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Microsoft Advised To Learn To Love Linux

Posted by Hemos on from the start-facing-up-to-it dept.

mikael writes "ZDnet is reporting that the management guru Clayton Christensen (author of "The Innovator's Dilemma") has advised Microsoft to learn to love Linux. In particular he advises Microsoft to purchase "Research in Motion", otherwise they will see their applications sucked off from the desktop and onto handheld devices such as the Blackberry."

3 of 418 comments (clear)

  1. Dvorak vs Christensen by jbeaupre · · Score: 4, Informative

    Take what Christensen says with a grain of salt. I used to admire Clayton Christensen, but over time found he was more business pop culture than substance. John Dvorak put it better than I could when he wrote a piece ome time back http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1628049,00.as p Christensen's 15 minutes is up. Back to business.

    --
    The world is made by those who show up for the job.
  2. Many would use MS Office in Linux. by Devi0s · · Score: 5, Informative

    MS Office is the only tool that can correctly render *ALL* Microsoft Word .doc documents. Anyone who collaborates with clients by passing Microsoft Word .doc files around needs to use Office, with the exception of those who do not use custom templates or other Word features.

    In a recent thread about OpenOffice, (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/13/13392 21&tid=185) I tried to summarize some of the major points that were repeatedly mentioned, and a major point was:

    OpenOffice's storage format is not .doc. Just like MS Word saves documents by defualt in it's (proprietary, closed-source) native format, .doc, to leverage all of Word's features (instead of .rtf or .xml or .sxw), OpenOffice needs to store documents in it's native (non-proprietary, open-source) format, .sxw, to leverage all of it's features.

    However, OpenOffice is a great tool to give to developers, IT staff, and anyone else that does not have to collaborate with clients, executives, and managers by passing around Word .doc files. A simple PDF of their sxw document will do and it's a hell of a lot cheaper (free).

    The lack of full .doc support in OpenOffice is one of about three remaining things that keeps me from moving to Linux in the workplace.

    2) Assonine developers that insist on perpetuating Microsoft's browser monopoly and closed standards that use Internet Explorer only technologies to deliver their content. (ActiveX tops my list here). Unfortunately, to do my business, I am unable to boycott all of these sites.

    3) The MS Exchange connector tools for Linux email clients are not yet capable of dealing with some of the features of Exchange / BackOffice that are leveraged by my employer.

    --
    - Have you ever noticed that the more you learn about technology, the more stupid you sound trying to explain it?
  3. Re:How to kill Linux MS Style. by hyphz · · Score: 4, Informative

    > If it's GPLed, we'd just fix it.

    Sure. The problem, however, is that once you've fixed it, you have to shout louder than Microsoft to let people know that you've fixed it. Shout louder than Microsoft? Good luck.

    And, sadly, doing this would not violate the GPL at all as long as the broken Linux was given away. As far as I'm aware the GPL doesn't specify any minimum quality requirement for permitted distribution. The type of attack described is, actually, a very real possibility and something which should be guarded against.