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What is Bill Gates Learning From Open Source?
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.'."
are microsoft good or bad this week?
Microsoft is always bad, and always will be ... that they occasionally (and largely by accident) do something good doesn't make the organization any less bad.
That said, you have to understand that Gates is far from stupid. His public comments about open source have, historically, been just what you'd expect the CEO of Microsoft to make. That doesn't mean that he doesn't privately understand the issues perfectly, and now that his role at Microsoft has changed, now that he's an ex-CEO, he may feel free to speak more honestly.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
From what I see in Vista...
Very little. (And yes, I have used Vista enough (unfortunately) to say that. Arch Linux/Ubuntu user primarily)
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
People misunderstood him, the BigBill always was for sharing, except that he always liked to be on the receiving end.
It's Ballmer who sounds off about the competition. Ballmer is probably a very good executive and businessman, but he's not visionary and he also doesn't hold back when giving his opinion. His opinion is very tabloid like.
Bill seems to be careful to base his opinions on fact and not overstate things.
Maybe he is learning how to properly cook and eat crow?
My humor is probably your flamebait
Its funny that, because the needs of nearly all your customers is that your operating system is reliable and user friendly and runs fast, and every OS that's released from Microsoft is worse is most of those categories compared with the previous version.
I write software that's used in medical analysis of blood, urine, tissue and other samples... we follow extremely strict design, coding and testing rules to ensure that there as few bugs in our program when it reaches the end user as humanly possible...
of course, then its run on Windows... which in my POV just negates all our work, especially seen as its now going to be run on Vista, which has brought us no end of troubles with discrepancies between XP and Vista!
Perhaps for board-level managing, but certainly not for doing IT jobs. That's a big problem in corporations when you get "professional" managers. In the old days top-level managers were usually people who had risen from factory jobs. They understood what made the business tick.
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.
I, for one, do *NOT* welcome our new board-level executive overlords!
I don't see anything in what he said that has anything to do with open source. Interpersonal skills and teamwork are just as important to the proprietary world. Someone's reading too much into what he said.
Ignore what they say, observe what they do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There was a fluff piece authored by Gates published on the BBC news website. I didn't read it fully but he was stressing the importance of IT skills. In my experience, the more people know, the less inclined they are to choose the Microsoft solution. What I think Gates is suggesting here is that Windows point and click is akin to genuine computing knowledge.
Eben Moglen once said something about GNU being one of the greatest learning libraries mankind ever created. I think there's some truth to that and Gates is probably attempting to hijack the argument; applying it to Microsoft software in a way that's fundamentally and intellectually dishonest.
No, I didn't RTFA.
* * *
The latest story in my series about a company imprisoned for theft addresses the sham called a financial system. Read "Bank Shot" here:
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/short-story-bank-shot/
That is because he missed the boat with Open Source. Just like he did when he didn't take the Internet into account. He's business man who wants to make money, great he's the richest guy around, but like all business men he doesn't really understand anything outside of the business. Collaboration was considered the first sin of business because no one, IE business (wo)men. couldn't figure out how to make money at it. Then Wikipedia (yuck!), YouTube, Linux Software Vendors, Apache, etc. come along, and they are making money. Now, collaboration becomes their mantra.
Of course you know something is up when the richest man in this country goes from it's communist, to it's important for business' to collaborate.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
I've yet to work for a company that didn't dismiss or downplay the products and actions of competitors. One thing that, occasionally, happens at Microsoft is they have a management decree for everyone to pull their head out of the sand and deal with a threat.. but it doesn't happen often enough, at Microsoft or anywhere.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Spoiler: He will be nice to them for now and then when the new Windows comes out and everyone realizes that Microsoft stole their code he can say "But I was nice to them" in court.
Did I miss something or did christian.einfeldt just claim that Open Source invented collaboration and talking to customers?
sig's not here
Rather than going by Gates' utterings; we must examine what he has DONE after Open source succeeded despite Microsoft's best efforts at side-tracking it.
.Net. Career-wise, it makes more sense for developers to stick to Java, PHP or even RubyonRails because they need not refresh their skills every 2 years or face extinction / pink slips.
