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."

Comments

What?!

[hoborocks]

What is this? Could this be serious? They did recently acknowledge Linux as an operating system, instead of a cancer (they included support for it in VirtualPC). A very fine move on their part, but perhaps they are onto the final stage (Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Sadness, finally Acceptance?) Though they are not dying, perhaps they see an opportunity to "Accept" the fact that Open Source Software has been around and will be around much longer than anything else.

We must be wary though - could this be a wolf in sheep's clothing? Could this be a false branch? Might they trap the OSS developers at the meeting-place and hold them ransom?!

Who knows...

Re:Vlad the Impaler...

[jd]

H wasn't the only one. There were numerous massacres in Scotland, where one clan would invite another round for a feast, but forgot to mention the bit about not leaving afterwards.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, there was an incident involving Chamberlin, Stalin and a few other dignitories in the 1930s...

Ho hum, again?

[yagu]

And, for my more serious post.... Microsoft has "reached out" before. Seemingly not many remember their big PR campaign when they first released NT circa 1992. One of the big claims, one of the big selling points of their "new technology" (not what NT stands for, btw) was NT's POSIX compliance.... Microsoft purportedly was then about to "join" the open architecture community. They even convinced me to go work for them. But, it turned out they didn't do complete POSIX (only implemented the API, not the User Utilities), and only did the POSIX at all to get government contracts (I know this, I was at an internal presentation where "Margaret" prefaced the presentation with the comments, "We are only doing POSIX as a checkbox, so we can get government contracts..." (I am not making this up.))

Re:Ho hum, again?

[ebuck]

My favorite "reach out" was close enough to reach into my old workplace a few years back.

Basically they invited a staunch Palm OS advocate (who incidentally was a *BSD/UNIX advocate) to ask about the state of PDAs/handhelds and what could be done to improve it.

He was really excited, as it would allow him to give direct input into the designers of what would be the next Windows CE. When he came back he was sporting a new PDA, and indicated that overall he had a great time. That is, until he talked about the time when they met with the group that wanted their input.

Basically, everything that was asked for was corrected, and the outside "experts" were persuaded, conjoled, and flat out told what they wanted was a windows-like interface that acted like Palm OS, but in a more windows-98 like way.

Funny thing is, it worked to some degree. Many of the staunch Palm fans were very busy the next three or so months trying to get the most out of their newly accquired Windows products. Some "converted" whole-heartedly, but a bit-by-bit they eventually drifted back to the Palm-side.

It could be much harder to make this work in FOSS circles, as MS really doesn't have anything to offer them, yet. But it may be just as disruptive.

Microsoft's knee-jerk response.

[rice_burners_suck]

This is either a knee-jerk reaction to their missed projections for the quarter, or this is an April Fool's joke 29 days late. Well, it goes right in line with what I posted in another story about Microsoft:

It's not a surprise at all that Microsoft missed their quarterly revenue projection. After all, the company is very accustomed to basically controlling the marketplace and dictating their terms upon their customers. The quarterly projections must have accounted for nearly everybody still using prior versions of Windows to be using Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. They expected tons of sales of the newest Microsoft Office. However, many sysadmins and IT departments are wary of further "upgrades" due to the problems posed by them. Many users who have Office 2000 continue to use it because newer versions, despite their glossy advertisements, really offer nothing new for this type of work. Other users, such as most employees at this company that used to use MS Office, are discovering OpenOffice.org and discovering, for various reasons, that they actually like it better. Essentially, many companies are slowly migrating away from Windows and Office, finding that other software out there is quite capable of doing the job without all the hoopla.

In our organization, spending on software has declined almost to nothing. We no longer buy MS Office products because OpenOffice.org has eliminated the need to do so; all of our critical infrastructure runs on Linux and FreeBSD; and the desktops and workstations that run Windows continue to run the same versions of Windows that originally came on those workstations. Therefore, we use Windows 98, Me, and XP Personal, which came on several eMachines we bought for office use. And the funniest thing is that while the Linux and FreeBSD boxes continue to use the latest stable and release versions of the OS and software, the Windows boxes have not been upgraded, and there are no plans to do so. It would only be costly, and would offer us nothing in exchange. And I believe the same applies to countless organizations the world over. People will simply not continue to upgrade hardware and software forever.

