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What Microsoft Could Learn from OSS and Linux
An anonymous reader writes "An article on OSWeekly.com discusses a few things that Microsoft could learn from OSS and Linux. 'As Microsoft continues to understand that open source does not mean they cannot generate a decent profit, I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option. Since the whole threatening to sue thing will be met with the same fan base response, just like the RIAA, it is certainly not a wise decision. And if Microsoft thinks Open Office is a pain now, try suing people over it, then see how many people refuse to buy their products.'"
They dont have to release code.. just give out a 100% accurate specification, and don't threaten to sue just because you write a program that can parse Word 97/07 docs.
This goes for any closed shop. Especially hardware vendors. We'll write the code, just release the docs! :)
Wow, could we have picked a title that would be more inviting to trolls? TFA is alright, but when I first saw that title I instantly thought, "Here we go again!" I guess that's to be expected on /. though :)
The next headline we'll see is "Hippy's Show Soldiers How to Clean Rifles".
Leave the money makin' to the convicted monopolists, shall we boys?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Microsoft already has the benefits of their product being free for home/casual users. It's called "piracy".
Besides which, Open Office is in no way a real threat to MSOffice's success and market dominance. Like Microsoft is supposed to throw away their monopoly because someone else has made a word processor for free? Right.
IBM used to be the alpha-dog on the block, only to be displaced by MicroSoft. Now it looks as though MS is on the way down, ready to be replaced by the new kid on the block.
It may not be an OSS company or product, and it may not be in the next five years, but it's coming.
They could learn how to make a good operating system!
Yeah, mod me flaimbait/troll, but I couldn't resist.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Maybe to treat people, their customers, like they matter?
"I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option"
Why in the hell would they do that or be enforced to do so?!
You can't enforce anybody to 'open up code'.
Supporting ODF or opening their own formats or codecs would suffice.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Lunix zealot/"journalist" with no business experience worth mentioning delivers condescending speech on what Microsoft needs to "get" and how much money they're giving up by not switching to Ubuntu's business model. Yawn.
Releasing an open source product and recovering development costs through support, donations and government grants is NOT the only option this time. In fact, it's not an option at all for most currently sold software products, given the number of developers required to write and maintain them vs need for support and public goodwill.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
With over 90% of computers on the planet using MS OSes and software, who could learn from whom again?
An open-format Rich Text Format writer was build by Microsoft but not adopted by users. Now people have to pay, both litteraly and in figure of speach.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Microsoft is a business. OSS is a community. Microsoft is out to make money. Only part of OSS is generating money through payment for services. Microsoft is completely successful as a business, and is making lots of money - there is little, if anything more OSS can teach Microsoft about money making.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
maybe change the name to Billux or Gatesex?
Just about anything else could be released as Open Source, or given away free, and they'd do ok. They've done some things like that - Netmeeting was the first widespread H.323 voice/video/data/conferencing product, and while they didn't give out the source, the product was free beer (on Windows, of course), and was a reasonably standards-based reference implementation that everybody else in the industry could use. But messing with Office is messing with the crown jewels.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
>>And if Microsoft thinks Open Office is a pain now, try suing people over it, then see how many people refuse to buy their products.
Statements like that just shout "I am delusional!". The people using Open Office are kinda already refusing to buy Microsoft's products. I don't think Microsoft is shakin' in their boots about pissing off Open Office users.
They could learn to really let the users define the software.
They could learn to let go of the marketing department madatory requirements and buzzwords.
But perhaps most importantly, they could learn that the product name has absolutely nothing to do with it's function, but is more of a reflection of the original programmers wit.
OK maybe not so seriously.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
...if you actually know English grammar and punctuation rules. Knowing these things makes the article genuinely painful to read.
And if Microsoft thinks Open Office is a pain now ...
They don't. Nobody, and in terms of market share that's almost not an exaggeration, uses Open Office. If OOo would gain even a 10% market share, MS would probably like it, because it would help them argue that Microsoft Office isn't a monopoly.
Google Apps is a much bigger threat than OOo.
Oh please, please, please let that come to pass! And please god, have MS charge an obscene amount of money for it so nobody buys or uses it ever again!
You want to worker productivity to really increase? No more long Power Point meeting putting your workforce to sleep and wasting their time.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
After all, Open Office hasn't yet mastered a Clippy emulator.
(btw - I think GoogleDocs should be considered a broader threat to MS these days... I don't open files emailed to me any other way any longer)
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
FOSS => Taxpayer-subsidized software development?
To be polite: let's not go there.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option if they really want to stop making almost 3 billion dollars a year in sales.
There, fixed that for ya.
I think the author is a little extremist. I don't see MSFT opening MS Office any time in the next 10 years, and I don't think that the bulk of consumers will care - they just want to use what everyone else is using, i.e. a feedback loop. Also, the idea that huge, industry dominator A suing small company B somehow makes it more attractive for your company to work with B, makes no sense at all. If you go to management with this, they'll laugh at you.
They should have learned by now that Linux will maybe sooner but certainly later destroy them if they don't adapt.
Turning Windows into a Theme or a WindowManager and leaving the rest of the code to Wine AND focussing only on Word as a product after firing all their developers that suck (they, evidently, got plenty) would help that sinking ship.
Everything else is just buzz and wont produce income in the long run.
The article misses a huge loss that MS will take if it ever releases anything remotely open-source. Not something technical, but something under "marketing". It will lose the idea that closed-source is better in a vast majority of their markets.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
In other news, it would be better for humanity not to have cancer and diseases.
You jumped from point A to conclusion B awfully fast there. Why would they want to release the source code to Office? Also from TFA...
Ah...so you're worried that Microsoft would SUE someone using OpenOffice?