1. His departure from the Chairman post indicates very troubled times ahed for his company; and he is reluctant to be associated with a declining company that even customers speak poorly about. This is largely due to the influx of open source and more recently, open standards.
2. The features removed; the h/w requirements; broken s/w compatibility etc. in Vista shows that ignoring the merits of Open Source will only hurt his company even more. The fact that he has not learnt the lessons and abandoned Vista; and continues to brazen it out indicates he does not want to hear the truth... only self-sponsored eulogies from 'independent studies'.
3a. One of the biggest reasons for the success of the Windows platform has been that developers have been attracted to the commodity stuff so that everyone could win. Despite Gates' best efforts, Java and PHP have built up a commendable market-share; while after being bitten badly by the abandonment of VB, Foxpro etc.; developers are extremely cagey of adopting to
3b. The loss of the developer community will pave the way for eventual collapse of the flawed Upgrade-And-We-Will-Solve-Your-Problems approach which has been Microsoft's business model for well over 2 decades.
4. For home users, the only hassle is getting broadband on Linux. Like Google, Linux has spread like wildfire by word-of-mouth; and even longtime friends of MS such as Dell, HP etc. have had to listen to customers and offer Linux bundles. The arrival of small form factor PCs like the OLPC, the XO laptop, the Asus EEE PC on Linux is further accelerating the success of Open source and the downfall of Windows. Microsoft is seeking to delay this by offering XP on these systems; but since long term avblty of XP is a question mark, OEMs, costomers or shareholders aren't very enthused.
All in all, Mr. William Gates has learnt his lessons well in advance; and as Eben Moglen remarked while launching GPL3; this is the beginning of the end for proprietary code.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The only reason Microsoft became so big wasn't that DOS, Windows, Office or any other MS product were any better than the competitors' stuff, but that all the other companies were so stupidly run. But after that phase was over, something new happened. Open source came along and scooped up what ever advantage MS once had. Apple made a miraculous recovery in a few years from their all time low in 1996, and is now a serious player again. Time is against Microsoft, and favors competing, superior products. I think MS will have to reinvent itself if it is to survive in the long run. As an enemy of Microsoft, I will never give them any free advice.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
sounds to me like Vista need to go in for re-work and come back out later, ready to use
Then sharing a form of collectivism! (dang short subject lines...)
Anyways, I find this amusing because this stance that FOSS == Communism is wrong for a number of reasons.
1) Use *and* development of FOSS licensed software is *consensual*
That's right, you don't have to use it or make it yourself, if you don't want. Although, it's fun to see how your initial ideas, even if they're crappy, can take off, you find that others have been mulling over the same problem with a similar take on it. FOSS, in this context, brings like minds together to work on problems in software without using the stick all the time (or even providing a carrot).
2) FOSS licenses *promote* private property, not impede it.
If you write program X, and license it under a FOSS based license, it's your damn right! Yes, if we acknowledge that the fruit of our labor is our property, even our source code, it's yours to distribute how you like, but like point one not everyone may take it (some software is just junk...). And this is a great thing, it means some folks will take and keep their code private, we don't have to worry about them except when we use their software. But when we use FOSS licensed software, we can enjoy more rights on our own property, reshaping the code to our needs and constraints, making more use of property rights in our ventures.
3) FOSS licenses *promote* competition.
Yep, this one is pretty obvious when you take a list of all the different kinds of FOSS'd DB backends, office suites, 3d rendering engines, game engines, encryption schemes, *programming languages*, compilers, IDEs, *games*, and so on. They're all competing, may not for immediate dollar investment or purchase, but for users. And that competition is more clear when one piece of software becomes adopted more so over another, when its feature set is lean (in a good way), its overhead not too high, and its results useful. If a piece of software that started out good becomes trash, more users stop using it, and go for another replacement, or fork off where the program was good for use and continue on from there. This level of competition isn't often seen in the world, and we've all seen better pieces of code written this way, not worse code.
