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DoJ Extends Microsoft Oversight for Two Years
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Department of Justice has extended its anti-trust oversight of Microsoft by two years. This only applies to the requirement that Microsoft make protocol documentation available to competitors, though. All of the other requirements have expired, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly did not give the states complaining the full five years of oversight they requested. Still, this should prove useful given that one of Microsoft's new tricks is to use OOXML extensions to tie businesses to Sharepoint."
What's the point? The DoJ has achieved less real change in the past decade than the EU has achieved in past two years.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
In a rare "double-whammy" decision, the DOJ has ordered Steve Ballmer and Darl MacBride to co-produce (and star in) a feature length film entitled "2 CEOs, 1 Cup"... MacBride couldn't be reached for comment, but Ballmer was heard saying: "No problem. Bill has been preparing me for this for years".
Seriously, though. Why does the DOJ seem so toothless when it comes to corporations or the ultra-wealthy, yet act like right-stomping psychopaths for small players (to the point of waffling on definitions of torture, or weaseling around the constitution)? How could it be anything but corruption?
It is clear to me that the sanctions are still relevant. What is not clear to me is how the consent decree is going to change anything, since TFA also states that "protocol specifications" were supposed to be released in 2003, and still haven't been fully released.
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sql server is a great product, and is certainly better then everything else in the opensource world aside from postgresql (i've used both extensively) and even then sql server trumps pg in many areas. like wise with access, say what you will about it but i don't see any OSS project that's even close to it.
many of the developer tools MS puts out are top notch as well, something OSS is still 10 years behind on - easy to use gui development, and i say that as someone who programmed in wxpython for 2 years solid on both windows and freebsd, and has since moved to a windows shop. no doubt there will be some out their who will equate this with VB programmers and the usual snobbery, but the truth is i can put together a windows apps many times faster and just as robust as anything currently out there int he linux world.
for OSS to move forward, they need to drop the stupid ego trip and look at what MS do RIGHT, or OSS will always be the poor mans 2nd choice.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is news to me. If this is true, it sounds like the Microsoft is making an attempt to entrench businesses with OOXML through there popular web-based collaboration software.
A quick search on Google turns up Alfresco as a F/OSS alternative to Sharepoint. Can anybody comment on the quality and effectiveness of Alfresco, and mention if it is mature enough to be a viable (and recommendable) alternative to Sharepoint as an enterprise solution for collaboration within large businesses?
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Is it incompetence that caused Microsoft not to get the protocol specifications documented? If that is the case Microsoft is in big trouble. Or they are illegally going slow. Either way Microsoft should be in big trouble. I think the judge needs to wake up.
It depends what you are looking at.
Many businesses, especially small to medium businesses have very minimal IT requirements, mail, web access and general administrative tasks. If you go the windows route that basic set up is quite expensive, prone to issues, inflexible and it will probably require more in the way of maintenance than a well configured FOSS based alternative. Many businesses have huge numbers of call centre seats that in effect need a web browser and possibly a very minimal agent application, with maybe one in 20 users requiring a spreadsheet application or a word-processor (Oh and they like to hot-seat), again, it doesn't have to be complex, and again its probably a better solution to use FOSS here too.
The truth is that for most people a non MS OS would probably do, we can both list things that are non-trivial to achieve, or possibly even impossible (running certain applications), without Windows, which is all well and good, but it is true to say that there is a large base of companies who could live without windows at all or with a mixed environment.
I'm not saying that FOSS is only suitable for small organisations, because that is not true, there is some extremely capable stuff out there, I would certainly say that there is an awful lot that is possible using FOSS that is either impossible with Windows, or prohibitively expensive, the problem as always is the fact that most businesses are entrenched in one technology or another and would find it extremely difficult to get out of it.
Anyway, this posted at a silly time in the morning, and I'm tired so excuse any rambling / grammatical errors or typo's.
Cheers.
On the contrary.
There are misguided FOSS attempts on going after what Microsoft is doing, but overall all they achieve is a loss of time for everyone. Why lose time replicating crappy technology? In this bag, I include, for instance, Mono and Moonlight. And, of course, the efforts on implementing MSOOXML, by Gnome, for instance. MSOOXML should be seen as a deprecated legacy format, for which only a half-assed converter should be created.
Take Samba, for instance. It's a great piece of software! But for what? For implementing a proprietary file sharing protocol, that is so flawed that it has to be changed with every major version of Microsoft's OS, many times with incompatibilities with previous versions. I mean, of course Samba made viable the implementation of Linux on the enterprise, on Windows networks, and should be praised for that. But, overall, isn't it a waste for these very talented guys to lose all this time coding this crappy protocol, when they could in fact be putting their effort on something other than following what Microsoft is doing?
Microsoft make lots of very good products, it's not fair to bag them on -everything-I don't agree. I don't know any Microsoft product that I could call "very good".
The reason to "bag them" is not because of their products, but because of their business practics, which are not based on competing on merits, but on spreading FUD and locking in customers as much as they can. Just see ODF/MSOOXML and the OLPC/Classmate for two great examples of why Microsoft is not to be trusted.
Unlimited users, but its a bit limited on how much hardware and RAM you can throw at it. Also limited to 4 gigs in size. Reporting Services is in, DTS (Which, as of SQL Server 2005, has been remade from scratch into the vastly superior SSIS) is NOT in (and that makes me very, very sad, since SSIS is my favorite ETL tool).
:) Postgres has OK dev tools, and onces its hidden behind an ORM like Hibernate or LLBLGEN, it all looks the same, aside for the business intelligence bits.
I'm not sure about the scheduling and stuff, but quite a bit of these features are there. The development tools for it are also free (they're part of a free version of Visual Studio). No Analysis Service and OLAP cubes either.
It is definately not for all scenarios, but considering the ease of development, it serves a lot of purposes. I still push the open source offering when we need an enterprise-class solution and the customer's being cheap though
As I understand it, the courts don't aim to make them "not a monopoly", they aim to prevent them abusing that position to prevent competition.
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Microsoft has posted first and second quarterly results for fiscal year 2008 that that have been nothing less than spectacular. It is debt free, paying dividends, and holds $20 billion or so in cash.
Interestingly, since Windows Vista became generally available one year ago, Microsoft's client business has grown more than 20% and sales of Windows Vista have now surpassed 100 million licenses. Microsoft reports record second quarter results
If this is castration, then let's give the eunuchs their due:
Vista is the only client OS to show significant growth in years. OS Platform Stats
You can argue all you like about the specifics of the w3Schools stats but you are going to have a much harder time explaining away the long term trends exposed there.