That, my friends, is why Microsoft missed its quarterly revenue projection.

I'd say that pretty much sums it up. Microsoft has finally realized, after I don't know how many years, that it will not pay to stay with the old fashioned business model that no longer fits.

What is the old saying?

[the eric conspiracy]

If you are going to sup with the devil, bring a long spoon...

Holy Disengenuity Batman!

[lheal]

What a load of baloney!

Microsoft wants to interoperate? Go ahead! Just quit *not* interoperating.

Microsoft wants to reach out to the Open Source community? Uh, they really don't get it, do they. There aren't any leaders to reach out to! There are leaders, but it's not a labor union or a PTA.

We'll judge you by your actions, not by what you say to our leaders.

Pattern of Conduct

[Thunderstruck]

The typical MS pattern is this: Make it easier to accomplish your goal with our software and the competition dies. Make it easier to just use our browser and netscape dies. Make it easier to use our word processor and Word Perfect dies.

Now take all these OSS groups. Many programmers want lots of people to use their software. They work for free, but they still get credit. Microsoft can give them all the credit in the world. All they have to do is bow down and worship ... wait... all they have to do is write software for Windows. Do this, and the competitor (Linux) will die.

"A Rising Tide... and Barriers to Entry"

[mcdtracy]

Microsft has been characterized by their actions over the years as predatory... even when it hurt the bottom line. They would target and squash a company just because they could... because they relished a cutthroat style of competition to get motivated.

If I could get an ear within MS I'd try to get them to admit to themselves that the Internet made them more money and the Internet was entirely structured from Open Standards... ethernet, TCP/IP, sockets, HTML over HTTP and on and on... They profitted enormously from NOT fighting these standards... no dial-up MSN only.

The reason for this is the Rising Tide effect.
More investment is poured into a market and most companies benefit in some ratio to their marketshare... there's some shifting but the big winners accelerate adoption and don't fight the new standards that are causing the explosive growth.

Microsoft saw the benefits and only tried minor hacks to the standards (DHTML for example).

When microsoft realizes that having your only significant competitor cost almost nothing they should have the next big Eureka moment. The way to destroy the Sun, HP, and IBM Unix businesses is to accelerate the enterprise adoption of Linux.

Oracle got it... if they spend less on Sun, HP and IBM hardware they have more budget for our products... duh. IT budgets are finite... growth comes from getting more of the budget.

Sun, HP and IBM could be effectively driven out of the Enterprise software business. Enterprise deployments of big applications goes crazy based upon new cost models and Microsoft's boat rises on that new high tide.

The logical extension is commercial Linux versions of their higher margin products (MS SQL, Visual Studio) and even more growth as a company when
the only other significant alternative is an OSS project with little revenue to help it compete for Enterprise requirements.

That's what I might tell this guy to explain to Bill gates and Bill of course would sob gently...
"You mean we've already won? There's no one left to kill? Just mine the veins we already own?."
Well... there is Oracle still.

Bill will likely develop an interest in politics where dirty tricks still mean something.

McD

Re:It's a trap!!!!

[caluml]

Perens, no. He's cool. Stallman has his head screwed on, but rubs people up the wrong way. Raymond - I have no comment.

Re:This Is What Our Congress Thinks?

[ewhac]

Yeah, [patent law] works well if your a member of the Billionare club, Incoporated.

Actually, the statement is mostly correct; the law itself is mostly just fine. What's horribly broken is the patent examination and granting process. The examiners have done a shameful job in maintaining the integrity of patents by allowing patents on trivial "inventions" or re-purposing of existing inventions; by allowing patents that do not fully describe how to re-implement the claimed invention(s); and by allowing patents that are nearly unreadable with legalese and deliberately vague language.

Fix the examination and approval process, and the patent system will almost certainly sort itself out again without any legislative changes.

Schwab

Re:MafiaSoft

[Bisqwit]

From the company who has said laughing "open standard? doesn't that mean it's broken, incomplete?" (a Finnish Microsoft representative in an interview I don't remember which).
I'm not too optimistic.