Honestly, I think OpenOffice is its own worst enemy. I've tried to switch to OpenOffice several times, but it just can't match my old Microsoft Office 97 in terms of launch and execution speed.
hmmm.. if they give out a spec, everyone will rip the piss out of them for both the bugs that make the program fail the spec and for lameness in the spec itself. If they release the source, hilarity at any lame coding.
Any open source microsoft office will be a _new_ project.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Can't wait for the year when most people won't even care what Microsoft does.
I don't care what you do. Switch to Mac. Delete Windows and install Linux. But for the love of (insert deity here), stop helping them. You're the cause of your own problem. And in some cases, the cause of our problems too (non-Windows games, non-Windows CAD/etc, SPAM, bots, worms, etc).
Since the whole threatening to sue thing will be met with the same fan base response, just like the RIAA, it is certainly not a wise decision.
I don't think MS Office has a similar "fan base" to recorded music. A lot of the market for MS Office is businesses, not individuals. They will continue to buy Office no matter who MS sues because it is the industry standard. If MS started suing businesses for not upgrading to the newest Office version or something then that would be a closer analogy and might cause some backlash.
I find it interesting that a big part of the OSS spirit is to use Big Government to sue the pants off of companies (MS) who make it hard for OSS to get accepted.
They also want Big Government to pass laws to force federal and state offices to use Open formats.
Why do individuals, businesses and governments have to be forced into using OSS?
"Microsoft thinks Open Office is a pain now, try suing people over it, then see how many people refuse to buy their products."
How old is whoever wrote this? 12? Who honestly believe that anyone gives a flying expletive about whether Microsoft sues the Open Office project or not? As if the millions of technologically apathetic Microsoft Office users will rebel against Microsoft for a cause that they've likely never heard about.
How did this get on the front page? It's like a half-way thought through anti-Microsoft rant taken from any random open source related IRC channel.
The important thing is, Bill Gates had an onion tied to his belt, as was the style at the time.
Has the poster RTFA? That's not even a rant - rants usually have a point or a specific grievance that they're aimed at. There's no point to that, no argument, he's not trying to meaningfully convince anyone of anything, offers no evidence, no logical or illogical basis for what's being concluded, nothing. It's just a loose collection of vague, meaningless assertions about how doomed MS is if they don't change. Does he even name one thing that MS is going to miss out on by not being OSS?
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
"Since the whole threatening to sue thing will be met with the same fan base response, just like the RIAA, it is certainly not a wise decision."
What planet is this guy living on? The average person doesn't know anything about OSS, the RIAA, or MS lawsuits against piracy, and doesn't care.
"I honestly wonder if they will eventually 'get' that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option."
Billg: "That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft."
Microsoft does not give a flying f*** about fans. They care about 10,000+ employee businesses that are MS shops. And even then, they want them to pay for premium level of support.
Even if the total number of MS haters exceed the total number of MS licenses on any given year, MS still goes to the bank with those licenses.
Do they want the haters to become joiners? No, not really. They do however want businesses to buy laptops for their workforce so that work done outside the office is still done with MS products.
Gee...I sometimes wonder how come every subject I submit gets rejected while this dreck gets posted...
Suing over open office would be the dumbest idea ever. The amount of pulbicity generated around open office would skyrocket the user base.
2. Dominant (90%+) Office Suite worldwide? Check.
3. Member of the DJIA? Check.
4. Zero debt? Check.
5. Making a BILLION DOLLARS A MONTH IN PROFIT? Check.
Well, there we have it. I guess Microsoft really DOES need to listen to F/OSS to learn how to run a business...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Lunix zealot/"journalist" with no business experience worth mentioning delivers condescending speech on what Microsoft needs to "get" and how much money they're giving up by not switching to Ubuntu's business model. Yawn.
You know, if I had $40,000,000,000.00 (can you nerds even count that high?) in the bank and you open source freaks tried to take SOME of it away you better bet your balls that I would act like a total and complete jerk asshole, like Gates is.
(remember the $40 billions probably depends on MSFT stock price which depends on perception that it will be king for evah)
Why must MS start suing before people refuse to buy their products? I've refused for years and will continue to do us. This wasn't because Microsoft sued anyone. It is because I know better. I know what options I have. I know how to read, hence I can RTFM. I want to understand how various parts interact to make things work. And if I didn't, I can simply install an easy to use GNU/Linux distribution like Mandriva or Linspire or Xandros or give BSD a shot. Open Source/Standards frees one from the shackles for monopolies. Open Source feeds your mind and not billionaire monopolist family.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
i don't think the author understand what make Office better than OOo. It is not template and clipart. those are easy to add. why do you need MS for that? I have been using Office 2007 for some months now and the Ribbeon UI is really the feature of Office2007. if MS open source that. what's the point of selling Office? MS might as well just open source the entire Office.
It's funny that he think template and clipart are the reason that people buy Office. far from it.
The fact that there is no such thing as "the year of [OS] desktop"...
give away software for free, update frequently, be more secure. we get it, its never going to happen
MS does let it's user design the software...That's it problem. It tries to do everything for everybody.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not MS fanboy, but WTF? What should MS be "getting"? Why does this joker think MS should just give their code to the Open Source community? Does he want the keys to my house next? People today have such an inflated sense of entitlement.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Look, I loathe Microsoft and all of its business practices. But until something seriously threatens Windows, they really have little to worry about. People ask me, "Is that Vista?" "No, I'm running Linux with XGL/Compiz. Look at what I can do!" And they say wow and move on, because it wasn't Windows and they have no intent to use it. Nothing will stop them from making their programs incompatible with yours, or changing libraries or whatever to make OpenOffice.org so unbearably slow on Windows. If you want to play games, you'll probably need to support DirectX. The RIAA was voted the most-hated company in America by The Consumerist IIRC, yet their sales really have not been hit that badly (or not as much as they want you to think). It hasn't stopped people from buying music, listening to the radio, or supporting them indirectly.