In closing, maybe I'm just a libertard, but I'd like to state that I don't see why people get all uppity over FOSS, other than they never read the licenses related to FOSS. Maybe it's because people think guys with beards want to be Lenin clones, who knows.
now that people/companies/governments are seeing alternatives and sign xxm$ contracts with competitors, it's normal to see them "interested" in "understanding needs". at least until they know how to lock-them-in again.. cheap propaganda
get information from consumers, claim rights to it and sell it back to them....seems to be what this article is promoting while using MS as a media to say it.
What happens when programming is done right and consumers can use an easier to use interface to create programs with, for themselves?
General automation is not difficult but wide scope capable
Bill Gates talking about software innovation is like George Bush talking about good government.
More than 60,000 Windows programs won't run on Linux.
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.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Is the OP claiming that *developers* on open source projects, in general, have a better record of teamwork, interpersonal skills, and understanding end-user needs than *developers* on Microsoft projects? Man, I hate to be the one to stick up for Microsoft on Slashdot, but...
Much as Microsoft churns out a lot of junk, whenever I read their developer blogs, I'm always impressed by the amount of thought that goes into their design. Now, a lot of times their product teams go in the wrong direction, focus on the wrong things, get told not to fix something, or simply get hamstrung by their own legacy code. But to the extent that that reflects on the developers at all, it reflects on their design skills, not personal skills. And, frankly, most of the problem at Microsoft seems to be a management issue in the first place.
Meanwhile, a surprising number of open-source projects are led by one brilliant-but-eccentric guy who everyone tolerates because he invented the thing and he writes a lot of good code. Then, someday, another brilliant-but-eccentric guy joins the project, and a year later it forks, and they spend eternity sniping at each other on USENET, which nobody else reads anymore, while each claims to have plonked the other.
I'm having trouble remembering the last time I saw a lead Microsoft developer:
* Give a presentation featuring a "Fuck You" slide,
* Get indicted for killing his wife,
* Call his rivals idiots,
* Boot someone off a mailing list or forum,
etc. etc.
Let's face it - with a few notable exceptions, FOSS tends to attract zealous, dogmatic, fiercely independent people whose idea of good interpersonal communication usually involves a die with more than six sides and some Monty Python quotes.
Gates ain't no visionary, tee hee ya got that right
...is a marketing guy.
he bought DOS from Tim Patterson and sold it to IBM
he stole the X-window graphic interface design from XEROX/PaloAlto Research Park (if I remember right) and sold it as "Windows"
and now I find out he hadda have his internet planning added to his visions book retroactively. did he have Al Gore ghost write it for him ( tee hee )
and his most famous quote "64k ought to be enough for anybody"
No, Gates is definitely NOT a visionary.
what Gates IS
and marketing guys operate by manipulating your perceptions. selling the king new clothes
what really have we got from Windows?
+ a 1 GB RAM computer with 1 GHZ processor still can't do what an IBM/AT could do using 1 MB ram and 12 MHZ processor remember: Lotus-1-2-3 and WordPerfect were just as effective for must use as Excel and Word running on MS/Vista. And a copy of Procomm+ gave you all the commo you needed.
+ a 1 MB/sec network connection cannot bring you communications as well as an old USR 9600 dual standard modem. the reason being: too much marketing fluff is sent with the info
+ CompuServe was a very good information exchange, the WWW has degraded into an advertising and market research forum
the one thing that Gates & Ms have truly excelled at however is: obsoleting your existing computer assuring a continued ( if forced ) demand for upgraded processors and software.
but Gates learned that at GM
Really? Then I'm sure Vista will get scrapped and we'll see Windows XP back on sale. Not that it was perfect, but at least it worked acceptably. For me personally, more so than the Mac I'm posting from. And I'll shut up now because I'm just venting my frustrations.
Requiring authenticate signature before a program is allowed to run would only take care of the users who promiscuously open things they download from the web. In this case, a browser that simply refuses to save things downloaded from the web is just as good. It could work like a popup blocker showing messages like "Firefox is preventing this site from saving a file to your local hard drive, which may be harmful to your computer" and give user the ability to override it.
