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Microsoft Wants Sit-Down With OSS Advocates
bonch writes "Microsoft is reaching out to the OSS community and wanting a sit-down to discuss how to better to interoperate with them. At a conference sponsored by the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) in Cambridge, Md., Microsoft's Brad Smith extended an olive branch to its competitors, including the OSS community. 'We're going to have to figure out how to build some bridges between the various parts of our industry,' he said. Eric Raymond responds, saying the first steps Microsoft could do are to open their file formats and support open standards."
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
--sig fault--
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mohandas Gandhi
The more you know, the less you understand.
How about following the RFC's to start. Once M$ adhears to the specs in RFC's devolpers will not longer have to alter RFC compliant code to be M$ compliant.
You only live once, so you might as well have fun before you die.
If this is a publicity stunt, someone in Microsoft's marketting department's getting fired. This move won't sway many to stay with Microsoft products. If anything, it acknowledges OSS as a real force in the marketplace, bringing more people consider OSS. Microsoft simply realizes that by cooperating, they can possibly use OSS to their advantage like many others have.
The European Union (EU) is after Microsoft in a big way. The EU wants them to enable operability with other systems. The timing is such that these may be interrelated.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Why would any company ask its competition how they could get along better, if the real motivation wasn't to be more competitive? Am I missing something?
-- Fratz, human
MS does support open standards. They can read and write to them just fine. They just like to "enhance" them, and "innovate" to add functionality that, sadly, leaves open software hopelessly out of date and incompatible.
If you want full featured software, come over to the dar..., uh, our side of the street.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Sure, what could be wrong with that?
Name a good software company that has had a serious relationship with Microsoft as a competitor and has come off better over a 5-year period as a result of trying to cooperate with them (OK, IBM lasted a bit longer, but most are dead).
IBM has demonstrated any number of ways of showing some level of cooperation with the open or free software communities. Apple, too, has earned some good karma, basing their OS and browser on open code and architecture, even if they keep a lot proprietary. Sun has been involved as well, and it hasn't kept them from keeping other things private. So why can't Microsoft think of something like most other major companies have, without calling a conference of competitors that sounds too much like looking for a target to attack, much like SCO's supposed invitation to IBM and the open source community to sit down and work things out?
Stop being so evil. Microsoft has enough money in the bank to be able to afford business ethics and earn trust.
How insincere can Microsoft be? They don't need to sit down with anybody. All they need to do is publish their specifications for the API to their operating system. This claim that they want to 'find common ground' could hardly be more insincere.
When they're ready to cut the BS and be serious, all they have to do is publish their API. After that, let's talk.
Best regards.
-Stop saying OSS is Communist
-Full CSS2/XHTML 1.1 in IE7 with no proprietary extensions
-As stated, open the file formats.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Microsoft cannot get the OSS community to agree to anything. They can't say: "Do xxx we have a signed agreement from your CEO".
Even Linus can only speak for 10% or so of the Linux code base.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"If this is a publicity stunt, someone in Microsoft's marketting department's getting fired. This move won't sway many to stay with Microsoft products. If anything, it acknowledges OSS as a real force in the marketplace, bringing more people consider OSS."
Well said. But that's not the end of the stupidity. Microsoft cannot allow this kind of talk to gain credibility. FOSS advocates have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being perfectly frank and honest. Add to this the credibility and exposure they'd earn from being treated as equals by Microsoft, and they'd represent more of a threat than ever before.
These are not marketing folks they'd be sitting down with. FOSS geeks don't come out of the boardroom talking about synergies and new paradigms, they come out saying, things like 'MS has refused to budge on their third-rate security measures, their proprietary file formats and closed APIs. As a result, you the consumer will continue to suffer, in spite of our best efforts to mitigate the damage.'
Microsoft has a pathological streak a mile wide when it comes to partnership and dialogue. IBM, Lotus, Stack Technologies and Novell have all been victimised by their blindly opportunistic avarice. They all left it to the lawyers to do the talking, and never expressed their full and frank opinions on MS' business practices - likely because in many cases it would leave them open to pot-and-kettle accusations.
FOSS advocates aren't (typically) officers of publicly owned corporations, so they don't have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders that requires that they 'play nice'. If they're given a pulpit to preach from, you can count on some fairly frank discussion that corporate powers-that-be would find quite difficult to address. That's why even 'good guys' like IBM tends to avoid open discussion about the principles of Free Software.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
All the Slasdot stories about Microsoft have been very interesting lately, both in their number and in the content of the following posts. First, Longhorn is a no-show--a real honest to goodness flop. It's like Windows XP Plus. Second, someone at Microsoft blew it big time on their earnings projection. They probably have the best accountants and economists in the industry, and they made a mistake. The first time in a long time (ever?) they missed their earnings goal.