You want to sue Microsoft for sabotaging you or stealing your patents? Go right ahead. You'll be embroiled in a long, expensive lawsuit, and the eventual penalties, if you get any, will be very little. As a result of FUD or "embrace, extend, extinguish," your company is more likely to be marginalized by the end, like RealNetworks or Netscape. I really think the only way to have dealt with it was the major antitrust lawsuit by the government, but we know how that resulted.
Sure, that would bring them revenue. Why would someone not just clone it and resell it? It isn't as if it requires a great deal of support or anything else for that matter. The only reason anyone pays for Office is they don't want to be possibly raided by BSA - home users pretty much just pirate or buy it with a new computer.
What possibly would Microsoft gain from exposing the code base? It would certainly allow OpenOffice to incorporate all of the "features" of Microsoft Office into their product with (a) little work and (b) no risk. What else would it do? It would not make throngs of Open Source devotees rush out and buy something the could have for free. I can't see unpaid volunteers contributing to the rather rigorous build process Microsoft has to add fixes for obscure, unfixed bugs.
And why does Microsoft have to sue anyone?
In a word, NOTHING!
Money is their game.
Innovation is their aim.
Stupidity is their fame.
That is all. Here endeth the lesson.
Good thing we have Apple offering vastly superior products at lower prices to knock out Microsoft's monopoly! Seriously though, a near-monopoly in capitalism is supposed to be countered by competitors that find an opening when the monopolizer takes too much advantage of their monopoly. I.e. if Microsoft starts charging exorbitant rates for poor-quality products (as many would argue), then all it takes is another company (such as Apple) offering competing products at a competitive price. Apple's still serving too small of a niche to dominate Microsoft like everybody says they will. Apple's products cost too much more and, when you get down to it, do not offer enough benefits to justify the cost.
If Microsoft opened up the source for Office, all that would happen is the OSS folks would dissect it and incorporate it into OpenOffice or whatever projects they 'like'. I doubt many current OSS programmers will work to improve Office. Remember... it's a lot like a religion.
I'd make millions of dollars even if I just sat on my arse each year and did nothing to improve the product aside from the odd security patch or coding out patent offending features. But you know what I don't need the money I'll give the software away.
What a business strategy! I'm suprised Bill hasn't hired you already.
The best openoffice could hope for is adoption of ODF as Microsoft's default format even then the strangle hold of the Microsoft computer ecology on many corporate networks would mean Open Office's market share increase by a pittance.
to tell the truth.
Seriously.
Yes, exactly what I said.
Seriously.
.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition 2007 is $122 from Amazon.com, retail boxed. Three seat license. Currently - and predictably - #1 on the Amazon software sales chart.
There is of course the OEM edition and academic pricing.
The Geek is far too quick to equate max retail list with the street price for a legit copy of Office. But the deeper truth is that MS Office is still overwhelmingly dominant in every market and still best of class.
Sun Star Office 8 - a solid alternative, one might argue, for the home user - is $73 at Amazon and #1000 in sales.
Try actually using it for once, it just plain SUCKS.
I just think of Microsoft Office as legacy software, and have no problem with their continuing to use their current licensing and distribution models. It won't be too long before that way of life disappears, and I would rather see Microsoft working more closely with the open source community on new projects that can be of benefit to all.
Sadly this is very true. I am an (almost) exclusive OOo user, and the slow-as-an-arthritic-dog look and feel just doesn't go away. Even under WINE, MS Office loads a hell of a lot quicker than native OOo. That immediately dismisses any claims that Windows pre-loads half of MS Office to make it seem faster.
Any claims that MS Office is unnecessarily bloated and slow compared to its OSS counterparts can now be laid to rest.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
As long as people maintain the attitudes like the one you shredded, Microsoft has nothing to fear. Microsoft has some of the worlds brightest technical people, who get beaten down on a regular basis when they try to get all 'geeky' with the software. Eventually, really good technology makes its way into the products, especially in the case of Office 2007, but only when the "user experience" is taken care of. It has to look good, feel good, install and uninstall with ease, and become second nature to the user in a short amount of time.
Linux people need to understand what they are up against. I work with a group of small medical research companies. When Merck decides to move to Office 2007, guess what all these companies have to do in order to continue working with Merck? Ya think they are going to take a moments look at Open Office? Nope.
You see, Microsoft understands that they can focus all their sales attention at a group of select companies, and the rest of the market has no choice but to follow, just to stay in business. Suppose you are a small manufacturer, trying to get your product sold at Walmart? Try sending them a financial forecast on anything but Excel, and see how far you get?
You dont beat this kind of lock-in with technical superiority. Steve Jobs understands this, and has restructured Apple accordingly. Linux vendors should follow his lead, but they dont. In no way is the IPod, or IPhone the most technically superior solution in its space, but both will be market leaders on the cool-factor alone.
Geeks dont like it, but tough shit, that is how the world turns.
In every industry, and in every marketplace, marketing determines who wins. I say it over and over again on Slashdot, but until Geeks relinquish the direction of their creative inventions to people who understand how to SELL something, the folks at Microsoft will lose no sleep.
Are you actually praising the upgrade train and trying to tell me that people like it? That's the impression I get when I read:
Microsoft's got a tight-knit set of products out there - businesses want to run Office because everybody else does, so they buy Windows to run it on, and buy upgrades to Office when it comes out, and buy upgrades to Windows when Office needs them.
Let's get this straight. M$ is coercive monopoly. People do not want Vista because it's expensive and restrictive. People are not buying it. The only thing they want less than Vista is a new Office design, complete with a format no one can open that forces them to buy the OS they don't want.