I once had a signature.
In community open source projects, testing is left to the community after the developers do the best job they can to find and fix problems. Microsoft has apparently adopted this model, releasing early versions of their products so that users can find and report problems. They have extended that model to paid versions of the official releases, too, resulting in frequent Patch Tuesdays and massive Service Packs. Why pay for internal testers when you can get your customers to do it for you?
I think for Bill Gates, there are multiple ways to view open source. I'm pretty he doesn't find the idea of open source repulsive and I'm sure he understands there are many things to be learned from how OSS is developed, how communities are built around the software, etc. These are things he doesn't view as a threat to Microsoft but are things that he probably feels the company can learn from. After all, all engineers like learning new methods and understanding processes.
So what is it about OSS that Bill Gates dislikes so much? The business model. OSS threatens Microsoft via its business model and this is what he actively attempts to show as inferior to the closed-source way of doing things.
I think once this distinction between business model and engineering are taken into account, his views are relatively easy to understand.
They promote OSS at every turn. All of their APIs are open and documented. They use open formats and open protocols whenever they can. They release application frameworks for others to use to build applications that play nice with OSS. They release applications across all platforms, actually supporting versions of their software that work on OSS platforms and with OSS software. But to retain the attention of users, they choose to keep some of their solutions as proprietary, but they are ones they maintain themselves. You want them to open source their search engine, but the only reason their search engine is successful is because of their constant tweaking and additions in their specific way, and users still use their search engine without problems. OSS can interface with their search engine if they want to leverage its benefits.
How could OSS really benefit from Google open sourcing their search engine? By publicizing the inner workings of their main asset, it would divert attention away from google. Google supporting OSS in the ways that they do wouldn't matter so much anymore if nobody was paying attention to them. If everyone had what made Google unique, then others could get the attention Google deserved but put it to a use that may not be leaning towards OSS so much, and then OSS wouldn't be as much of a benefit anymore. It serves Linux well because an OS is something every computer needs, but a search engine doesn't need to be run by anyone, and Google seem to be doing a good job. It's not like there aren't any OSS search solutions. But OSS seems to be benefiting as much from Google as the other way around.
Don't you think Google is giving something back to the OSS community just by standing as a viable example of people using OSS in a commercial environment? Don't you think that buys OSS credibility? They run on Linux, they are putting a lot of force behind Firefox, and all the other stuff I mentioned above.
What exactly do you want Google to do, and how do you think it would actually benefit OSS in reality more than what they are doing now? You're really unhappy about the current scenario?
Twinstiq, game news
Why is information like this even considered newsworthy? M$ is legendary for being full of hot air and then continuing on with business as usual. Now, if they were suddenly to start acting according to such words in a significant way, that would be different. Don't hold your breath, though.
Aside from that, open standards are now being tauted and as such they more than anything threaten Microsoft who does not want standards to be open but want them to be closed and only available to Microsoft and owned by the Microsoft corporation.
So even though he may be saying things that sound like he gets it, he still has yet to show that he does; he fought the EU tooth and nail not to open up Windows API's. If he was so into being open, this would have been a no brainer.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
During the Cathedral building era, there were Cathedral builders who were heavily connected and shared openly their knowledge and there were some who kept them to themselves (mostly out of greed and power hunger). So you can use this metaphore for both proprietary and Free software.
As for the way to develop software, some free softwares are built in house with little connexions to the outside until it has reached some level of completion and some proprietary software are built with the same methods described as "bazaar" (for example, most game mods in the gaming communities).
It's all about the license and the rights you have or lose. The rest is mythos.
Companies don't help other companies unless one of them owns the other. Microsoft is not particularly unique in this respect. I'm sorry that you don't like the fact that Microsoft is a corporation, but, you can't go arguing that their intents are somehow more evil than other corporations. Every one of them is out for its own gain, and its own expansion of its profits.
Bill, as in revenue stream. Gates, as in barriers. It seems pretty clear to me. My develpment firm is headed by Gill Bates. Breathe underwater, intimidate the competition.
