This isn't Microsoft's fault... it is the fault of an incompetent IT department.
We made a similar mistake where I work, except with hardware. We decided to lease hardware, went with GE Capital and then got into a bad contract.
On top of that we weren't tracking hardware inventory well and had a lot of stuff which had expired off lease but nobody knew where it was.
As such we were still paying stiff lease costs on old hardware, and were facing some stiff penalties on the contract and had to spend a month scrambling around cleaning up the mess.
It was the same deal, because of some bad decisions and a lack of proper management, we ended up in a bind and had to scramble to save our asses.
Just look at your story. This is what your IT department did which caused the screw up:
- Failed to listen to client needs when choosing an office suite forcing them to install something in addition to what you choose.
- Failed to monitor and lockdown desktops from having unsanctioned/unlicensed software installed.
- Failed to enforce a policy with the support staff about installing unlicensed software.
- Failed to track purchased licenses and other accounting stuff.
These painful lessons wouldn't have been a problem with competent management looking proactively at the problems. Same with our hardware lease problem we had.
"That's my "Halloween document" for 2000. Nothing to worry about. And for crying out loud, don't leak this memo this year. We all remember what happened to Vinod, right? "
I rather suspect this is a forgery.
I just don't picture Bill Gates having the sense of humor that is behind this article.
Perhaps if it had come from Steve Ballmer, I'd believe it.
It also seems to have a lot of "inside jokes" which will dig into the Linux zealots, and I just doubt that either Gates or Ballmer are paying that close of attention to the Linux situation.
Besides Vinod no longer works at Microsoft, according to a slashdot article last year.
Pretty funny anyway, and I wonder if slashdot can hit 1000 responses of outrage.
I don't know about this Indrema. I agree with others, it'll probably sell a few and there may be some interest, but I doubt it'll capture the attention of the big game houses. Yet it stands a chance of having some very good free games written for it. Sort of brings back memories of the C64, etc.
Sony... they have a headstart, and certainly have the hype.
Microsoft. I don't know. Honestly people don't buy products just because they say Microsoft on them, despite what others say.
Anybody here buy a Microsoft telephone? What? No? You did know they made one, right?
The Xbox will only sell if the design turns out to be solid. The console will need to be easy to use, durable, etc. There will also need to be a ton of cool games available.
So far from the previews it looks like this will be the case. They are certainly working with the right people to design the internals. My fear is the chassis and how well that is built, Microsoft doesn't have nearly the experience in this as Sony has.
Microsoft certainly has game developers on board. Microsoft is promising to reduce development costs by making the console and the PC use the same APIs. With the low margins in the gaming business, this is a good incentive.
I really doubt you'll see Microsoft pulling the same contractual moves as Sony has been.
Microsoft understands that the secret is in the software, and the goal to dominating the industry is to get as many software titles out as possible. Since they are the underdog, they aren't going to try to muck that up.
As such, I fully suspect they will encourage people to develop, rather than stifling them like Sony, Nintendo, etc. have done.
Specifically I doubt that Microsoft will charge excessive license fees, like Sony picking up an extra $10 off each title sold.
The XBox cost will have some profit margin in it, if not they'll make it up by selling their own games. Microsoft has been buying up some game development houses over the past several years. No need for license fees when you can absorb all the profit instead.
I doubt Microsoft will control what you can release. Nintendo has to OK the content of your game before you can sell it(I believe they've patented their ROM cartridge design), same with Sony, Sega, etc.
If people want to produce porn games for the XBox, I don't think Microsoft is stupid, they aren't going to try to prevent that. Anything that will gain them sales...
We'll see. Personally I don't doubt that Microsoft can pull this off from a development, and creative software point of view. My fear is that the resulting chassis will look like a piece of shit, and the mechanicals will work even worse. Microsoft just doesn't have good experience with consumer electronics.
If anybody saw that Microsoft phone, you'll know what I'm talking about.
MP3 distortions are very evident especially at 128kbps(so called CD quality) They become less evident the higher the bitrate, but even at 320kbps the distortions are still easily identified compared to the original CD.
Ellison pushes benchmarks when they show Oracle is faster.
When they don't he whines about how it's real-world experience which show them as being better. How does this sound when ebay has been having severe database problems for the last month?
This fucked up company is also purposefully crippling their database as a server platform with WinNT/2k clients because of their hatred of Microsoft.
Then in light of the weird new pricing strategy, what are customers supposed to do? It's a lot easier to switch out a backend database than it is clients, especially if new database software costs a tenth as much.
