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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.
There's no question that they've made some missteps in this area, but I think the tales of their demise are very, very overstated. Microsoft still has an enormous install base, and I would absolutely expect them to try and apply the "embrace and extend" approach increasingly to open source. All they have to do is get more involved in coding for OSS projects, and they can change the entire nature of the situation.
Catch telemarketers
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. "
That makes sense now. Leave peer review out of research and you get vista.
I agree. Compiz-Fusion totally ripped Microsoft's patents to the desktop cube idea.
I just forgot how to enable it in Vista Ultimate...
Microsoft's innovations stand on their own.
Their accomplishments with active directory, for instance, are wonderful. I'd like to see the open source community come up with anything like it.
Also, their networking stack is rock solid. It would take years for the open source community to come up with anything as polished.
From the beginning, Microsoft has been an innovative company. MS Dos, Basic, I could go on and on. Their contributions to original research have truly advanced the human condition.
Open source projects are simply parasites on the innovations of microsoft. Bah!
A 10K report is *supposed* to have a section where the CEO lays out, in gory detail, external threats and situations on the horizon that have a significant chance of derailing their revenue plan for the next year.
What Ballmer is saying here is that
IIRC it was Marc Andressen who first hit on this tactic for competing against Microsoft, when Netscape launched the Mozilla Foundation in 1998. It took a few years of fumbling around before that took fruit - probably because the Navigator/Communicator code was so badly written - but that turned out to be a masterstroke of business tactics.
This is a very good point, but not one that will win favor from the MS-bashing crowd.
The truth of the matter is that much of the "Computer R&D" is incestuous and cannibalistic. Microsoft used BSD networking stack for Windows, and the whole "windowing" motif from Apple. Apple, in turn, got the windowing motif from Xerox. It would be difficult at best to say where the boys at MIT "stole" the idea for the X windowing system.
Some "borrowing" is necessary and understandable. Open Office and Microsoft Office are inextricably intertwined, but this is not necessarily because anyone "stole" from anyone else. This is because any suite of programs that perform the same fundamental functions is going to have some overlap on its functionality.
Microsoft's FUD to the side, yes, new things do come from the OSS community. Microsoft still hasn't implemented Windows over network connections like X does--instead, they use Remote Desktop, "stolen" from the VNC protocol. At the same time, Microsoft has a massive install base, and has become the de facto "standard," as much as we might wish it had not: Linux is still playing catch-up. 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?
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Have you used Firefox?
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
I fail to see where Microsoft makes any "mistakes" in its filing. The statement the company made were, as far as I can tell, correct. Without making judgment calls on R&D models, it's fair to say that the proprietary-versus-open source methods are very different, and that open source products benefit from the fact that their research costs *are* distributed amongst the various contributing developers.
The filing never says that OSS companies don't spend a great deal on R&D, nor does it say that Microsoft's R&D (ie. feature development and coding) hasn't been influenced by outside factors. Therefore, I fail to see how there are any mistruths spoken here.
Keep in mind that this is SEC filing, for goodness sake, and that the questionable sections are intended to be simple, concise analyses of the competition and a few differentiating factors between them and Microsoft. I think it does that just fine.
With all the complaining we do here about the FUD inflicted on us by megacorporations, I am rather embarrassed to see us using the very same tacticts with this sort of story.
Your posting on the internet asking such a question? The irony is strong with this one.
What's wrong (or, at least, morally dubious) is that they fail to recognize what they did with the OSS-originated network stack...
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.
Thankfully, most observers are able to see through this particular line of nonsense at this point. Sadly, however, it's likely that Ballmer and other 'softies actually believe it. They're so narcissistic that they really do believe that Microsoft is the epicenter of innovation, and that it really is impossible for good ideas to come from anywhere other than Redmond.
In fact, many open source projects and products use Microsoft as a reference point for how not to design software. Call it a second mover advantage if you like.
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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.
I've noticed that stories regarding Microsoft or Apple have difficultly cultivating constructive debate. For example...