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
1. No, Microsoft stock is doing just fine, despite the Vista failure/disaster you keep harping on about as a sinking ship. Take a look at how bad MSFT stock has tanked in the last 12 months - http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=1y
.Net if it can run on Windows. There's some cross-over, but not much. Additionally, Java probably is more popular, but only because it had a 10 year head-start. .Net is a superb platform (for Win systems at least), I challenge you to try and spin that one.
.Net tech is healthy thanks. A quick look on monster.com shows more or less the same results for .net and java positions.
2. I can run 12 year old software in Vista without modification. Can you run a 12 year old binary in Linux and have it still work? Unlikely. Most binary drivers break with a simple kernel upgrade.
3a. Link? In my experience people choose php because frankly its piss easy, Java because its cross platform, and
3b. Developer popularity around
4. Spread like wildfire for home users? I don't call 0.6% of desktops spreading like wildfire. Apple have the most to take from Microsoft in this area. What games runs on Linux? Not many. Linux is great if it does all you want already, but in the home the software needs to run anything and everything, which Linux doesn't.
Proprietary code is here to stay. So is OOS. Learn to deal with it.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Activation, bloatware, and spyware. If I buy software whether an application or an operating system as long as I enter a valid key I shouldn't have to Activate it. Nor should my software spy on me, stamp documents with a guid, or need to be Activated again if I change hardware. All the provider of the software has any use for is whether there is a valid key, for proprietary software.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'd say NT 4.0 was the best thing MS put out, that I have used. NT4 was the only Windows OS I did not have crash while I was using it. XP on the other hand froze the very first tyme I booted up a computer using XP. And it wasn't a noname PC, it was on a brand new Dell, a Dimension I think though I'm not sure.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Oh well, posting on slashdot and with all those digits in your ID you must know what you're talking about. So that's my MBA thesis shot down in flames. Maybe I can get my old job back at the drive-thru window.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is patently ridiculous.
If MS didn't understand the significance of F/OSS, they would never even bother about it.
The fact that they are doing everything they can to stop it means that they understand it all too well, but don't want to give their users any freedom they don't have to.
And why would they?
Vendor lock-in means a steady revenue stream. And that's all that matters.
Give your users freedom, and they might fly away. And then you'd have to work on getting them back.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Oh, and we're breeding. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Not to be difficult, but Windows NT4, and its successors Windows 2000 and Windows XP, were vast improvements
Moving from NT4 to XP was I think a leap backwards. I've run NT4 for years and didn't have a problem with the OS but the first tyme I used XP the computer froze while booting up.
FalconShould there be a Law?
great he's the richest guy around
Not anymore, Bill Gates is no longer the richest person around. Now a Mexican holds that title. But he's in a related industry, he owns CompUSA, among other businesses I'm sure.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I was replying to this. It is not a reasonable thing to expect a company to "bring another to the top of their field" without having some sort of profit interest in it. A joint venture implies sharing the spoils of war, as it were. What the original poster described was not that.
But congratulations on your apparent mastery of sarcasm. Do you have a degree in that as well?
4. For home users, the only hassle is getting broadband on Linux.
More than a year ago I bought a PC with Linux preinstalled. Once I unpacked and set it up I was able to immediately connect to my cable provider. There was no editing configuration files or changing settings or anything like that. The PC immediately recognized the connection and allowed me to go online.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So no, for most of those, Vista hasn't 'added' them, because they've been there all along. May I recommend Google?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Mod parent up! I have been appropriately humbled.
Of course, my comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. Netscape was the first company to understand that it was more effective to release buggy software early than to spend time getting it right. As with many other things, the Internet changed everything. Before the Internet, it cost vendors money to ship out new disks, tapes, etc., with new versions of software. Now, vendors can shift the burden to you, posting the updated (fixed) version of the software and leaving it up to you to download it. More and more, vendors are including "call home" routines in their software to check for such updates. The whole concept of "agile development" is built around "release early, release often".
...Is a lie. Whatever he means, it's not what you think it means. But surely we all know that by now?