Oh yeah, isn't it about time for the yearly "We will bury Seibel" announcement?
I'll probably be modded down as a troll, but that's ok I've been karma whoring for a while now.:)
I'm a little bit concerned about this comment "well deserved reputation for reliability". Is this really true?
There are good and bad products out there, some commercial some free. Overall I wouldn't be so quick to say that free software has a better reputation for reliability. Overselling a product is what Microsoft is routinely accused of and I think it is a dangerous proposition especially when you are talking life critical applications.
For all the joking that goes on about MS, I still encounter Unix installations where they have BIND setup to restart in daily cron jobs, for example.
I call that a kludge, not an example of reliability.
Now it is a workaround that gives the perception that the system in it's entirety is stable. But as a programmer it doesn't give me the perception the code is better written.
Another really good example, I was playing around with RedHat 6.2 a couple of weeks ago and it's default Apache installation. The Apache config file is set by default to kill and start a new httpd process after fulfilling 100 requests because of known issues with memory leaks. (supposedly on the SPARC platform according to the docs, but still... that's ridiculous.)
I have probably purchased 50 or so CD's over the past three years because of the music samples provided by cdnow.com.
I can certainly appreciate that being able to hear something before hand helps. I don't agree that you need the whole song, as I've been able to tell from listening to the samples what the band is like.
Now the unfortunate thing is that out of those 50, probably only 10 of them were actually purchased from cdnow.com. It's more convenient to buy at Best Buy, and it only costs me maybe an extra dollar.
People who give out charity are called philanthropists, not Venture Capitalists.
I think it's fairly obvious to everybody involved that Napster is positioning themselves to make money off of their service.
Well ok, trying to position themselves. Yeah, they probably will never be profitable. But that didn't stop people from giving tons of money to Amazon, Redhat, and other dot coms.
He could sell you licensing rights to produce your own energy saving devices.
Besides, the monopoly would only exist for a short time, so yes eventually everybody would have free access to it. In the meantime the inventor get's to benefit from his work.
Why do you think people shouldn't be compensated for their work?
The key issue that makes the two mutually exclusive is the whole "And I have the right to give copies of it to anyone I want" clause of the GNU dogma.
If I spend $50 million developing some new program, according to RMS I get the opportunity to sell it to one person to recoup my costs. That's it, from then on it's free game to everybody on the planet.
Software doesn't have to be free to eliminate the proprietariness.
If you can't see that, it's you who is thinking sloppily.
Actually the sofa was quite large and could be used by 4 people at the same time.
You don't seem to understand my point. I support free software, I just don't support the GPL and the whining that goes with it.
If I write a program and decide to give it away for free, then I have done so willingly. If someone finds it useful, great. If someone decides to incorporate it in the latest RedHat Linux distribution and make some money off of it(not that RedHat is actually profitable), that's fine too.
On the other hand if I write something that I believe there is a market for, and I want to take the time to try to find customers and sell it to them. Well then, I'm going to do it.
The key here is we both have a choice. Since it's mine I get to decide what to do with it. I can give it away for free, or I can turn around and sell it.
You also have a choice. You are free to shop at Goodwill and pick up stuff others have donated for free. Or if you don't like the selection there you can go to some other store.
You get to consider the value proposition of buying software or using something that is free. Oftentimes what people are selling is worth the cost, sometimes it is not.
But it's all about choice.
What I have a problem with, and why I consider Stallman to be morally reprehensible is that he doesn't care about choice.
I don't understand your point about being able to fix software. There are many companies that produce commercial products and provide you with the source code to same.
That's not the reason behind the GPL.
Stallman is absorbed in self interest and could care less about other people. He's admitted to not getting married and having children because he feels that the need to support the family would conflict with his goal of working for free.
Hey that's great. I'm sure the Pope and several million priests and nuns would probably agree.
However, I made a choice to become a programmer... Not a Monk.
Copyright law was modified in 1978 to accomodate computer software. At that time Microsoft was a *VERY* small company and had no influence in the industry.
I suspect IBM and the other computing giants at the time would claim that this wasn't Microsoft's innovation.
Here's a clue for you: Microsoft isn't the embodiment of all evil. In fact most of the software license ideas that they consider weren't originally their own ideas.
For example, the Mainframe and Unix markets have been leasing software for years. I used to have to pay something like a $5k/year license to use a popular Unix GIS package back in the early 90's.
Don't believe me, go look up a product called 'flexlm'.
The History Channel did a story a while back on a project the US goverment looked into which basically used A-bomb's to launch something into space.
