Slashdot Mirror
Steve Ballmer's Thoughts On Free Software
An anonymous reader writes, "Steve Ballmer during a 3-day visit to India was asked about whether Free software is the future of India. And he effectively circumvented the question and answered that in the future, software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as subscription fees, lower cost hardware, advertising and of course traditional transaction. What is amusing is that in answering the question, he refuses to use the word 'free' or anything close to it."
Agreed. Some of these extremely sudden and verbose posts coming to the immediate defense of the mega-corporations wax suspicious. Did someone say plant? I didnt. Who's talking? I already did!
I like that line too.. funny how Microsoft alawys expects somebody else's margins to take the hit to bring the cost of computing down... notice how the price of Vista went UP for the version with Aero? You'd think after 5 years of pure (85-90%) profit from windows already they wouldn't have made up costs to recover. Hasn't Microsoft already been rewarded quite handsomely for their version of Windows XP? After 5 years why would anybody expect to PAY for those features... everybody has them already! For example a $1000 cpu from 3 years ago would be work $10 bucks today, why is software somehow different, why must we pay for the same thing over and over? Let alone MORE! Microsoft is still believing that businesses "owe" them for such a wonderful system... in a capitalist system NOBODY is owed after the work is done... they like to tell other companies that, but don't seem to get the idea them selves.