Apple topic - The iPod design is amazing, I really want one, but am concerned about DRM. (Score:-1, Flamebait)
Microsoft topic - vista suxors!!11!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it be possible for Slashdot to have two sections? One for discussion of topics, that present conclusions based upon stated facts and assumptions. And a second section for free expression of angst, like 'Bill Gates is the Borg-Devil' or 'I want to have Steve Jobs iBaby!'.
Compatibility gets confused with copying. And when you know nothing about the history of computing, well, "UNIX? That's like DOS, right?" Because the GUIs can be made similar to Windows, because menus like OpenOffice are made similar to Office for ease of transition, because compatible file formats are often read and written, people who know nothing about the underlying structure of computers or the history of innovations can logically, if incorrectly, conclude from their experience with Windows from the earlier '90s that linux _must_ be a copy of Windows in the '00s.
Open office is a bad replica of Microsoft Office.
Remember how hard it was getting people to switch from a CLI to a new GUI back when the first Macs were coming out? Getting people to migrate to Windows from DOS? It was hard. Now change the interface of someone's most used program, it is the same thing over again. Plus, OOo looks nothing like Office 2007, and that is part of the reason it is being adopted.
Sharp Develop is a bad replica of Visual Studio.
Again, people use familiar things.
Firefox 3 search bar and navigation button interface is derived from that of IE.
There are only a certain number of ways to improve something. For once IE got something somewhat right, so the Firefox developers took that and changed it. Guess what? The tabs in IE 7 are similar to Firefox's, which are similar to Opera's. And as for the UI, it mostly has stayed the same from Netscape onwards, and just about every browser has adopted it.
Linux desktop are inharently trying to copy Windows day by day.
Ummm... Yah. Wrong. First, take a default install of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distros, you get, 2 taskbars, not like Windows, you get a package management tool, not like Windows, you get pre-installed programs for advanced image editing, word processing, etc. not like Windows. Ok, sure, you have a button on your window manager to close, minimize or maximize your window, but that is about where the similarities end.
And that isn't even dealing with the technical differences.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So what MS is and has been saying is that it acquired the IP fair in square, and is properly selling it on the market, while others are just copying. Let us not dwell on the fact that is where MS was 20 years ago when Apple acquired the WIMP interface fair and square and MS copied it to run on cheaper hardware, which let us remember that Compaq created at no small expense fair and square. No, let's just look at the claims as they stand using a classic example, SQL
SQL server was aquired acquired from sybase. Is there technology here that MS can claim was part of that deal, and stolen by the OSS community. I think not. SQL was developed by IBM and what is now Oracle, and was standardized, I believe, in the mid 80's. The two big OSS competitors, mSQL and PostreSQL were both independently developed by teams concurrently with the Sybase product and opensourced, partly or otherwise, by their creator. I am sure that both not include features that MS SQL has, but I would also guess that Oracle or IBM has the features first.
In the end MS problem is simply that they are not 2-3 years ahead of the curve. When this happened to SGI, they went bankrupt. A firm simply cannot charge a premium for this years technology. In the case of software, this is because the OSS people can do the same thing, for free. MS Office is simply too mature to be a profit center. MS Server is simply relatively too low tech. Even the X Box is not at the front of the pack, at least not by more than six months.MS has some traction through collaboration, and they can continue to make money there, but complaining about the loss os MS Windows market share is silly. They had the chance the database file system, but for some reason they did not provide enough resources. This in itself proves that they are not innovative.
MS will lose customers because they are lazy. They will continue to have enterprise customers, they will continue to have the gaming market. We will see the general desktop and server market move away from them unless they come up with something big or go back to their roots as the cheap solution. We see this in the emerging $100-$200 portable market. If this will provide the growth the stock market wants is yet to be seen.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
In a surprising twist, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted yesterday that Free Software is the cause of better than average health for Microsoft employees. "Free software means no free soda" is the new catch cry at the Redmond, WA software powerhouse.
