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Microsoft in 2008
r.jimenezz writes "Over at Wired there's an entertaining article written by Gary Wolf. It purports to be a memo written by a 2008-Microsoft-employed Linus Torvalds to Bill, arguing against Steve Ballmer's desire to go back to the untenable OS monopoly proposition instead of the 'new order': Windows is now some sort of desktop environment on top of an open OS!"
MS just made $10 billion in a single quarter. They're not going anywhere anytime soon.
Can it get any more horny than this?
I've heard of some sick fetishes (I do have access to the Internet, after all), but you take the cake, my friend!
I think he's been hanging out with John Titor a bit too much lately. ;)
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
It's entertaining. I don't think I would mod the article 'Insightful' or 'Interesting', but I would mod it 'Funny'. A choice snippet (taken out of context no doubt, but still)
You never made me alter my goal, which was world domination for Linux. I'll never forget your line: "Come on, Linus, infect the mothership." I still believe that was the best recruiting pitch ever uttered. We both took a lot of criticism from our partisans, but look what we've accomplished.
Inflect the mothership? Just writing this makes me chuckle. Seems kind of creepy, and dare I say, 'borgish'. Oh well, I suppose getting co-opted by Mothership Microsoft had somehow warped the psuedo-Torvald's mind.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
"...infect the mothership..."
That's poking fun at the movie "Independence Day". The PowerBook that manages to establish an authenticated PPP session, get an IP address, transfer a virus to the alien host (pun intended), then REMOTELY EXECUTE IT.
Okay, yes, I'm a unix admin, mac user, network engineer, and the mere concept has my dying on the floor laughing as I watch the Classic environment do that.
Anyway, point is....I'm betting the author has watched that movie recently.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
"Windows is now some sort of desktop environment on top of an open OS!"
Wow, so in the future they'll keep copying Apple. That's big news.
~Philly
They finally ship Longhorn.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
From TFA:
You told me that if I ever hit a wall with Steve or his people, I should let you know.
Somehow, the image of Linus Torvalds grabbing Steve Ballmer and swinging him like a bat at a brick wall, Neo-vs.-Smith style.... It's a good thing I didn't have any soda in my mouth when I read that.
I mean, the old NT codebase has some interesting capabilities. What about building a Debian/NT on top of it?
Like any corporation that has survived and thrived due to a monopoly, it will never change and will take a very long time to die. See AT&T for a useful analogue.
We've built a Windows desktop and application framework around a Linux operating system, and both sides of this equation - open source and proprietary - are needed for our plan to continue to work.
In other news, RMS announces the imminent release of HURD. "I can feel it, any day now, " says RMS.
When asked about the new Winux, RMS suddenly issued blue smoke and sparks, muttering "Freedom, freedom, where is the freedom," before crashing to the floor.
Anyone else notice the date on the memo? :)
I just lost 5 minutes of my life that my employer will never get back...
Since I have first-hand knowledge of Microsoft work environments as that's where I'm sitting right at this very moment, I'll enlighten you about the good parts, and the bad. (Disclaimer: I am not employed by Microsoft; however I am on a contract at their Redmond location, and for anybody keeping track: I'm on lunch right now. :p )
First, there's the free drinks. Every building has at least one Kitchen. In my building, on my floor alone, there are 2. On floors 2 and 3 there are 2 more kitchens each, for a total of 6 in the building. In each kitchen is the type of floor-standing refrigerator you'd see at the grocery store or a 7-11, the kind they keep soft drinks in. Well, much like the grocery store or 7-11, just about every soft drink you could want is in there. Every "Coke" and "Pepsi" variant, Root Beer, Nestea, Dr. Pepper, different juices (cranberry, grapefruit, grape, apple, orange, V8), skim/2%/whole/chocolate milk, a variety of Talking Rain, and so forth. Not to mention the 12 flavors of Tea and a similarly diverse variety of coffee. Are you powered by mountain dew? Your batteries will never run low at Microsoft.
Second, there's the hours. Want to come in at 10am? ok, come in at 10. Want to work the weekend? no prob, you've got 24 hour building access thanks to your security badge. When you get sick of sitting at your desk, you can walk down the hall to a fooseball or ping-pong table and take a breather. Or, if you're in a building with an atrium (like mine) you can go sit there and read for a while. They don't micro-manage you, they like assigning people tasks and then letting those people handle those tasks independently.
So I'm a perl wizard (I have a beard and a hat too!) and I can do things with perl that is beyond the comprehension of most of the people I work with. Which is absolutely fine, really, because it takes me about an hour to accomplish something that would take 4 hours for them to do by hand. I tell them it'll take two hours and I've still got an extra hour to read slashdot.
