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Microsoft's Annual Report Reveals OSS Mistakes
mjasay writes "Microsoft's most recent annual report suggests that the company is increasingly coming to grips with open source, yet also seems determined to perpetuate myths about open source that poorly serve it and its shareholders. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has suggested before that 'free software means no free soda' for Microsoft employees; but this is perhaps the first time that Microsoft has managed to enshrine its ignorance in a public document. In the annual report, Microsoft makes two primary false claims about open source: 1) Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights; and 2) Open source projects don't innovate and instead mimic Microsoft's products. Perhaps Microsoft has forgotten its own 'innovative' past copying of markets and technologies created by Apple and others. But at least Microsoft gets one thing right: 'To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue and operating margins may decline.'"
Did anyone expect anything other than spin from MS with regards to Open Source Software? Hmmm.
Hmm, where did that IP stack come from? Where did they get the idea of tabbed browsing? Where did they get a web browser from? The list goes on and on. I wonder how many "patents" came from ideas inspired by open source?
The reason Microsoft is failing is that the parasite has become larger than the host.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Not really worded as the author states, and is quite interesting - mainly the meat is the Risk Factors section where they must report the possible situations on investment/profit risk. Nothing really much there about stealing ideas, but what was omitted by the author was the probable losses incurred by MS "opening up" on some interoperability technology as well as being forced to open up other standards due to high court rulings.
They still call their Licensing "Ownership" as in Cost of Ownership... sigh.
Very interesting read.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
What's wrong (or, at least, morally dubious) is that they fail to recognize what they did with the OSS-originated network stack...
Like they did with IE? Shut out competitors by mimicking another product and making it a default install of their own?
Didn't they JUST begin to do that with Apache?
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I guess I don't see the need to respond to Microsoft's FUD with FUD of our own. After all, if it's wrong for them to do it, is it not also wrong for us?
It would be. But the term "FUD" implies deceit. FUD against Microsoft is much more likely to simply be true. They _are_ a monopoly. They _do_ use unfair practices to "compete". They _will_ stoop to almost any low to avoid a level playing field. This isn't FUD in the normal sense of the word. It's fact.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
An entire complete operating system including thousands of programs that can be freely shared far and wide at no cost by everyone, suitable for use in the tiniest embedded processors all the way to the top ranked supercomputers on Earth..and now beyond into space?
Outside of that, nothing I guess.
MS will justify crushing OSS in any way possible. Honestly, if you call the people of the FSF free software zealots, then call MS proprietary software zealots. MS basically exists totally proprietary, not to make money, not to be inventive but to prove a key point in the Open Letter To Hobbyists by Gates, that quality software will not be written without a lot of money. Unfortunately for MS, it seems that the tables have turned, just about every quality application is OSS in some part if not fully OSS (OS X, Firefox, Apache, etc) and about the only major software vendor that isn't transitioning to OSS is MS, look at it, Apple mostly has with OS X, IBM has embraced Linux, Sun seems to be trying to open source everything they have, Novell has openSUSE, and everyone in between is getting things open sourced.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Or Apple HQ?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
"open source software doesn't innovate"
Ha! The article directly below this one states that someone has developed an app to graph or diagram SQL statements... Now, that's innovation - and it didn't require any Microsoft products to be harmed during testing or development!
Oh by the way, the Internet itself is an open source effort and I can't imagine anything more innovative or groundbreaking than the most advanced communications medium ever created!
1) Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights;
I say Microsoft cannot sue. If they could, they would've already done it. I think if Microsoft sues, they are either afraid that they'll get sued for the free-ride they've been enjoying or they simply do not know who or how to sue. OSS isn't really making any money. OSS is not a company. Yes, MS could sue, say, Redhat, but Redhat is not equal to or represent in anyway OSS itself, and I doubt Redhat really does that much IP damage since most of their business is distributing what others have made and providing support - they are not burning CDs of Windows, if you will. Then sue GNOME or KDE? Can't. Sue kernel developers? How? For what? They would have to go project to project performing drive-by lawsuits which will all be tedious and expensive and very unrewarding.
Like all annual reports, these are self-published documents designed to serve the appetites of shareholders. So anything written in it should be viewed with that in mind. It is not a tech document or a fact sheet. It is a spin sheet.
Well, if you don't see any of it in products, I'm curious what you call R&D? 'Cause unless I'm mistaken, it means exactly that: Research and Development. It's the first step in the chain that then goes through Manufacturing and later Marketing.
So normally even stuff like developing a new product (say, the XBox 360) does count as R&D. When Ford comes up with a new car, even if it's not revolutionary in any way or aspect? That's R&D. When NEC or Samsung come up with a new TFT, only this time with LED backlight? That's R&D. When Seagate announces a new line of HDDs, only this time with higher density (i.e., pretty much a smaller head and more precise mechanics)? That's R&D too.