It was kind of interesting, basically we're talking a very large vehicle capable of holding like say 500-1000 people. On the bottom was a dome, and a chute. Drop a bomb through the chute, it detonates and launches the vehicle upward.
When you start loosing momentum, drop another bomb down the chute.
They had some video of a working prototype using small explosives, like dynamite or whatever. It was kind of cool.:)
The project was ultimately dropped because it was bad idea. There was the immediate concern of how to keep the occupants of the vehicle safe from the explosion and radiation.
Then of course there was the unhappy people who were on the ground when the vehicle launched into space.:)
I had an old sofa I didn't want any more. I decided to give it to Goodwill.
Goodwill turned around and sold it for $50.
Should I be screaming outrage? I GAVE IT TO YOU FOR FREE YOU MOTHER FREEAKERS!
No, because I no longer wanted the sofa and to me it was more convenient to give it away than it was to try to find someone willing to buy it. It just wasn't worth that much to me. I gave it away knowing full well that I was giving away any rights I had to the piece of property.
The same is true of software.
Although very little software has ever been released under a public domain license. Most people would release it using a non-commercial only clause, etc which also would prevent the issues you bring up.
Besides the key difference in your example... Gates would offer to give you money in trade for your cool product. Stallman would just say bad things about you to mailing lists and such to coerce you into giving it away under the GPL.
Personally I find Stallman to be the morally reprehensible one.
There is scarcity, it's called time.
If there was no scarcity then you would be able to reproduce the software by simply sitting down at your computer and thinking about what it should do and have it magically appear on your computer.
Obviously this is not the case. I use someone elses software because I am unable or unwilling to devote the time necessary to recreate the same thing myself.
It is therefore more efficient for me to spend some amount of dollars to buy a copy of someone elses work. I am trading dollars for time saved.
Piracy is all about greed, and it's not corporate greed I'm talking about.
Half the information you whined about is available to them the instant your computer contacts their web server with a browser...
MAC address, IP address, OS version, Browser version, etc.(the last three are recorded in the web server logs)
"Windows is fairly widely used but we all know that it's not necessarily better..."
I'm going to nit-pick.
This statement depends on your definition of "better".
Like you said, it is quite possible that Rambus memory is better in the context of a Playstation 2, but that doesn't mean it is better in the context of a PC.
Similar concept goes along with Windows being better. To the majority of consumers who have bought it, it is better. Otherwise they would be buying competing products and Apple wouldn't be reporting slow sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Being asked to do more than 4 hours a day is called overworking?
This isn't Microsoft's fault... it is the fault of an incompetent IT department.
We made a similar mistake where I work, except with hardware. We decided to lease hardware, went with GE Capital and then got into a bad contract.
On top of that we weren't tracking hardware inventory well and had a lot of stuff which had expired off lease but nobody knew where it was.
As such we were still paying stiff lease costs on old hardware, and were facing some stiff penalties on the contract and had to spend a month scrambling around cleaning up the mess.
It was the same deal, because of some bad decisions and a lack of proper management, we ended up in a bind and had to scramble to save our asses.
Just look at your story. This is what your IT department did which caused the screw up:
- Failed to listen to client needs when choosing an office suite forcing them to install something in addition to what you choose.
- Failed to monitor and lockdown desktops from having unsanctioned/unlicensed software installed.
- Failed to enforce a policy with the support staff about installing unlicensed software.
- Failed to track purchased licenses and other accounting stuff.
These painful lessons wouldn't have been a problem with competent management looking proactively at the problems. Same with our hardware lease problem we had.
Hmm, so now when I walk through an airport scanner they are going to know that I'm wearing a pair of Levi's and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt?
Not to mention a $20 bill in my pocket, since US currency has had these magnetic strips for years now.
Still not quite sure how this relates to privacy since it doesn't identify you as a person.
Wow, such big words for an Anonymous coward.
What line? There was no line when I read it.
"That's my "Halloween document" for 2000. Nothing to worry about. And for crying out loud, don't leak this memo this year. We all remember what happened to Vinod, right? "
I rather suspect this is a forgery.
I just don't picture Bill Gates having the sense of humor that is behind this article.
Perhaps if it had come from Steve Ballmer, I'd believe it.
It also seems to have a lot of "inside jokes" which will dig into the Linux zealots, and I just doubt that either Gates or Ballmer are paying that close of attention to the Linux situation.
Besides Vinod no longer works at Microsoft, according to a slashdot article last year.