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Companies do the mistake to misunderstand free software and open-source in many ways. Some companies think that free software and open-source are the same thing (it's not). Others think that merely putting some code under the GPL makes it truly free software (a licence isn't enough). Some see opensource simply as something to get from, rather than sharing with it.
Free software is a social process. Merely saying "look guys, our code is GPL now, we are an opensource shop! buy from us, we are good!" isn't enough, because the heart of free software is the social process involved, not the licence (the licence is simply an instrument used to reinforce the community's customs and values and help make the social process more official).
People wishing to understand free software should look at it from a social viewpoint, not from technical or legal point of views.
There's plenty of competition in the Open Source world ... human beings thrive on a certain level of it. However, money is not the usual reward.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Now if you specifically meant microsoft, you could have, hmmm, mentioned them by name. Or were you afraid of being modded down - if so you could have referred to them as M$, Micro$oft or any other variation wittily playing on the visual similarity between the letter "S" and the dollar sign. ROFLMAOMA.No. Like Jigaro Kano, there is nobody to grade me.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hmmm... Locutus needs to recognize that one company, be it the size of the Borg from Regmond, cannot take upon itself the sheer amount of technical challenges as the Borg have tried to do. They may have tens of thousands of drones, but they're still spread thin. The solution is to release the entire code to their flagship products, Borg Windoors XP and Borg Windoors Vista, under an OSS license. The entire world is suffering from the problems inherent in these two products, so you can rest assured that within no time, millions of programmers will jump in and fix the problems therein. Most likely, most of the system would be replaced by major chunks of Linux or BSD code anyway.
I agree with your comment about the Overlords. However, I think that they do have a point that having IT skills alone is not good enough. You should know what you need to produce as well as how to produce it. In the ideal world, IT customer and IT supplier would be the same person (or at least share a brain) which would presumably ensure perfect understanding of what the customer needs (not the same as what the customer wants). In reality, it is enormously important that IT people have the ability to understand the customer's problems and relate to them.
Of course they should have good IT skills as well, I've seen far too much crass amateurism to deny the need for good IT skills. And I intensely dislike the fact that we have IT managers without IT skills, who are nevertheless trying to promote the technical standards of their choice. Nevertheless, giving the choice in my role as a customer, I would always prefer an IT-er with whom I can have a constructive debate, can develop an intuitive understanding of what I need to have, and can be an effective contributor to a team that also has other tasks beside setting up and maintaining IT systems. To curse in the church: I think IT should be a skill and not a job. The job is doing whatever needs to be done.
Quite possibly this is what went wrong with Vista. Vista seems to have started out as "Windows As IT People Thinks Windows Should Be"; cleansed of Windows' notoriously compromised kernel design, more secure (or at least with fewer gaping loopholes), and the kind of nifty user interface features that programmers are proud of when they achieve them. The problem was that that was very much an abstract IT ideal; it is not what the customers want or need, it does not seem to make any business sense, and worst of all, it could not even be achieve its own goals.
Back to Overlords: I've been in R&D for long enough to recognize that large companies tend to be dominated by authoritarians with tramline thought processes, especially when they are "professionalized" and managers from other sectors are brought in. Board-level decision processes often betray an appalling lack of floor-level business knowledge. That's not exclusive to IT, or to Microsoft. Microsoft as Bill started it, probably was a very different and much more effective organization than the Microsoft of today.
What such organizations need to shake them up are men like the late Admiral of the Fleet John Arbuthnot "Jackie" Fisher, Baron of Kilverstone (1841-1920), who after he joined the Admiralty as director of Naval Ordnance, "asked for a list of things I was not allowed to have and have got them all but one."
My point is that Microsoft has, in the past, been the archetypal command-and-control Cathedral, within the meaning of Eric Raymond's essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Any collaboration that happened lacked one central core characteristic of FOSS production: sharing source code outside the Cathedral-builders' team. Microsoft never has released the source code to its flagship Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office products to the unwashed masses. Their business model cannot sustain that model.
Contrast this model with businesses that have made billions from the sale of FOSS-related products and services: Google, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and Novell. In each of these cases, these businesses are earning revenue by commoditizing complementary activities that support their core businesses. They improve and share source code for FOSS projects. They sell hotdogs, and so are interested in driving down the cost of mustard and relish.