I've never once had somebody look over my shoulder, and I work in a cube farm. There's 40 cubes in this room, and they aren't even cubes so much as the partitioned desks you see in a call center. Nobody is walking up behind me to check in on me. I produce my deliverables and they show me their gratitude.
Now, the downsides... Nothing works, and that's OK. Or rather, when something doesn't work the way it SHOULD work, people just shrug it off and accept it. The internal network can at some times be as slow as a 56k modem, and that's OK. (I'm not making this up, I speed-tested it) When the tools crash persistently day after day? That's OK. There's a standard of established mediocrity within the company's internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
A minor downside is the "independent work" thing I mentioned above. Sometimes tasks get subdivided to the point where you've got 4 people working on a one-man job and the only way to accomplish anything is to have all 4 of those people in the same room at the same time, which can be a daunting task to accomplish. But this is really quite trivial compared to the acceptance of mediocrity that seems to pervade the campus.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I don't know about this. My youngest kid had no problems whatsoever with KDE. For the most part, it's pretty similar to Windows; point-and-click stuff.
As an old OS2 user, I find Windows in every incarnation to just be a stunted imitation of the WPS, which was a truly awesome GUI still light years ahead of XP. I don't see anything particularly innovative or easy about the Windows XP interface. I deal with a lot of plain users, and half of them panic a little when you ask them "Now please press the Start button".
Most of the time their more-knowledgeable son/daughter/brother/friend/neighbor puts icons to Internet Exploder and Outlook Distress, along with the photo software and Solitaire on the desktop and people never look one bit further.
The only place where Windows has something of an edge is in software installation, and the problem there is that there's a number of different systems depending on distro. I mainly use Slackware, but when I played with Mandrake, it's package GUI installation system was every bit as easy as Windows XP.
So I can't really understand what people mean when they say "Windows is easier to use". I mean, what parts of Windows does the average user plug into on anything approaching a regular basis that's more involved than double-clicking on the program.
I'll place a bet that if you put a Linux box running KDE with Firefox and Thunderbird on the desktop as Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, many users will probably be just fine. It's the product recognition thing that gets most users.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I was assimulated by Microsoft..
Not completely, it seems. They forgot to install the spellchecker.
True. But the ass-emulator seems to be working fine!
... There's a standard of established mediocrity within [Microsoft's] internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
What makes you think that Linus would solve this problem? In all seriousness, look at the "stable" 2.6 kernel branch, and the attitude demonstrated by comments like "some kernels will be good, others will be bad... we'll find out which kernels are broken soon enough".
I'm not saying that Linus himself believes in such mediocrity; but it's a bit unreasonable to expect that he would improve things at Microsoft when Linux, under his "benevolent dictatoriship" is plagued by exactly the same problems.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
We're slacks and ties in the IT department here (Friday you can wear short sleaved collars though!) and we're still exceptionally mediocre. I imagine I'd be no less mediocre if I could dress the way I wished.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
And people wonder where the acceptance of mediocrity comes from. It's a way of life. In work. In dress. In attitude. Sorry, not my scene.
Yeah, your capabilities are directly related to the way that you're dressed at that moment. If they wore business suits they would code so much better. Have you ever seen Superman do anything special when he's dressed like Clark Kent? Me neither. It's that suit that gives him all the power.
So good post.
Alternatively, now that Oracle has bought Peoplesoft, Oracle is vulnerable. It hasn't the money left to resist an attack from Microsoft. With Microsoft wanting more of the server market, taking over companies dealing in high-end server software would be not only logical but consistant with Microsoft's tactics in the past.
A third possibility would be for Microsoft to buy part of the Internet backbone, or one of the suppliers of it. Juniper is growing in popularity but isn't so big as to be able to resist a buyout. Cisco's not been doing too great, recently, and may be vulnerable. Lucent would be easy pickings and may even welcome such a move.
Finally, Microsoft may opt for a "strategic partnership" with Boeing. Boeing is in the middle of a massive struggle with Airbus, and it's unlikely both can survive. If Boeing wants to win, it needs more money. Microsoft doubled its profits last quarter, even after allowing for the shareholder payout AND the record EU fine. Aircraft may soon have WIFI. If Microsoft can become the only vendor who can work with such WIFI points, they'd have absolute control of the business market.
Finally, Microsoft could buy a hard drive vendor. If the OS came pre-installed on the hard drive to OEMs, then fewer OEMs would be willing to install rival Operating Systems....
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)