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Microsoft Asks Open Source Not to Focus On Price
Microsoft's supposed open-source guru Sam Ramji has asked open-source vendors to focus on "value" instead of "cost" with respect to competition with Microsoft products. This is especially funny given the Redmond giant's recent "Apple Tax" message. "While I'm sure Ramji meant well, I'm equally certain that Microsoft would like nothing more than to not be reminded of how expensive its products can be compared with open-source solutions. After all, Microsoft was the company that turned the software industry on its head by introducing lower-cost solutions years ago to undermine the Unix businesses of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and the database businesses of Oracle and IBM."
So he's asking people to get a recent Ubuntu build instead of Vista?
and indicative of Microsoft's sense of entitlement.
...are more important. As is leveraging a new paradigm
This is Lauren. She told us she wanted a stable OS with an Office Suite and some photo editing software for $0. We told her, you find it, you keep it.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
You can tell that most Microsoft apologists haven't had any sort of role in supporting or managing IT in business.
Been there. Done that. Have the faded t-shirts to prove it.
Although this isn't just about the fabled "business case".
This is also about the bargain conscious consumer that might
see various bits of commercial software and get a sudden case
of sticker shock or try something that claims to be free but
is really just an open door to malware and spam.
This is about taking Microsoft's own marketing approach and turning it on them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Open source software is often the better option both on cost and quality. As a consultant, I've found that when you stand up open source and proprietary solutions side by side for a customer, the open source solution wins most of the time. Now ISV's prefer the kickbacks, training and marketing support they get from proprietary vendors, so the customer has to ask for the open solution to be compared, but when they do the results are significant.
Microsoft: Please compete with us on our terms??!?! Pretty please?!
Open-source: No.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
> Businesses are a lot more interested in the total value of something than its price tag.
I'll go you one better: businesses, or more accurately, managers in charge of making major spending decisions, don't often understand the difference between value and cost.
If a typical empty-suit gotta-wrap-this-by-2-so-I-can-get-to-the-golf-course middle manager looks at open source software (priced at $0) and then Microsoft software (priced in the thousands or tens of thousands, for company-wide use), he's probably going to make the decision in favor of Microsoft because if it doesn't cost anything, it must not be worth anything.
Small business owners have always dealt with this mindset. If they want contracts from big companies they usually have to inflate their prices (even beyond what they would consider a fair profit margin) in order to even be considered as a potential vendor. This is especially true when trying to do work for governments or Universities.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
OSS software is a total boon to developers. I'm a developer, and we use OSS everywhere possible. Since we can easily support our software when something goes awry, we jump quickly and confidently.
But not every company has their own staff of developers. Companies that don't produce software have little incentive to hire developers if they don't contribute significantly to the bottom line. And for companies in this boat, OSS does, indeed, have costs that far outstrip the purchase price.
Windows Server licenses for needed servers might cost a grand or three. If this is sufficient to avoid the cost of hiring a developer (at around $100k/year) or an admin, (at ~ $60k/year) it's money very well spent!
Sure, I use OSS because it lets me sleep very soundly at night, with perhaps 1 significant unplanned incident per year in our hosting cluster of 14 servers. But part of that is that we already have paid the price of having developers on hand to maintain and understand our OSS-based servers.
And don't think that just because it's Microsoft, you can assume it's safe to laugh. I remember when MS Word was laughable. I remember when Windows was laughable. I remember when Excel was a toy compared to the "meat and potatoes" competition.
As a corporate culture, Microsoft learns how to dominate markets. They're losing right now, and maybe they won't turn things around in time. But they have massive assetts, they still have a monopoly in the desktop computing marketplace, and with Vista, they've shown a willingness to take risks if they are necessary to improve their software.
I know this is unpopular to state here on Slashdot, but many (most?) of the problems with Vista have been centered around making the changes necessary to more properly secure Windows. Software that was badly built that did bad things broke on Vista, and that's a necessary step to take in order to preserve their long term market share.
Don't laugh. Keep your head down, keep improving the OSS software, and be wary of Microsoft - they still have everything it would take to continue to dominate.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
That quote from Ramji was taken completely out of context. It takes a bit of digging, because the distortion is already present in TFA, but here is the blog post to which TFA "responds". Note especially:
Due to the downturn in the economy, many business users are putting the kibosh on migrations to or from open source. [...] That's why Microsoft is advising open-source partners with whom the company is collaborating not to focus their customer pitches on costs, but instead to lead their sales pitches with "value," he said.
(Emphasis mine.)
Now this may certainly be bad and self-serving advice from Microsoft, but it is still very different from what TFA makes it out to be. Microsoft isn't begging OS vendors to change their sales pitches to something it can compete with. It's telling vendors how it thinks they should pitch in a time of economic difficulty.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled Microsoft bashing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know about you, but when someone asks for a change to one of my apps and I tell them "It's open source, make the change yourself," what I'm really saying is "**** off."
If you're business this is only possible:
- Assuming you have the budget for a development team.
- And the time to become familiar with the code base before the feature is needed.
- And a repository maintainer who is willing to accept your changes, or an even bigger team and budget to track security and bug fixes from the original developer and incorporate them into your modified code base.
- And a silver tongue, so you can convince your investors that it's totally worthwhile to spend their money improving a product that anybody can use for free with absolutely no way to profit directly from the improvements you made to the software.
Or if you're a home user, in which case you probably don't know C, and if you do you're probably too tired from writing C all day to fix someone's code for them.
The ability to make contributions is far from the main benefit of open source software. The main benefit is the fact that someone can't shut it down for selfish reasons. The code is essentially in the public domain. Apache or MySQL will never enter a "vault" like The Lion King or Sleeping Beauty; the Linux kernel will never have its "support period" expire. The real benefit is social, rather than technological.