The real question is how long hardware vendors can hold their breath before deserting M$ entirely. They have waited six years for Vista and it's a dud. Retailer have been squeezed into buying 20,000,000 coppies of Vista that no one is buying, which adds insult to the poor hardware sales injury. The complex and anti-competitive standards M$ has pushed on hardware makers has made hardware purchases a real crapshot, solved only by purchasing systems as a unit or meticulous research. How long are they going to back that kind of inefficiency when the result is a stab in the back like Plays for Sure?
Their "crown jewels" are third rate and increasingly irrelevant. Digital restrictions are an obvious dissaster which must be removed if they want any media market share. After six years of development, mostly wasted on digital restrictions, we get Vista. I've never, ever, heard anyone say they like a new Office format that causes them to go spend a bunch of money. M$ can't fix these problems on their own and no one is going to ride to their aid unless the result is really free.
M$ has a choice to make: go free or die. I have not had any of their stuff in my house for six years and I could care less. Either way they are a diminishing threat to hardware and file formats.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
far too many RTFM's for the OSS community to be lecturing Closed Source companies on treating people like they matter.
Where do you see that? It's not on my LUG or in the class I help teach. Elitism is entirely a closed source constrution. Non free software is designed from the beginning to keep people helpless and divided, to create haves and have nots. Free software, by design, is inclusive and friendly. Have you ever seen a Vista install fest where enthusiastic volunteers come together and give a configured OS to anyone who wants it?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Please, the average American has a memory of about 2 seconds, about as long as a gold fish. A new headline pops up and we'll pretty much forget about MS sueing anyone. That same day, we'll drive to Best Buy and not only buy Office, but donate a few bucks to a "clubbing baby seals foundation", and "help the poor gas companies cause" in exachange for a free subscribtion to Stuff magazine.
Just look oat our foriegn policy, we have secret prisions in Poland, and a concentration camp in Cuba to torture brown people with names like Aziz. People don't care about that, and they most certainly don't care about some office program lawsuit.
Absolutely. I like OSS as much as the next Slashdotter, but I currently believe that office suites are the single weakest point of OSS. There is no really good free, open-source office suite. The fact that OpenOffice is the most popular/hyped one only goes to show that there is no real alternative.
OO still messes up MS Word XP/2003 format documents. Yes, I know, MS fault for not releasing the specifications and all that, but that often means OO can't be used as effectively. Working with complex tables in OOWriter is nowhere as good as in MS Word. And, while I think Vista is crap, I'm actually in love with Office 2007, I think it's a real improvement over past versions.
Functionality wise, OO isn't on par with Office XP yet (and don't get me started on collaborative features). But even features aside, the performance of OO is nightmarish. I've converted several people to Ubuntu. I had to install AbiWord for those with 128 MB RAM. For 256 MB RAM users OO was usable but became really sluggish with several documents open at once. Office XP does run fairly well on a WinXP machine with 128 MB RAM.
I realize that creating a good office suite is one of the hardest possible projects, but as an OSS user, OpenOffice is the only common program that makes me feel it's considerably inferior to its commercial, proprietary counterpart. Well, I also feel that MonoDevelop is poor compared to Visual Studio, but it's been in development far less and is certainly a less commonly used application.
I've read the article 3 times now. The author claims that, eventually, Microsoft has to open source office. The argument goes like this: Because it's not completely impossible to make money with OSS, Microsoft HAS to open source Office. Then he claims that Microsoft attacked Linux "proxy with SCO" (and I guess, this too, implies, that opening Office is their only option).
/. readers who are unable to understand this implication?
Is it just me, or are there other
Georg
Talk about delusional self-contradiction. Are you just trolling? Or do you expect anyone to actually believe this "M$ is dead" mantra that simply does not reflect reality?
Seriously, I mean:
Digital restrictions are an obvious dissaster which must be removed if they want any media market share.
That might suck, but in reality DRM will give them access to a much larger share of media, unless the media owners suddenly decide to change their ways. If you don't understand how these things work then why do you use that "I know what I'm talking about" tone? Don't you realize it just makes you look foolish?
It would be great if reality were different, but constantly repeating the same wishful drivel does not reality make.
I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option
Open sourcing office is their ONLY option? What about the second option, the one that involves keeping it closed source and continuing to generate billions of dollars in profit off of it each quarter?
They could learn to really let the users define the software.
;-)
Uhm.. I'm using Linux, but honestly, I'd rather not recompile a bunch of drivers after each kernel update, just because they aren't shipped as part of the kernel. If Linux is defined by the users, who's the jerk who asked for this 'feature'?
Georg
"I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option."
I don't think that is their only option. They could release Windows as Open Source and still be in the strongest position to offer software that runs on it.
People are becoming angry that the playing field isn't level and that's one reason there is a migration away from Windows onto a platform where the developer doesn't have to guess about API calls. If Microsoft Offered a version of Windows that was Open Source a community would quickly form, bugs would get fixed, people would start to feel better about Microsoft and they could still keep Office and other application cash cows closed source.
But absolutely they have got to stop rattling the patent saber. It's not helping them it's just pissing a lot of people off.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
How to be a communist!
If they open sourced Windows then they would lose a lot of control and revenue. But that is going to happen anyway. At least this way Windows would probably remain the dominant OS for many years to come, and as the main backers of it MS would still be able to make a lot of money from it. In addition thanks to their terrible track record on viruses and security and the NSAKEY scandal their OS will never be treated as secure again so they will eventually lose ALL market share in the governmental and high security markets. As an open solution at least companies could vet the thing themselves and make sure there were no back doors, allowing Windows a fighting chance in these markets. In short MS has already made their strategic mistakes. Damage control is the best they can do now, and opening Windows might save it from obsolescence.