Pretty funny anyway, and I wonder if slashdot can hit 1000 responses of outrage.
I don't know about this Indrema. I agree with others, it'll probably sell a few and there may be some interest, but I doubt it'll capture the attention of the big game houses. Yet it stands a chance of having some very good free games written for it. Sort of brings back memories of the C64, etc.
Sony... they have a headstart, and certainly have the hype.
Microsoft. I don't know. Honestly people don't buy products just because they say Microsoft on them, despite what others say.
Anybody here buy a Microsoft telephone? What? No? You did know they made one, right?
The Xbox will only sell if the design turns out to be solid. The console will need to be easy to use, durable, etc. There will also need to be a ton of cool games available.
So far from the previews it looks like this will be the case. They are certainly working with the right people to design the internals. My fear is the chassis and how well that is built, Microsoft doesn't have nearly the experience in this as Sony has.
Microsoft certainly has game developers on board. Microsoft is promising to reduce development costs by making the console and the PC use the same APIs. With the low margins in the gaming business, this is a good incentive.
I really doubt you'll see Microsoft pulling the same contractual moves as Sony has been.
Microsoft understands that the secret is in the software, and the goal to dominating the industry is to get as many software titles out as possible. Since they are the underdog, they aren't going to try to muck that up.
As such, I fully suspect they will encourage people to develop, rather than stifling them like Sony, Nintendo, etc. have done.
Specifically I doubt that Microsoft will charge excessive license fees, like Sony picking up an extra $10 off each title sold.
The XBox cost will have some profit margin in it, if not they'll make it up by selling their own games. Microsoft has been buying up some game development houses over the past several years. No need for license fees when you can absorb all the profit instead.
I doubt Microsoft will control what you can release. Nintendo has to OK the content of your game before you can sell it(I believe they've patented their ROM cartridge design), same with Sony, Sega, etc.
If people want to produce porn games for the XBox, I don't think Microsoft is stupid, they aren't going to try to prevent that. Anything that will gain them sales...
We'll see. Personally I don't doubt that Microsoft can pull this off from a development, and creative software point of view. My fear is that the resulting chassis will look like a piece of shit, and the mechanicals will work even worse. Microsoft just doesn't have good experience with consumer electronics.
If anybody saw that Microsoft phone, you'll know what I'm talking about.
Give me some of what you are smoking, dude!
MP3 distortions are very evident especially at 128kbps(so called CD quality) They become less evident the higher the bitrate, but even at 320kbps the distortions are still easily identified compared to the original CD.
Ellison pushes benchmarks when they show Oracle is faster.
When they don't he whines about how it's real-world experience which show them as being better. How does this sound when ebay has been having severe database problems for the last month?
This fucked up company is also purposefully crippling their database as a server platform with WinNT/2k clients because of their hatred of Microsoft.
Then in light of the weird new pricing strategy, what are customers supposed to do? It's a lot easier to switch out a backend database than it is clients, especially if new database software costs a tenth as much.
Oh yeah, isn't it about time for the yearly "We will bury Seibel" announcement?
Larry Ellison needs a boot to the head.
I'll probably be modded down as a troll, but that's ok I've been karma whoring for a while now. :)
I'm a little bit concerned about this comment "well deserved reputation for reliability". Is this really true?
There are good and bad products out there, some commercial some free. Overall I wouldn't be so quick to say that free software has a better reputation for reliability. Overselling a product is what Microsoft is routinely accused of and I think it is a dangerous proposition especially when you are talking life critical applications.
For all the joking that goes on about MS, I still encounter Unix installations where they have BIND setup to restart in daily cron jobs, for example.
I call that a kludge, not an example of reliability.
Now it is a workaround that gives the perception that the system in it's entirety is stable. But as a programmer it doesn't give me the perception the code is better written.
Another really good example, I was playing around with RedHat 6.2 a couple of weeks ago and it's default Apache installation. The Apache config file is set by default to kill and start a new httpd process after fulfilling 100 requests because of known issues with memory leaks. (supposedly on the SPARC platform according to the docs, but still... that's ridiculous.)
Umm, Oracle is still supporting Oracle 7 up til the end of this year. If you give them more money they'll help you out next year as well.
The current version of Oracle is 8i(aka 8.1.6), and has been out for quite some time and has proven relatively solid.
I don't know if Oracle 9 is currently shipping? I know Ellison announced it a couple of weeks back.
I have probably purchased 50 or so CD's over the past three years because of the music samples provided by cdnow.com.
