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Mozilla Chairman Speaks on Open Source/Microsoft
ChrisMDP writes "Tom's Hardware has an interesting interview with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. They discuss, amongst other things, what it's like competing with Microsoft, and Firefox as an operating system." From the interview: "Pragmatically, I think we have to distinguish between a base set of extensions and everything else. It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions when there are nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings. There's a basic tension in principle that can never be completely resolved."
It's called bloat. It happened to Red Hat. It happened to SuSE and it happened to Opera. You have to have limited objectives to avoid bloat. This is the key for browsers like Lynx etc. I would say Slackware Linux is one of the few distros that has managed to avoid bloat whilst still being very modern and "full of possibilities"...
Microsoft has never intended to compete on a level playing field. Instead they have tipped the field to favor themselves, sacrificing product quality and user benefit over and over again.
This is a great quote. It explains partially how Microsoft got where they are today, and why their current size and monopoly is unsustainable. Unless they make a fundamental change in their business model, something's going to happen to them.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
The challenge is changing the end-user more than anything. I have tried for the longest to get my company to convert to Firefox, but users have integrated, in their heads, that to use the web is to use IE, and they can tell they're firing up another browser they get nervous, blame all problems going forward on the new browser, and simply don't like change. Microsoft did something very powerful by link IE to Windows. IE has become saturated within the minds of users. The few users I have converted over I have to change the new browser icon to the big "E."
People also have a great amount of grace for microsoft, excusing their security holes, making such statements as, "well, if another browser gets as popular as IE then it'll have the same problems, etc." And I'm talking about IT professionals not just end users. I try to explain that, no, Microsoft has been uniquely bad at security....
No matter what the browser, it has an uphill climb against IE....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
somehow I always think that this premise might actually be somewhat true for our society:
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Forgot where that is from (Spaceballs?), but sometimes I feel that evil does win out in the end. Companies that use evil tactics to get ahead may not win out in the long run, but really screw things up in the short timeframe.
Of course you could look at it this way, Firefox could be an example of Good winning in the long run because Microsoft was being evil 5-8 years ago. Wow, its been that long already?
No, it's called bloat when the nearly infinite possibilities are part of the default application - the base set.
That's why Mozilla and Firefox work with extensions. Users can personalise their application, add the missing features they need (or think they need). But without the overhead of the missing features they don't need.
That's particularly true for a light-weight browser as Firefox.
But because the fact that lots of extensions exists and lots of combinations of extensions are possible, the problem of the nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings is as real in such a customisable application with extensions as it is in a bloated application.
Microsoft releases products for its customers, which is what it should do.
/.'ers more than anything else is that most people don't care about merit. They just use products that are there, and which do the job required. This is something which most geeks don't get.
However, the reason Microsoft is deemed evil by some is because it uses its power in order to capture marketshare. This is a huge faux pas in geekdom, which is traditionally a meritocracy.
What annoys
Mitch oughta know this by now. Product is just the wrapper for the business plan. Product is just a carton you put on a shelf to aim your markeing at. Product really doesn't matter all that much. If it did then Firefox and Openoffice would have been able to charge $5 for their product and make billions doing it. And Bill knows this too because the great genius of Bill Gates is understanding that if you talk to your competitors about 'product' it will distract them from looking at your business plan. And without a credible bizplan, products like Mozilla are essentially interesting experiments that demonstrate how close you can come to MS's product. In other words they are triumphs of reverse engineering. But as I said, 'product' really doesn't matter so those organizations have spent all their time and effort to replicate a wrapper, a box without having anything to put in the box.