What Microsoft Could Learn from OSS and Linux?
How to start the name of every single piece of your software with a capital G or capital K.
How to have all the various distributions of you Operating System inconsistent.
How to label anyone who disagrees with your point of view of as a troll and/or glib.
How to not dominate the desktop market.
How to work for free.
How to not make a profit.
Before anyone points out the profitability of Red Hat let me ask first where I may freely download Red Hat Enterpirse Linux, not Fedora Core, RHEL. This for me kind of contradicts the "free" aspect of Linux.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
I can't believe people get paid for writing such delusional crap.
"Microsoft is making exactly the same mistakes IBM made"
Actually, from a business perspective IBM's mistake was making the PC too open (although it wasn't entirely open). If you want your platform to be widely adopted and ultimately non-profitable, make it open. If you care about profit more than generic adoption, keep in closed. That's why Apple is still in the personal computer business and IBM is not.
So, MS open sourcing their software would be making the same mistake as IBM.
These are neither rare nor new. What would be more rare and more interesting to me would be an article, without using sarcasm, discussing what Linux and OSS could learn from Microsoft and Windows.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Until MS starts to have some trouble in terms of financial performance, I don't think people really have room to talk about them not doing what they should, business wise. With a balance sheet as solid as MS's it is pretty clear that even though you may not agree with what they do, it is making them plenty of money. When (or more like if) the day comes that MS's marketshare has significant;y shrunk and they are struggling to stay in the black, maybe then the OSS people can pipe up and tell them what they ought to do to make money. At this point, however, I'd listen to MS over any OSS company when it comes to lessons in how to make dollars. That's not to say I'd want to take ethics lessons from them, but ones is not the other. This article was talking about needing to release Office for business reasons, not because it would be the humanitarian thing to do or whatever.
He speaks the truth.
I don't care for Microsoft's business practices. And many of their products are horribly flawed.
But Outlook/Exchange are staples in the business world, and I don't see a really alternative.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Micorosft wants power and nothing else.
THey control standards, operating systems, what people buy, how they use software, what price people pay, and even the speed of innovation, to what best suites Microsoft.
If MS were dumb enough to give away their crown jewels then people could be free and decide for themselves. This would mean a loss of profit as people who want to write letters to Granda would not spend hundreds of dollars for Word and another hundred for Vista. It would mean phbs may actually consider non ms products.
MS owns over 50% of the server market now thanks to MS Office and Windows on desktops. Its what the phbs think will integrate best with it and thats all they know.
http://saveie6.com/
Actually that is what they think they do. They let the Reps (who hold what are essentially Focus Groups, and Opinion polls) dictate needed features. Actual users are so far away from design as to be insignificant.
Witness the changes from a beta MS product to shipment. All that user feedback what changes, It crashes less, Maybe If you are lucky.
They respond to "Trends" not users.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Let's get this straight. M$ is coercive monopoly. People do not want Vista because it's expensive and restrictive. People are not buying it. The only thing they want less than Vista is a new Office design, complete with a format no one can open that forces them to buy the OS they don't want.
I think half the problem with Vista sales, is how many copies they give away for free. Seriously, I have FOUR Vista licenses, all legitimate, none paid for.I think it's worth pointing out to you as well that Office 2007 works perfectly fine on XP so you're talking shit that it forces them to buy an OS they don't want, and to add insult to injury you can open Office 2007 documents in Office 2003! Further proof, that you're a fucking moron (you know, with how often you get moderated Troll, I wonder how you can post more than once a day).
The real question is how long hardware vendors can hold their breath before deserting M$ entirely. They have waited six years for Vista and it's a dud. Retailer have been squeezed into buying 20,000,000 coppies of Vista that no one is buying, which adds insult to the poor hardware sales injury. The complex and anti-competitive standards M$ has pushed on hardware makers has made hardware purchases a real crapshot, solved only by purchasing systems as a unit or meticulous research. How long are they going to back that kind of inefficiency when the result is a stab in the back like Plays for Sure?
Retailers haven't been "squeezed into" anything. Around here, we still have XP on shelves, and not so much Vista. If people want it, they get more copies in. Sounds like normal market workings to me. I can't decipher the rest of your rant (except PlaysForSure - which is about as crap as FairPlay in the long run).Their "crown jewels" are third rate and increasingly irrelevant. Digital restrictions are an obvious dissaster which must be removed if they want any media market share. After six years of development, mostly wasted on digital restrictions, we get Vista. I've never, ever, heard anyone say they like a new Office format that causes them to go spend a bunch of money. M$ can't fix these problems on their own and no one is going to ride to their aid unless the result is really free.
If they're third rate, why do people use them? Not because they're forced to - after all, OO.o does a fairly good job of opening Office documents - but because they CHOOSE to. Start getting OO.o on shelves in stores, and chances are, people will buy it. Face it, when people want to buy an Office Productivity application, they go down to the local store and look at what's there. They don't search the internet for "free office". That right there is something that OSS could learn from Microsoft. Marketing.M$ has a choice to make: go free or die. I have not had any of their stuff in my house for six years and I could care less. Either way they are a diminishing threat to hardware and file formats.
No need to respond to that, that's just utter bullshit. They don't need to "go free" any more than Apple needs to "go free" or Sony needs to "go free". Seriously. Morons like you HARM the Open Source movement more than help it - typically you whiney, zealous imbeciles are what the entire community is typecast as. Getting rid of that reputation would be a good start to actually getting somewhere in the market.Also, you mention that you haven't had an MS product in your house in six years, and apparently care a great deal about it (because you could care less, as opposed to couldn't care less). In that case, shut the fuck up because you don't use the products, and therefore you don't know anything about them,
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Umm, NVIDIA.