"We used to offer our developers free soda, and never thought about the health consequences", said Ballmer while rocking on a designer chair. "Then one day, one of our employees installed Linux on his workstation, which also happened to run the in-house Visual Basic control panel that overrides all the networked soft drink machines on the campus. Suddently, people couldn't get their Mountain Dew anymore, unless they actually paid for it themselves".
Ballmer went on to explain that the programmer who wrote the soda control software had left years ago, and nobody could replace him. Soft drinks were left in the machines for months and morale went down at first among the employees, but soon picked up again when a drop in the monthly rate of deaths from heart failure was noticed. "Free software is like a virus that actually helps you", Ballmer said. "With the money we saved in ambulance fees, I bought every employee a free yo-yo, and even had enough money left over for a new chair. Way to go, Free Software, we love ya!" Former CEO Bill Gates declined to comment.
"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!
Aside from the mouse, and icons, Apple really got very little from Xerox. The Xerox UI didn't have user positioned or sized windows. It didn't have the concepts of double clicking, or dragging. It didn't have the contextual menu bar that Apple added to the top of the screen, and instead relied on static buttons on the keyboard for pre-defined options. It used different desktop metaphors....
Xerox planted the seeds for the Desktop idea, but Apple and to an extent Microsoft, really fleshed out the idea and made it practical.
It took "innovations" like Firefox to finally get the monolithic Microsoft of its collective ass and FINALY update their aging browser after letting it hold back the internet for about half a decade.
I know it's somewhat taboo to RTFA around here, but I thought I'd compare with the summary anyway:
Article, quoting MSFT:
"Some of these firms may build upon Microsoft ideas that we provide to them free or at low royalties in connection with our interoperability initiatives."
Implication: there exist some companies that reuse some of Microsoft's ideas, reducing their costs in the process (presumably at MSFT's expense)
Slashdot summary:
"Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights"
Implication: Microsoft claims most/all open source companies copy Microsoft's ideas and don't contribute anything
Article,quoting MSFT:
"Open source software vendors are devoting considerable efforts to developing software that mimics the features and functionality of our products, in some cases on the basis of technical specifications for Microsoft technologies that we make available."
Implication: there are open source products that look and behave very similarly to some of Microsoft's products
Slashdot summary:
"Open source projects don't innovate and instead mimic Microsoft's products."
Implication: Microsoft claims most/all open source products are copies of MSFT's products
I understand that bashing MSFT is a popular passtime around here, but when the article summaries are completely misleading, that starts to get in the way of the trustworthiness Slashdot as a whole. If Slashdot hopes to remain relevant in the longterm, it needs to make at least some effort to accurately portray the stories. Otherwise, it will eventually become the internet equivalent of tabloids, worth only the entertainment value of reading the stories+comments, and completely untrustworthy for actual facts.
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.
yes, but does it run linux?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
seriously, when was the last time microsoft innovated?
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.
Just for the record though, RMS has stated many times that the decision to base GNU on Unix was a technical one, not a preferred one. He would have PREFERRED to create a whole new OS with a radically innovative design. The reason he chose to be Unix-like was very simple - he knew it would take a long time to finish, and nobody knew what kind of computers would be common when it was ready to use. Unix was (and to a large extent still is) the only portable OS in existence. So the decision to base his code on it was to ensure that GNU would be portable and still work in the future regardless of changes in computing architecture.
Linus did not originally have this goal - Linux was hard-targetted for the i386 platform, and was stuck there for some time -however it's own unixy roots combined with the GNU base it sat upon meant that making it portable was soon not just a high-priority but a working reality.
The fact that today you can run GNU/Linux on practically any computer in existence is a direct result of it's unix-like design.
Now take a look at KDE4.1 though, and compare it to VISTA - then tell me OSS isn't being innovative on every level. Right now KDE4.1 is a better desktop for Vista than Vista's OWN desktop !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Look at it from their perspective though. All those companies are going open source, 'cause they can't successfully compete with Microsoft.
