Microsoft's 'Hands-On' Linux Lab

aneroid writes "eWeek has a story on Microsoft allowing a third party to present a 'hands-on lab' that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software at its annual worldwide partner show in Minnesota this weekend. It was run by Don Johnson (not the actor), who explained in true MS style how the things that are considered wrong with Windows are planned or an advantage. Whether it's for the desktop or server, wasn't clear. People did get to 'see the Apache Web server in action' and a KDE desktop.Is this more of a preemptive strike where the Linux experience is so bad (slow machines, old software) they wouldn't bother to check it out in the future, thus securing an existing partner/client? Or are they that confident people won't stray if they're invited to sample the competition? According to the Register, 'Microsoft is unlikely to stop developers moving to Linux and open source so its best hope lies in articulating a strategy of co-existence to limit the 'damage' to its business.'"

Comments

Re:I attended the conference and this demo...

[poopooboi]

Interesting??? Best ... troll ... ever :-D

Other than also because Netscape sucked?

[Moraelin]

"Microsoft have a relatively featureless, uninnovative browser compared to the competetion."

Well, good, because that's how I like my browsers. It's a browser, FFS, not a whole operating system. _All_ it has to do is render HTML pages. If it does that well, I'm perfectly content with that.

(And before you scream "Windows fanboy", go tell that to the makers of Firefox then too, because that one too had the goal of being "just a browser" all along.)

"Why is it so popular?"

Because back when it still mattered, and the browser market was up for grabs, Netscape was a festering pile of shit. It's easy to blame it on MS's OS monopoly and unfair practices, but the fact remains that Nescape was a buggy crashing mess on any OS, including Linux (yes, I ran it on Linux too) and on MacOS (yes, we had to test our web apps on Netscape on macs, too.)

Again, feel a need to scream "Windows fanboy"? Well, go tell that to the Debian developpers too, then. One of the standard Gentoo fortune cookies is of them joking about using Netscape's crashes to close several windows with a single click, and how that's progress.

And then came Firefox, which was for ages just vapourware. No, lemme rephrase that: it took years before even being worthy of being called "vapourware."

Instead of making a browser when it mattered, and when the market was up for grabs, they went into fantasy land and spent years coding their own widgets (yeah, I sooo need yet another widget set that doesn't act like any other app on that system), and their own bug tracking system (good one, no doubt, but not a browser), and god knows what else. That's _years_ spent reinventing wheels that already had been done better, instead of actually making a damned browser.

There were _years_ of IE being the _only_ usable choice. I don't know about you, but in my book that's reason enough for it to own the market.

"If you were the boss of a browser company, I am sure you be complaining too."

If I was the boss of a company who lost the market because they had a total crap product in the first place, and then spent years re-inventing the wheel instead of having a replacement product to sell... well, yes, guess I too would blame it on Microsoft. Beats accepting the cruel reality.