They could easily be included in the kernel, damn near anybody can, but they like it the way it is. They believe thier product is software instead of hardware.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
It occurs to me that I'll probably get marked Flamebait for that. Still, although I don't like Microsoft's business practices I do believe that if you want to bash them, bash them based on facts not bullshit.
And twitter really is a whiney zealot. You know it too.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The person who modded this "interesting" should be blacklisted for life.
Why software author are special?
... others also.
Why they enjoy the copyright protection without showing us the code?
Why is it necessary that copyright of software can only be done by business secret?
I do not think that letting others see the code destroy software writer's ability to protect their copyright. The sames can hold for text, song,
Stop that, because some judges were mislead, because some greedy software authors, make absurd decision, we need to continue that stupid copyright status.
As in a completely unencumbered, open specification for storing their data in?
Because when Merck has to deal with the US (or French or Australian or Chinese....) government, and that government DEMANDS non-proprietary formats for digital correspondence, Microsoft will be kept alive by all the goodwill they've fostered over the past two decades...
And that will happen.
Governments don't like threats to their complete sovereignty. And Microsoft's ability to put governments on the "Smiling Redmond Upgrade Merry Go Round" in order to milk cash from them doesn't make governments happy.
If it was clearly open that is, as being very specific and not relying on any backwards compat that forwards to patented stuff, MS if you let anybody be able to implement your 'standard' I don't see any reason for people to disagree with it.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
2)Fight Dirty
3)Ensure long-term product continuity
There is no valid reason whatsoever for MS to open source anything. They have customers willing to pay them a reasonable price to ensure that they have good long term support from 1st and 3rd parties, cross application integration, and an accepted standard of quality. $500 for software people already know is cheaper than a day of training.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
MS is old school
i love turing my clients on to Open Office.
$%#$% the macros.
Opps Ballmer, thats how much money you didnt make this week?
uh?
uh?
For business professionals (not sysadmin philosophers), Microsoft is one of the most respected companies IN HISTORY. They are the most successful software business EVER. They won't do the stupid crap this article recommends because their business - in all areas of their business - is wildly successful. Not five years ago, not two years ago, RIGHT NOW in the existing model they are working in. And no open source won't change that. Learn to read an earnings report. Learn what revenue is. Or, keep picking 'Don't stop Believing' like Tony Soprano. Later.
You are right and I wish people would not typecast me or the rest of the open source community to kids like this.
People who use a GNU/Linux system excursively almost never talk about Microsoft unless its Linux related and when it is Linux related then it is usually Microsoft saying some BS so all you hear is pissed off Linux users that Microsoft are Trolling.
If you are trying to get them to "do the right thing" you are really wasting your time.
If you think there is a kb of value in MS Office, you are out of your mind.
Maybe you are into FOSS, maybe you are a C coder. If you want to make apps that make documents, you need to learn a bit about DOCUMENTS. You need to learn more about PUBLISHING and less about word processing and Microsoft.
In the same way that grandmothers and rock stars are all using BSD in their Macs, they need to be using HTML in their documents. It's not acceptable to categorize them in some DOC or ODF ghetto. I'm the guy who has to take those shitty documents and "rip" the text out and do the formatting all over. Complete waste of time. If you are making DOC or ODF you might as well just print hardcopy, that is ALL they are good for. Funny thing is, that's what they were designed for also, so we shouldn't be surprised. What purpose is there in that here in the 21st century? A print out of a Web page, maybe. But a printout with no Web page? Useless.
How hard is it for software coders to build a 1980's style word processing interface that uses 1990's style word processing codes (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and save the user's work as a single 21st century document with very plain readable code? Have you watched people use an office suite? Just watch them for a bit and write down which features they use. At the end of weeks of testing on hundreds of users you'll find that they use maybe 10% of the features. People take courses in MS Word for a month and they end up not knowing how to use Styles it is abysmal, there is no point to working on a document if you can't use styles, you will find that user selecting words and changing their typeface, that is also a bullshit function you would never ever give the user a one-way whip they can only use on themselves like that.
Microsoft has convinced the world that operating systems and office suites are hard. They are if you do them the Microsoft way, and there seem to be 10,000 FOSS idiots out there who want to inflict ODF and other faux-Microsoft bullshit upon the world. Every time I see a Linux desktop that looks like Windows (never mind acts) I am so disappointed. It is so meet the new boss same as the old boss.
As much as Web servers need BSD, Apache, PHP and others, and Web clients need Gecko or WebKit, regular everyday people who need to make documents need better casual HTML tools.
You can use external CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript to provide styles and behaviors for the user. Then all you have to do is help them make one valid HTML 4 Strict document (no forms) that is like 10 tags you use over and over again. About 95% of the documents that people create are just , , etc. and
and and that is all the information people even have outside of their actual typing, that's all the tagging they want to do.
There is probably a Linux distro somewhere where some mad coder is working hard to commingle Firefox with the kernel as per Windows and IE. It makes no sense.
Bill Gates or Tim Berners-Lee? Choose.
Much to my disgust, I had to buy a new desktop and replace my literally broken laptop. Vista was the only option - I don't particularly like anything about Vista but - it NEVER crashes. Complain all you want but Vista really is reliable - after three months I've never had to reboot either system. I've never seen this kind of reliability for an end user in forty years of computing experience. Vista is going to be a huge seller.
No, I don't sound like Steve Ballmer. I sound like ME. Yes, I would say the same sort of thing if I ever met you, because I do generally disagree with nearly everything you say. You don't like Microsoft. We get it, it's not a bloody religion you should preach. I don't like Stallman, I don't preach the evils of the FSF (even though their ultimate goals are noble, I just don't agree with the way Stallman goes about it. My opinion, your miles may vary).
