into a kParts container like kMail nor a UNO OOo swriter container. Our components can't really talk to each other like theirs can. If we could offer the same kind of integration, Microsoft calls it OLE, where you could fire up OOo writer and edit an embedded gnumerics spreadsheet, right-click on it and send it on it's way using kmail... If we could do that then we would kick Microsoft's butt on the desktop just as bad as we kicked them out of the server arena.
Too bad that every major OSS project has to invent their own Component Architecture.
MS Linux bundled with a compatible MS Office makes more sense...
Imagine a server in which you have a thread for accepting input from sockets, several processing threads (for various stages of processing), and one for sending output to sockets. These threads communicate by means of queues, access to which is controlled by a mutex. Aside: there are often dozens of processing threads in this sort of architecture, and processing ranges from sub-second to a minute or more
Now consider the output thread. It needs to wait on the mutexes of several queues and know when sockets (that have had their buffers filled) become writable.
Just waiting on multiple mutexes is a problem under *nix, but it can be avoided by reducing the number of mutexes and increasing the opportunity for lock contention.
Let me point out that if you are designing a system, knowing that it is targetting a *nix-style threading model, then you can avoid these problems. But the Win32 model allows a more straightforward approach (without sacrificing performance), and, if you already have a Win32 program using the functionality of that model, its a complete bitch to port to *nix.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net