Or to put it another way, all these companies have realised that they can compete with Microsoft if they go open source. Pay per unit sale can be a disadvantage too.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Outside of that, nothing I guess.
Wha? no, you're leaving out all the cool non-development-oriented Free Software created in UNIX such as X and TeX/LaTeX, which were already mature software before Linux was even born. And given that they still are, decades after their creation, still the "industry standard" in their respective markets, they certainly qualify as "major".
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
The fact that today you can run GNU/Linux on practically any computer in existence is a direct result of it's unix-like design. Now take a look at KDE4.1 though, and compare it to VISTA - then tell me OSS isn't being innovative on every level. Right now KDE4.1 is a better desktop for Vista than Vista's OWN desktop !
Umm, I just got call from RMS. Apparently everyone is going to move to his compound in Guyana.
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;
"Our business model has been based upon customers paying a fee to license software that we develop and distribute .. Certain "open source" software business models challenge our license-based software model..."
I do believe MS has been drinking too much of its own koolaid. If they really believe this then they are only deluding themselves. That their current business model is under attack is a given, but not from the Open Source sector. I mean how many times can you sell the same GUI, web browser and email client to the same people. The only real innovation they do is making each new version of Windows more bloated than the previous version, forcing the endusers to buy a new computer year after year. They also manage to make their older formats incompatible with the 'newer' software. That you see the writing on the wall is evident in your "software as a service" sector.
The WinTEL PC is obsolete and people would have moved onto smaller embedded Internet aware devices if it wasn't for your repeated actions in stifling the market. Twenty years of CrapWare. That a bunch of hobbyists working in their garage can produce applications that equal anything Microsoft has produced tells us just how lacking in the innovation department you really are. Anything you ever produced you only ever leeched of the academic sector.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Almost no one realizes that R&D has only a tiny sliver of R of it, and the rest of it is D. And by Development, they mean everything - developer/tester/program manager salaries, computers, costs of running the buildings and datacenters, IT, etc. So it's not like they spend $7B just on Microsoft Research. Last I heard, MSR costs something like $300M a year. And stuff from there does end up in products every now and then.
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.
Indeed. What have the Romans ever done for us?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
When you have a business that basically is 0% cost, and 100% profit (no, it doesn't cost even $1 to burn a CD).
So in other words, all their products just materialize out of thin air? Or not. AFAIR, just Windows Vista sucked up more than nine billion dollars in development costs.
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.
SkipStone had tabs back in 2000, in version 0.6, and that was OSS. It was certainly much more tab-like than Opera's implementation back then, which was just a side effect of it being MDI.
You may be joking, but I think something similar to WINE might be Microsoft's best approach to fixing Windows:
Redesign/clean up the OS without too much regard for backwards compatibility, then put a WINE-like compatibility layer on top.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The annual report doesn't make any statement to the effect that "Open source projects don't innovate", it says:
"A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products. These firms do not bear the full costs of research and development for the software. Some of these firms may build upon Microsoft ideas that we provide to them free or at low royalties in connection with our interoperability initiatives. To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue and operating margins may decline."
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Just for the record though, RMS has stated many times that the decision to base GNU on Unix was a technical one, not a preferred one.
One might add to this that before GNU, RMS was working on the Lisp machine and its window system.
The GUI toolkit he had developed was more powerful than Swing, Qt, or Gnome, and easier to program. The object system he was working on put AOP and Groovy to shame.
The fact that this software became proprietary despite his objections was what prompted him to develop GNU. And he based it on UNIX and C because he correctly realized that the world wasn't ready for advanced GUIs or advanced OOP. It's taken 20 years for people simply to accept basic single inheritance systems and garbage collection.
The people behind GNU were technical pioneers; they consciously kept things simple with GNU because they knew they were building software for the unwashed masses of programmers.
Emacs had tabbed browsing in 88. Hey! don't knock it because it was just for local files... it amounts to the same thing...
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
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.
There is a free update for Office 2000 and Office 2003 that allows you to read Office 2007 formats: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips