Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Leaves U.N. Standards Group
pk2000 writes "Microsoft withdrew from a United Nations software standards group for commerce. 'Unfortunately, for now, we have made the decision to stop participating in U.N./Cefact for business reasons and this serves as notification of our immediate withdrawal from all U.N./Cefact activities.' This might be connected to Microsoft's intention to build up its patent portfolio. Currently it has about 5,000 patents and seeks to at least double this number by the end of 2005."
The more and more they isolate themselves with proprietary technologies the more they cut their own throats.
Once their corporate clients realize a decision to go MS is a decision to STAY with MS for a LONG LONG time, that TCO will get a hard second (and third) review.
It's not suprising, but it's somewhat disappointing. MS was looking like they may be good to the community (and industry) for once. That didn't go far...
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
One can only hope that MS' refusal to adhere to real standards will backfire. I just hope that corporations and governments aren't to dumb to realize that it is them who have to pay the prize for MS' tactics.
On the other hand, once patent laws are the way MS and others want them to be world wide open standards will simply not matter anymore. What a bright future lies ahead for freedom of information and freedom of choice...
With this many patents, Microsoft will win. Their intent is to kill all competition/freeware by patenting everything remotely interesting to them. They don't even put their name on any of their patents until they issue, so it's really hard to spot them. There's no telling exactly how many, or which patents they have in process at any time, unless you do a lot of educated snooping at the USPTO. And that tells you nothing about their international patents. Their pulling out of the organization will have little impact for them.
This is something we need to keep in mind while all the flames and MS troll rant. Microsoft is making a buisness descision, because it is a buisness and not a local geek club that does this in their spare time. Good or bad, we can't expect them to suddenly shake hands with Linux and begin working on universal standards for OS interopolbility because that is a buisness killing move and against the very reason buisness competition even exists in the first place.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
In this corner, we have Microsoft with a platform-specific lockin solution designed to drain business revenue without actually committing to fix reported problems.
In the other corner, we have IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, RedHat, Mandrake, Oracle, Sybase, and a few thousand other vendors supporting full POSIX stacks, international and national standards, and essentially working on the philosophy of building from a shared technology foundation.
While Microsoft may have bought their way out of court-imposed penalties by delaying the case until a change of government occured, they can't buy their way out of the opinions and mistrust they've built for the past 2-3 decades.
As they've refused to compete on quality, reliability, security, and performance of business solutions, what choice does Microsoft have except to try to use the courts and barratry to survive?
After all, they can't accept (or perhaps can't grasp) a service/quality based market. Their whole mindset is package and sell, not long-term services and support that generate stable revenue instead of bursts during purchase/upgrade cycles.
Business hates upgrades. A minor patch for an existing release means much lower retraining and deployment costs.
Consumers love upgrades, they get a whole bunch of new gadgets, features, toys, and shiny icons.
It's simple: Microsoft can service one market or the other, but not both. Any attempts to use their IP portfolio for barratry are likely to get them pimp-slapped by the vendors I mentioned above: they don't like Microsoft's intrusions on their turf any more than Microsoft want's Linux on the desktop.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Anti software-patent groups in the EU should seize on this, and note how Microsoft's use of its patent portfolio is so demonstrably at odds with the public interest.
What could be more in the public interest than the commoditisation of web services?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Companies that join working groups should be forced to say "right, these are my patents, i'll share with you and if i pull out, i cant use them against you".
:/
If Microsoft start patenting things the group is working at making, waiting until the standard is out to start suing (Hi, my names Rambus, id like to help you with your DDR tech!), or perhaps even joined, had a look what the groups doing, realises they have patents that covers it then pulls out.. ooh, i'll be angry!
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Considering the amount of novalties presented by M$ through their software, how many of these 5'000 to 10'000 patents will actually hold up in court? Could this be a way to increase stock price in short term?
They only win if the rest of the IT industry and society accept that it's reasonable to allow one company to "patent" such obvious ideas as timed clicks, TODO lists in code, etc. -- especially concepts that have been in use for years or decades.
So Microsoft bought their way out of penalties, can force the USPTO to approve bullshit patents, and has a few billion in cash.
Just how much do you think that matters when the other side of the court has IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, Cisco, Oracle, Sybase, ... and they all see more benefit in OSS and a shared technology stack than a lock-in for one vendor.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The real problem is that Microsoft just doesn't get along with standards groups. Witness their history with XSL, Kerberos, ISO character sets, etc., etc. They go in determined to be good, cooperative techno-standard citizens, but always reach a point where continuing to participate means they can't do things exactly their own way. And they always want to do things exactly their own way.
You almost can't blame them -- the industry is dominated by emotionally immature technogeeks who always have to have their own way. Unfortunately, MS has the financial clout to make their tantrums into defacto standards.
You know, a lot of times when companies go under, they start to use their patent portfolio in a last kamakazi attempt to drag everyone else down with them. Perhaps Microsoft sees the writing on the wall, and realizes that things are going to go so well for them in the future.
This could cause huge problems in the IT world...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Microsoft have enough money, time and resources to patent pretty much anything in the future, and it looks like they're going to try and file as many patents as they possibly can.
This will be very damaging for the entire rest of the software industry including open-source - I mean you're going to have to think harder and harder to come up with a new software idea that Microsoft hasn't already thought of and patented...
Patents were introduced to level the playing field for the little guy with a big idea, helping him to compete with the giant corporations - what Microsoft is doing is exactly the opposite. The entire patent system needs to be overhauled before its too late.
Who said it was? Why do you even bring it up?
Actually im surprised we even use tcp/ip, email, html and http! i guess those were the last things to slip through...
We probably wouldn't be using those if Microsoft weren't four years late to the party. Ahh, the old Win 3.1 days, where you needed a third party set of utilities, such as Trumpet Winsock, to even get the PPP connection started.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
It becomes more and more clear what software patens are doing. Protect the companies and screw the individuals.
For Europe it still is not too late.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Now, it's MS against the rest of the world. However, it hasn't always been that way and won't always be that way.
``In the other corner, we have IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, RedHat, Mandrake, Oracle, Sybase, and a few thousand other vendors supporting full POSIX stacks, international and national standards, and essentially working on the philosophy of building from a shared technology foundation.''
That coalition will only last as long as there is a common enemy. After that, there will be a new era of Unix Wars, a new Great Divide, and, in time, there will be a new Evil Empire.
``As they've refused to compete on quality, reliability, security, and performance of business solutions, what choice does Microsoft have except to try to use the courts and barratry to survive?''
So far, the bulk of people and businesses seem to be quite happy with Microsoft's solutions. As long as features equal quality, fewer crashes than the previous version equal reliability, service packs and managed code equal security, and "it works without hours of prodding with configuration files" equals performance, I don't see that changing. Sure, there have been more and stronger voices against Microsoft, but most people have either the "works for me" or the "everyone else uses it" attitude. The people who really care have already switched.
``After all, they can't accept (or perhaps can't grasp) a service/quality based market.''
I think they grasp it rather well. Instead of shipping a software package that needs a system administrator to work well, they ship software that any idiot can work with, and they handle all the issues for you. Not enough features? Not secure enough? Not enough "seen on the net" buzzwords? Don't worry, it will all be fixed in the next release. Just sit back and relax.
``Business hates upgrades...Consumers love upgrades...Microsoft can service one market or the other, but not both.''
I think Microsoft is large enough to serve many markets. Traditionally, they had different product lines for home users and business. However, home users have grown more demanding, and home PCs more powerful, and MS apparently considered it more beneficial to merge product lines than to keep adding features to the home products.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's because its opponents include people like you with a political axe to grind. You're not making a good poster boy for OSS. They'll use the specter of people like you to convince politicians that any measure is appropriate to defend free enterprise against you.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Not to start a euro flame war or anything, but "If your not with us, your agains us" comes to mind.
Next you will hear Ballmer refer to UN software standards as "old-tech".
"/Dread"
I know a lot of users who hate upgrades, as they'll inevitably mean slower, more bloated and often less reliable software that makes it harder, not easier, to do the things they need to do.
That's if the upgrade even works.
Many people "upgrade" only when forced kicking and screaming by external factors such as format and protocol changes or hardware failures. I don't blame them, though personally I'll often prefer to upgrade.
Take a step back and remember socio-economic theory.
Until now, Apple was really the only alternative on the desktop, despite the efforts of OpenView or OpenLook to provide a Unix-based desktop. People needed something relatively easy to use, and so did business.
Now you have OS/X (still Apple), Gnome/Gtk (virtually any vendor's hardware that run's a *nix stack with X11R5 or newer), KDE3/Qt (as per Gnome, plus handheld/embedded support), and an ever-developing web UI infrastructure of defacto Apache standards and official HTML/CSS/ECMAScript facilities (XUL, XForms, Struts, ...)
All of those products and tools support a full POSIX/ANSI API stack, plus defacto standards like X11, OpenGL, Postscript, etc. All the functionality required to develop and deploy solutions to the desktop are available via Windows or cross-vendor solutions.
So you can lock in product development to a platform with a lousy security reputation that has no significant enterprise data center share, or you can shift development to cross-platform tools that still provide what business and end-users need.
Sure it needs to evolve, but Windows 3.11 was pretty shitty, too. Right now Gnome/Mozilla/SuSE have provided my full-functionality desktop for about a year. I've been living on Linux longer, but the release of SuSE 9.0 really made it a desktop experience I could sit down a normal user or relative in front of, and expect them to be able to work with it.
That's the key point: you now have much more choice about whose tools or products you use to deploy a solution.
That leaves the question of what other reasons you might opt to go Windows. Lots of developers? Sure, but they hardly outnumber the OSS community, much less the even larger army of *nix developers that service North American industry.
Colors, bells, bings, and eye candy? You can turn all that on in Gnome or KDE3. OS/X Aqua actually outdoes Microsoft eye candy for those who want beads and trinkets instead of a solid platform.
