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What is Bill Gates Learning From Open Source?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the how-to-love-the-bomb dept.

christian.einfeldt writes "In the world of Free Open Source Software communities, Microsoft is often viewed as the very epitome of the Cathedral-style model of software production. But is Bill Gates learning from the software development phenomenon that he once compared loosely to communism? In commenting on the results of a Microsoft-commissioned survey of approximately 500 board-level executives about the importance of interpersonal skills versus raw IT coding skills, Gates starts to sound a bit more like a member of the Apache Foundation than the take-no-prisoners king of cut-throat competition: 'Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.'."

3 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Our new overlords by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Informative

    Enter the business schools. Managers start believing they can command any corporation without understanding how the production works. They start doing things like transplanting a CEO from Pepsi to Apple. Dismal results.

    Oddly enough the other day I read an article from an ex Microsoft guy making the same point -

    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  2. Customer satisfaction indec ... by foobsr · · Score: 2, Informative

    Mr. Gates: 'Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.'

    Big news, given that the concept of 'customer satisfaction' has been embraced since decades, even by not exceptionally innovative companies (e.g. GM). Microsoft fails both in IT and 'customer satisfaction' (a related comment: Microsoft falls below the average in customer satisfaction survey).

    CC.

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    TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
  3. Re:What have M$ learned from OSS? by lattyware · · Score: 1, Informative

    I'm going to go ahead and feed to troll here. Mainly because I am bored.
    I said that I have used Vista enough to talk about it, and also, I never said Vista was bad, I just said it hadn't learned much from OSS. You, sir, are clearly an idiot.
    There are things wrong with Vista. Compared to my Linux distros it is slow and bloated, I have to pay for it and software for it, there is no package manager, there is no Compiz Fusion, It is less secure, etc...
    I am by no means a fanboy. A fanboy is someone who makes an argument without backing it up, (generally exaggerating and using bad English), and bashing everything else. Also, you can not spell fanboy.
    Please come back when you can make a structured argument and understand basic things.

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    -- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)