Technically even writing a program, any program, is R&D. (That's a mistake many PHB's do: thinking that programming is manufacturing and can be treated and measured like assembly line work.) Manufacturing is when you press the CDs and print the manuals and box it, later. So if none of MS's R&D made it into a product, they pretty much wouldn't have a product.
So, yes, MS does invest in R&D. Now if you're trying to say that they never made some major scientific breakthrough, we can agree on that. But then most other companies don't, either. And I don't remember many fundamental breakthroughs from the F/OSS camp either. They too just tweak a little here and there and occasionally put lipstick on a pig... err... skins and transparencies on the same old program. Not condemning it in any way, but let's not pretend that the latest release of KDE or Firefox are comparable to discovering Penicilin or Quantum Mechanics. It's R&D anyway. And it's still R&D when MS does it.
And yes, occasionally R&D does produce a dud like Vista. Well, that's the inherent risk of it. It happens to other companies too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
1. Because it _is_ R&D. Manufacturing is where you already have a detailed blueprint of what cog/transistor/thingamabob goes where, and you just have to take it from bin A and stick it into hole B. And move on to do the same thing verbatim again. And again.
In programming, the equivalent would be, I don't know, copying someone else's program by hand. It makes no sense. If you have to make the same program again, you just make a copy it, you don't go through the assembly line to make an identical one from scratch. Even bits and pieces, whatever you need again, you don't program verbatim again. You move it to some library class and call it from there. Or it's already included in the compiler or standard library.
Programming isn't manufacturing and it makes no sense for it to work like manufacturing does. There is no mechanical taking a cog from here and placing it there, and knowing in advance exactly which cog, where, and how much time it takes. The whole exercise is, every single time, designing the whole mechanism in the first place.
Just because the manufacturing step is missing, or trivial (e.g., just pressing the CDs), it doesn't mean you can move back one step and proclaim the development stage to be manufacturing. It's just about as silly as, if a river has no delta, moving back a step and proclaiming the whole actual river to be a delta.
But that's what some incompetents do. They learned how to manage an assembly line, and then they re-christen a whole different thing an assembly line if they don't have one. Sorta, when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
2. It's not even the only one. There have been plenty of other cases where only one piece of something was built, and it was basically the prototype at the end of R&D. It may have been an actual manufactured product, but nevertheless the manufacturing step has been missing or never done, and the "product" was the prototype built by R&D.
As an infamous case, and a botched project at that, take the Vasa. The design had been experimented with and tweaked right until it was put to sea. (And it sank.) If it were a software project, it would have been pulled out of the sea and "debugged" until it works. And it still would have been an R&D stage, rather than mechanical repetitive manufacturing.
Or take the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was no assembly line, and (unlike the Nagasaki one) not even testing. It was a prototype right out of R&D. The fact that it was actually used, doesn't make the whole process any less R&D.
So basically again, it seems to me like just a case of some people not wrapping their heads around a different beast. They learned in school that if you have a product at the end it's manufacturing, and if that step is missing, they'll re-christen something else as manufacturing. Just so it fits their mental model.
3. Well, that's still no excuse for incompetence. If an industry works differently enough from others, managing it must fit the reality of the industry, not try to warp the industry to fit the pre-existing mind-set.
Basically, imagine if I came from agriculture, and started managing a car production plant. And went, "no, no, no, see you have to plough the land outside the factory and bury some cars as seeds." Wouldn't you think I'm retardedly incompetent and have no business managing a factory like it's a farm? Well, I'm thinking the same about those who manage R&D as if it were an assembly line.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I always thought bundling the browser wasn't even an issue. It was all really Netscape crying like a little baby because they couldn't compete. Back in those days, IE was truly superior, especially when Netscape 4 came out. I remember installing it for the first time and watching it literally take 5 minutes "updating the registry". The thing was a huge bloated mess. Of course, MS hadn't done anything in the way of usability on the thing until Firefox reminded them what innovation was all about. Today IE is losing market share because the alternative is truly superior.
On the other hand, my wife got e-mailed a couple of attachments the other day. On was a .DOC file, and the other was .DOCX. What the hell is .DOCX? Why, it's a new XML format that only Office 2007 can open, of course. Microsoft is still up to their old ham-fisted tactics. I had to find some on-line conversion service to turn .DOCX into something readable because I don't have Office 2007 and you couldn't pay me to use Word (my wife has a student edition of Office 2003). It turns out it was just a simple letter. Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks for yet another in a long series of kicks to the groin, and more of my time wasted simply to serve the ego of that simian running your company.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.