Videogame performance? OS/X and Linux are perfectly capable of providing a secure and stable gaming experience. Right now it's a bear to set up sometimes, but Id Software and others have proven there is no particular need for Windows to build a game. It's just a market share decision.
So the only lock in Microsoft has is insecure APIs that haven't been updated as the POSIX and other standards have. Other than companies 100% in bed with Microsoft who can't even conceive of alternatives, I really don't see the majority of IT providers and vendors sticking with Microsoft in the long run.
As I've said before, once upon a whence Microsoft had a chance to win the war when it was them vs. Apple and a small Unix-based business server market. That has changed -- AS400, Mainframe, hundreds of specialized variants like QNX -- everyone supports the standards.
Everyone, that is, but Microsoft. With a security hole nightmare. With stability problems. With high entry and support license costs.
The security holes are the real issue. Even if you spend millions building a hierarchy of firewalled departmental LANs to minimize the depth of a virus, worm, or cracker penetration, you still can't eliminate the risk.
When any kid with Google and a knack for technology can crack the admin password on the parent's laptop, install an infected piece
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's very rarely in the interests of a dominant entity to engage with a group like the UN. Whether you're talking about international law and the United States, or IT standards and Microsoft, you have the group wanting everyone to play by the same rules and the dominant player wanting to leverage its advantages.
Doesn't mean that Microsoft (or the US) is bad; that's just logical behavior for an entity in a dominant position.
Now I've just drawn a comparison between the US and Microsoft, so I know my karma's shot to hell.
I should buy some cement.
RAMMS+EIN, I just wanted to mention I like the way you think. I might not agree with your conclusions, but I like your approach anyhow.
P.S. The difference between the *nix "coalition" and the old Unix fragmentation is that the coalition is driven by agreed-on standards. Business is like people -- it has to learn and grow. The vendors I mentioned see the potential of a services-based business model and realize it's a better fit for the industry. Like the buggy and whip makers, those companies who resist the model too long are doomed to virtual extinction.
While we techies may be rabid supporters of particular approaches, business cares about generating revenue from it's customers, and the consumer wants to be able to access those business services and entertainments.
It's that simple. Beyond that, it's all a bitter bickering between techies, and no one outside our community really gives a damn unless it affects their life or wallet.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Not at all. GNU was started in response to the lockin of IBM, AT&T, DEC, Pyramid, and others. Microsoft wasn't much more than Bill Gates' brain-fart at the point GNU began.
In fact, Microsoft began their approach to marketting from the same perspective as GNU: freedom from the big vendors and outrageous licensing fees.
What both were really saying is that competition is good for business. It leads to better solutions.
What Microsoft forgot is that business only benefits when the better solutions are generic and can be applied to a variety of problems without fear of barratry.
They never have been very good at delivering quality -- the first release of their C compiler didn't even handle pointers properly, making it effectively a useless, overpriced prototype of a compiler at best. The combination of market domination tactics and refusal to acknowledge or correct defects in their products or their support of industry standards is why Microsoft stands alone.
Despite their size, Microsoft is still only a small percentage of the global IT market. Outside the US, they don't matter half as much as they'd like. China, India, Japan, Europe, Australia, the UK -- most regions are backing the same international standards as the big vendors.
Standards level the playing field. It makes it easier to port apps, it makes it easier to implement secure systems because everyone is familiar with the essential capabilities and how to use them. With Windows, it's a perpetual churn as Microsoft tries to come up with their own way of doing what the industry has already been doing for years.
It seems a tremendous waste of energy and resources that costs society and industry an awful lot of overtime, lost weekends, lost data, and money. All to service the collective egos of one company's board of directors.
It just baffles me that anyone thinks Microsoft has real power when push comes to shove. When the final line is drawn, on one side are not just the standards, but everyone that Microsoft has pissed off by losing data, overcharging for an "upgrade" that still doesn't fix fundamental problems, etc.
More importantly, it is the revenue streams and survival of global industry vs. one company.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is the death knell for IT development and innovation in the United States.
Let me paint you a picture:
1) Microsoft patents as much technology as it can under US jurisdiction.
2) If you want to make something new, and retain control over it, you must do it outside the US. The rest of the world will make IT innovation more attractive to the masses by championing open source and open standards.
3) All non-Microsoft IT development goes overseas. (Heck, the labor is already being offshored. Just offshore the whole shebang.)
4) US loses much of it's ability to innovate in the IT market.
5) US becomes a technology consumer instead of a technology creator.
This process is inevitable when so much greed is involved. Witness the US energy industry. By and large it is addicted to foreign sources. This is because of greed and an unwillingness to change the status quo. (i.e. moving to alternative sources other than oil.) Is being addicted to foreign oil a benefit to the US economy? Absolutely not. Is the control of all IT innovation by a central source a benefit to the US economy? Again, no. Does it matter to the short sighted corporations pushing these agendas? Nope. Not one bit.