Strangely, I only have one account on Slashdot - I try to get by on my own merits thanks. Unlike some others I could name.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
"Who would have guessed that a modern program would take longer to launch than a ten year old program with fewer features."
the sad part is OO is currently only equivalent too, and in many not even equivalent too, office 97. Office XP, 2003 and 2007 are all considerably faster to load, use and run than OO and each of those have vastily more features than OO.
The list of people challenging Microsoft to sue them has now grown to 1,440. And that is just based on Steve Ballmer's comments that FOSS projects infringe on 235 patents. Imagine how people would react if Microsoft did actually file suit. It would be bedlam. The "Sue me first, Microsoft" list is here:
l e=SMFM_list_page_12
http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php?tit
Join the fun!! Sign up to get sued!! Look brave without taking any actual risk! (Microsoft ain't never gonna sue no one over its questionable patent claims against FOSS.)
I do generally disagree with nearly everything you say. You don't like Microsoft. We get it, it's not a bloody religion you should preach. I don't like Stallman, I don't preach the evils of the FSF (even though their ultimate goals are noble, I just don't agree with the way Stallman goes about it. My opinion, your miles may vary).
All I advocate is user freedom. How can you dissagree with that? Why do you get angry when people point out M$'s flaws, both moral and product? Is your love of M$ so great that your own freedom is unimportant and you are willing to put up with software that's second rate? I may not have to use it, but I hear people whine about it all the time. Paradoxically, the people who whine the loudest are the biggest defenders. Office, Outlook, Exchange and the other things you praise, are they more important than your freedom? The ownership of your computer and it's contents?
There's something wrong with your world view. It's keeping you from seeing that Vista is not selling, that XP never sold well enough and that the non free way of doing business is over.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That puts it in perspective, doesn't it?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
HTML, CSS and javascript are for display purposes. You are confusing them with SGML, of which HTML is a subset. Formatting documents for good old fashioned paper printing or indeed common display is a lot more complex than what is possible in Ajax, simply due to the limitations of the browser. The adoption of XML based formats in Word and Word-type applications has been a step forward but the issue of implementation still remains a problem.
Word quite simply isn't very good at addressing modern publishing requirements. I'm suffering from this at the moment in having to write quite a few documents based on templates that haven't been made very well and are often impossible to fix once they have been populated. A search finds ways to fix these things, such as trying to make numbering do what you want it to but very often it's a case of 'can't get there from here'. This problem spreads to OpenOffice et al because they have to emulate Word and the habits that users develop from using Word, which perpetuates the errors and problems without finding a solution. Personally, if I ever get around to doing any serious writing I will do it LaTeX. Until then I'm stuck with Word and its slightly less idiot cousins.
Seriously, as flawed as MS Office is, OpenOffice.org, in my not-so-humble opinion, is worse in many ways. There are plenty of excellent Open source projects out there... but OO.o is not one of them. My main problem with it is that it's so damn slow. Now, if you only edit 1-10 page documents, you might be able to get away with using OO.o, but if you're trying to write a book or a thesis using OO.o, the program quickly becomes excruciatingly slow and painful to deal with, (especially if there are dozens of charts and images in the document). MS Office, on a modern machine, does not suffer from the same problem. The program slows down, of course, but not nearly to the extent that OO.o does. It's almost as if MS Office slows down O(n), while OO.o slows down O(n^2), with the size of the document you are working with. Another big problem with OO.o, ironically, is that it tries too hard to be just like MS Office in a lot of ways. If you're gonna write an OSS office suite, why not try to incorporate the best features from MS Office, WordPerfect, and all of the other past productivity suites, rather than try to clone MS Office, which you supposedly despise? In truth, there are many differences between OO.o and MS Office, but not enough. Sometimes those differences are actually detrimental to OO.o, rather than helpful. Additionally, the monolithic nature of OO.o is disturbing. Gnumeric and AbiWord are nice examples of a lean, OSS spreadsheet and word processor. When Mozilla was split up into separate parts and became Firefox and Thunderbird instead of a monolithic monster, it suddenly became an attractive and viable alternative to IE. The same thing must happen to OO.o before MS will have to consider it a threat. When that happens, though, OO.o will become an even bigger success than FireFox, because many people don't get FireFox because IE comes with their Windows machine. MS Office, however, often does not come shipped with a new Walmart Special box. So, a viable Office Suite has the potential to not only decrease MS Office market share, but to BEAT them. Personally, what I would like to see, is an office suite that somehow integrates well with LaTeX, which I use for all of my publications. OK, three, two one, FLAME!
Did you ever think it is because MS controls the underlaying operating system?
Gee a few wait states for software that doesn't have a Microsoft Key would be easy enough to create.
Some image manipulations to make sure any document created in office and used as a web page could not be displayed is what they did for office 97 and 2000 as well as XP.
I have created several web pages using word and found irritant sabotage code embedded with my web page code.
(cleaned up with notepad)
After they lost the law suit to eola the patent office magically voided eola's patent for web browsers.
But yet granted microsoft a patent on the very same tech.
Microsoft lost to the EU trade council and still refuses to play fair in business. So the EU trade council fined them still no one deviates from M$ software due to the CEO's stupidity though out the world.
Good software is not about to happen if M$ is standing in the way and on the throats of developers everywhere.
Good example is the guy they recently awarded a MSVP title to they turned around and are now suing him for exceeding the limited software they issued to him for free.
I use to own stock in this company after i found the irritant code and the EU started suing them i divested.
I lost money on them.
Slowly M$ has lost ground with me and i will not buy another office program until they stop sabotaging the code.