So why all the publicity? Their stock is flat, their earnings are no longer in double-digit growth, their future OS is thoroughly unimpressive, their Office suite is prohibitively expensive, they have no diversification that can support their profit margins in the long-term, they are the last to endorse OSS for commodity products, their competitors are innovating like mad, and what does Microsoft have to show for it? Publicity. Keep their name out there while they scramble to stay relevant.
I think Microsoft is in trouble, and they are desparately seeking ways to stay in business for a decade more while their competitors eat their lunch. Unfortunately, there just is no way that Microsoft can compete with IBM and Sun in their current form. Microsoft is too dependent on revenue from proprietary software to continue without complete reform of the company, which includes no longer being the largest software company in the world. I expect to see a period of significant negative growth for them some time in the years ahead.
Support for Linux in Virtual PC existed long before Microsoft bought it from Connectix. In fact, at one stage you could buy it with an OS pack that had Red Hat Linux pre-installed. That is not available now.
And glancing through the web site product specs to research my post, there is no mention of Linux. Since Virtual PC emulates a hardware PC, they'd have to purposely somehow disable emulation for Linux (if that is even possible, it's like Intel making a CPU that wouldn't run an OS).
In other words, I don't think Virtual PC is an acknowledgment of Linux as an alternative OS that PC users would want to run.
The FUD that they pay "research" companies to publish is though...
:)
I agree with you that, for example, it doesn't make much sense for a average consumer to upgrade from office 2000 to office 2003. And obviously they haven't had a bump on consumer OS sales, given that Longhorn is still off in the horizon.
That said, these same product lines are still quite succesful in the corporate world. I'm talking the large companies with thousands of employees to deal with. In this envirnoment windows 2003 is attractive, even when linux is free, because it is jam packed with things to help in enterprise wide server administration. Let's not kid ourselves, it takes alot to be a good linux/unix system admin, and you guys can wear that badge with pride. Since the market is not exactly flooded with experts like yourselves, companies like it that a less experienced person can still keep a win2k3/XPSP2 network up and running, and can apply rules to machines company wide, using tools like active directory with pretty UI. Thanks to win2k3 and SP2, which turn off most services by default, and generally are more solid secure products, disasters like code red are much less likely.
Plus win2k3 and Office 2003 both have a slant towards collaboration, which isn't that attractive to consumers but intriguing for businesses. win2k3 has share point, and office has lots of collaboration tools (which will probably expand significantly thanks to the groove aquisition). They are also doing big pushes into the small business market with retail management systems, point of sales products, and even an accounting software in the works.
So it seems that while Longhorn has been in it's long development, MS has concentrated their vision towards the corporate world. This makes it easy to think they are absent from the consumer market, and hence somehow failing. But they still seem to be raking in the dough.
I think it wreaks of desperation. MS isn't the new thing anymore, they are the big bad monopoly. It's not easy to market as the big bad guy, so they want to be seen like IBM,the former big bad guy that's getting attention over OSS commitments. Plus that whole SCO thing didn't crush linux as expected, and longhorn is getting poor reviews. People are frustrated with poor security ruining they computers.
In the past MS didn't even give a phukene reach around as they embraced the competition, and now they are offering to reach out ?
I just don't really care have microsoft reach out. They carved out their solitude with monopolistic practices, and now they can deal with the consequences.
Microsoft's problem isn't proprietary software, but rather shrink-wrapped software. There's tons of room for proprietary software in the real world (as far as I know, /. isn't open source) and there are lots of people still making money off of it. The ASP model says that it's not the software that's important, but the service that goes along with it. Ever wonder why IBM is throwing its weight behind Linux? They never made a lot of money selling OS/2, and probably even lost some money on it, but they did make money servicing it after the fact. Kind of like printers - sell the printer at cost and then sell ink cartridges at a big markup. Retailers understand the concept of "loss leader". It's better for IBM to throw a few bucks into Linux and sell support on the back end. The problem is that Microsoft just doesn't get this concept because it's never made any real money off of service. Try looking for service revenues on their yearly reports. It's a real hard number to find, and it's very, very small relative to product revenues.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.