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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--
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.
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
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.
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.
:)
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.
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.