> It occurs to me that I'll probably get marked Flamebait for that. Still, although I don't
> like Microsoft's business practices I do believe that if you want to bash them, bash them
> based on facts not bullshit.
Hmm, on this occasion he may have a point, tho'. I haven't had an MS product in my house for *8* years, but it doesn't stop me knowing MS systems & products more than any other user chez mon employer...I may not use Windows by choice, but that doesn't stop me knowing about it.
BTW, I agree; Outlook is a bloated, horrible application...yet its value to business seems to be woefully underestimated by the development community. Evolution is nice enough but no real replacement (although maybe I should upgrade my home PC from FC4 before I sound off too much about system-freezing memory leaks).
Cheers,
C
I was thinking about this in the shower this morning. The people who would benefit from MS opensourcing their code would be the OSS community, not Microsoft. I find that any speech or statement to the press given by the guy who runs MySQL, Marten Mickos, disturbingly suspect since his company would greatly benefit from Microsoft working with the community. I find any project in the OSS community that has components to install with their application that states that you must be licensed with the owning company to install, which is not the project owner, like MySQL or KDE. I find that several prominate OSS projects have been fast and loose with other peoples' products and patents, which makes the community go up in arms when the offened party tries to defend their patent or product. Now, we have seen some abuse of the patent system, for example SCO and excedingly broad patents. Yet, if I come up with a new file compression protocal and the community steals it, I would be very upset and start sueing the large companies behind OSS left and right, because that is theft.
In God we trust, all others require data.
I have to agree that outlook/exchange is the killer business application. For home use, any pop or web-mail client is fine. But there's nothing close to exchange/outlook for businesses with more than 50 (or maybe 150) computers. The ability to deligate, tight calendar integration, company & project address books and a pretty decent mail client is unmatched. The web interface (which works almost as well for non-MS clients) is much better designed and easier to use than any of the alternatives. And, it looks almost the same as the outlook client version.
As a bonus, almost ever other large company is on outlook so the cross-company calendar invites work without any problems (unlike brand X software).
For home use or a 5-person firm, it's overkill.
"Seriously, as flawed as MS Office is, OpenOffice.org, in my not-so-humble opinion, is worse in many ways .. if you only edit 1-10 page documents, you might be able to get away with using OO.o, but if you're trying to write a book or a thesis using OO.o, the program quickly becomes excruciatingly slow and painful to deal with .. the monolithic nature of OO.o is disturbing .."
..
..
..
..
Windows running msOffice, OpenOffice
I fired up a ten page word doc in Word and OO, and
a) resized to one hundred pages using copy and paste
b) selected print view scrolled through a few pages
c) saved, closed then re-opened
Results:
a) Couldn't see any big difference in response
b) Couldn't see any big difference in response
c) msWord appeared to open faster than OO
But that was because the first page was displayed instantly while the rest of the document was loaded in the background. Eg. You couldn't go to the last page. OO waits until the whole document is loaded. Also OpenOffice opened from its native file format which is a zipped XML file. The sizes of the files different greatly, msWord = 606KB, OO = 15KB. A zipped version of msWord doc came in at 24KB. So presumably the difference in load speed was becasue of the uncompression.
was Re:OpenOffice.org is not a threat
davecb5620@gmail.com
Microsoft earn most of their money from Windows and Office. So how someone can say the model is broken I don't know.
Okay, if you're referring to the fact that without the lock-in and monopoly it would fail then sure, the model is broken.
Microsoft won't ever do open source for a current product. Maybe in a few years they would release Office 95 or similar.
Microsoft operates on a capitalist philosophy where in they buy out their competitors, the only reason apple is still around is because microsoft can retain their virtual monopoly on the commercial operating system market, how many people really use a MAC?. Open Source operates on a completely different philosophy where in members of a community help each other to build good software that is constantly being improved. It is my personal opinion that Microsoft has nothing it can learn from OSS because it is a capitalist company(list most are), and releasing their code for improvement would surely kill them.
now let's start an article entitled:linux and OSS could learn from Microsoft.
let's face it...they have 90% of the market in their pockets.CLEARLY Linux is doing something very wrong and it has been doing it WRONG for years.
So instead of allways being a smart ass how about being a student for a change.You can't expect to be taken seriously if you just keep attacking somebody who is clearly doing way better then you ever were.EVER.
The phrase is, "I couldn't care less". Meaning that it (the target of the phrase) is the LEAST IMPORTANT thing to you. God, I hate it when people get this wrong.
Hey, you are missing the point. Lunix doesn't need to do detect and configure an awful lot of hardware, given the platform it runs on: http://lng.sourceforge.net/
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
The phrase is, "I couldn't care less". Meaning that it (the target of the phrase) is the LEAST IMPORTANT thing to you. God, I hate it when people get this wrong.
Yes, there are things wrong with each of Microsoft's products individually, but together they've very *very* successful at selling the things to businesses, and the sales of each one boosts the sales of the others by forcing them or the people they do business with into buying them. Individually the products wouldn't be as successful, but the level of integration between them keeps them selling.
Exchange/Outlook is a special case. There are other ways that calendaring could be implemented that would IMHO be easier to use and work better - but it's a good enough calendar tool for most business applications, and the critical thing about a calendar tool is that if it's even something close to adequate, and most of your coworkers use it, then it's the right tool for you to use too, because that's how meetings get set up. I'd prefer a calendar system I could use without having to fire up Outlook, that kept calendar entries in a simple open format that was easy to parse with multiple tools, and that was accessible with a web browser as opposed to email (which would work fine, since Outlook-style email systems can call browsers to open html or xml attachments), but hey, it's close enough for government work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I know a lot of people who use open source because they don't like MS or how they operate. This means unlike you, I hear about them all the time. Maybe the community isn't as Idealistic and molded as we think?