Microsoft's Chief Exec For Latin America Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent'

An anonymous reader writes "The President of Microsoft Latin America, in criticizing the Brazilian government for its support of open source software, claimed that declaring something open is how you 'mask incompetence.' That seems especially funny coming from Microsoft, who has used 'closed' to mask incompetence for years. I thought 'open' meant that people could find and fix (or ignore) incompetence, whereas closed meant you were stuck with the incompetence."

Comments

Re:not long for his job

[jtownatpunk.net]

"Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through."

You mean like how Outlook 2003 had half-assed, crippled IMAP support that languished for 4 years until Outlook 2007 came out? Which still left out a few important details that were kinda addressed in Outlook 2010? And you got to pay $$$ for each incremental improvement?

I almost like Outlook 2010 but it took them 7 freakin' years to get IMAP right enough not to suck. Actually, it took MORE than 7 years. I'm pretty sure it was part of LookOut 97.

The whole idea that money must be involved to create a quality product really grinds my gears. Back when OpenOffice hit 2.0, one of our mucky-mucks took up the challenge to do all of his office tasks with OO. Several months later, he declared that he hadn't touched an Office product once, the learning curve wasn't bad, and he was able to do everything he needed with OO and several things that Office couldn't do. So we're sticking with M$ Office because it must be better because we pay for it. Sigh. Before I could even open my mouth, he came right out and said that there was no rational basis for the decision. Free software just doesn't feel right.

That attitude is starting to change but it's sooooo sssssllllloooooowwwww in an industry that moves so fast.

Re:Lost in

[Bigjeff5]

It sounds like he is being taken out of context.

For example, I've noticed a common theme lately for old, entrenched products. If they start to fall behind and their market share starts to dip too low, they open source their code. This generates lots of good press and a whole new army of free worker bees improving your product. The down side, of course, is you lose complete control, but if you've been screwing it up this whole time that might not be a bad thing.

Probably the biggest example of this is Mozilla, which came as a direct result of the disaster that was Netscape's "upgrade" (they took a fantastic product and killed it with incompetence).

So he's not necessarily saying open source = incompetent, what he is saying is that often the reason companies open source their code is as a way to mask their own incompetence (i.e. not the open source community's incompetence).

It seems plausible.