I thought that it was both amusing and disingenuous that Bill Gates, the man who wrote the infamous open letter to hobbyists, would have the boldness to claim that Microsoft "shares ideas". I found his claim entertaining, and I thought maybe some Slashdotters would also chuckle at the quote.
I am also a fan of Christensen's. In fact, I am producing a documentary based on his work. Our film is called the Digital Tipping Point. I would love to find out a bit more of your interests in this topic. Please feel free to email me at einfeldt - at , _- gmail dot com if you would like to discuss this topic off of this page.
Of course, my comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. Netscape was the first company to understand that it was more effective to release buggy software early than to spend time getting it right.
Again MS beat Netscape to releasing buggy software. MS was releasing it in the 1980s, before Netscape existed.
More and more, vendors are including "call home" routines in their software to check for such updates.
I can see software checking to make sure it up to date, as long as the user approves. What I don't like is when it calls home to make sure it is authorized, which MS does with Activation. When I used Windows I told it when I wanted it to check for updates, but the way MS wants to treat users like they're criminals forced me to switch to Linux and OS X, about 15 months ago when my Windows PC flaked out I replaced it with a tower PC with Linux preinstalled, then when I got a laptop I got the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on. Both the PC and the MBP asks me if I want to check for updates before it does, and neither one refuses to work or works with reduced functionality if I won't let them contact the vender.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Not arguing that Carlos Sim is a honkin' big Mexican multibillionaire ... but CompUSA is officially defunct.
While most CompUSAs were closed it's my understanding a few stores were kept open in select locations. And the online store, CompUSA is still running. I wonder how closing most of the stores affected his ranking. Oh, I did make a mistake though, according to wiki Carlos Slim Helú's father settled in Mexico from Lebanon.
FalconShould there be a Law?
As soon as it was possible for vendors to avoid the cost of manufacturing and shipping, then vendors changed their development processes. Microsoft, for example, now sets a date for their product releases well in advance and almost always adheres to that date, independent of its quality, since they have tied numerous sales and marketing activities to that date. It's rare for them to push back release dates, though they did that for Office 2008 for the Mac.
Netscape certainly didn't introduce the idea of shipping buggy software, but they were the first to recognize that they didn't have to do very careful testing of their releases, since they could quickly post a "better" version on their website and let their users download it. Netscape made at least 15 different releases of Netscape 4.x (not counting 5 preview releases) in roughly a year and a half between mid-1997 and late 1998. No vendor, including Microsoft, ever did anything like that before.
To come back to the subject at hand, the 1997-8 period coincided with the publication of Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the beginning of rapid growth of the open source movement. In early 1998, Netscape announced their intent to open source Netscape Communicator, though it took four years before the first result of the Mozilla project became available. In those four years, Internet Exploder basically wiped all of the other browsers off the map, and it wasn't until early 2005 that Mozilla Firefox began to take share from IE.
Firefox relies on extensive user testing and reporting, and Microsoft has done the same, the difference being that Firefox is open and IE remains closed. Firefox development has advanced much more quickly than has IE, and the Microsofties should have learned something about the power of open source from that.
"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.'."
What gates said is true and entirely consistent with Microsoft's approach even though Microsoft don't listen to customers, as they just don't innovate either.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Yes, Widows CE so you can parse the logfiles on the road using your WiFi connection.
The truth shall set you free!
BSD is goatse? But it comes with no open ports by default ;)
Windows, on the other hand..
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
The ability to modify classes at runtime was one of the main features that Alan Kay had in mind when he coined the term Object Oriented. It sounds like your only experience with OO is from languages that barely qualify for the name, such as Java or C++. There is a very good paper from the Newton team describing why class-based OO is better for model objects and prototype-based OO is better for view objects which I would thoroughly recommend that you read. Supporting both styles in a language is by no means a bad thing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
how many "ac" are you
i doubt 1 person could post all the stuff that you do
are you a ms propaganda team?