I can certainly appreciate that being able to hear something before hand helps. I don't agree that you need the whole song, as I've been able to tell from listening to the samples what the band is like.
Now the unfortunate thing is that out of those 50, probably only 10 of them were actually purchased from cdnow.com. It's more convenient to buy at Best Buy, and it only costs me maybe an extra dollar.
People who give out charity are called philanthropists, not Venture Capitalists.
I think it's fairly obvious to everybody involved that Napster is positioning themselves to make money off of their service.
Well ok, trying to position themselves. Yeah, they probably will never be profitable. But that didn't stop people from giving tons of money to Amazon, Redhat, and other dot coms.
He doesn't have to have a monopoly.
He could sell you licensing rights to produce your own energy saving devices.
Besides, the monopoly would only exist for a short time, so yes eventually everybody would have free access to it. In the meantime the inventor get's to benefit from his work.
Why do you think people shouldn't be compensated for their work?
The key issue that makes the two mutually exclusive is the whole "And I have the right to give copies of it to anyone I want" clause of the GNU dogma.
If I spend $50 million developing some new program, according to RMS I get the opportunity to sell it to one person to recoup my costs. That's it, from then on it's free game to everybody on the planet.
Software doesn't have to be free to eliminate the proprietariness.
If you can't see that, it's you who is thinking sloppily.
Ahh, but I actually did give a sofa to goodwill.
Using your story would be telling lies.
Actually the sofa was quite large and could be used by 4 people at the same time.
You don't seem to understand my point. I support free software, I just don't support the GPL and the whining that goes with it.
If I write a program and decide to give it away for free, then I have done so willingly. If someone finds it useful, great. If someone decides to incorporate it in the latest RedHat Linux distribution and make some money off of it(not that RedHat is actually profitable), that's fine too.
On the other hand if I write something that I believe there is a market for, and I want to take the time to try to find customers and sell it to them. Well then, I'm going to do it.
The key here is we both have a choice. Since it's mine I get to decide what to do with it. I can give it away for free, or I can turn around and sell it.
You also have a choice. You are free to shop at Goodwill and pick up stuff others have donated for free. Or if you don't like the selection there you can go to some other store.
You get to consider the value proposition of buying software or using something that is free. Oftentimes what people are selling is worth the cost, sometimes it is not.
But it's all about choice.
What I have a problem with, and why I consider Stallman to be morally reprehensible is that he doesn't care about choice.
I don't understand your point about being able to fix software. There are many companies that produce commercial products and provide you with the source code to same.
That's not the reason behind the GPL.
Stallman is absorbed in self interest and could care less about other people. He's admitted to not getting married and having children because he feels that the need to support the family would conflict with his goal of working for free.
Hey that's great. I'm sure the Pope and several million priests and nuns would probably agree.
However, I made a choice to become a programmer... Not a Monk.
Copyright law was modified in 1978 to accomodate computer software. At that time Microsoft was a *VERY* small company and had no influence in the industry.
I suspect IBM and the other computing giants at the time would claim that this wasn't Microsoft's innovation.
Here's a clue for you: Microsoft isn't the embodiment of all evil. In fact most of the software license ideas that they consider weren't originally their own ideas.
For example, the Mainframe and Unix markets have been leasing software for years. I used to have to pay something like a $5k/year license to use a popular Unix GIS package back in the early 90's.
Don't believe me, go look up a product called 'flexlm'.
The History Channel did a story a while back on a project the US goverment looked into which basically used A-bomb's to launch something into space.
:)
:)
It was kind of interesting, basically we're talking a very large vehicle capable of holding like say 500-1000 people. On the bottom was a dome, and a chute. Drop a bomb through the chute, it detonates and launches the vehicle upward.
When you start loosing momentum, drop another bomb down the chute.
They had some video of a working prototype using small explosives, like dynamite or whatever. It was kind of cool.
The project was ultimately dropped because it was bad idea. There was the immediate concern of how to keep the occupants of the vehicle safe from the explosion and radiation.
Then of course there was the unhappy people who were on the ground when the vehicle launched into space.
The Playstation 2 was created by the devil's own hand. It is evil.
You should not buy a Playstation 2, much less help to write software that runs on it.
I had an old sofa I didn't want any more. I decided to give it to Goodwill.
Goodwill turned around and sold it for $50.
Should I be screaming outrage? I GAVE IT TO YOU FOR FREE YOU MOTHER FREEAKERS!
No, because I no longer wanted the sofa and to me it was more convenient to give it away than it was to try to find someone willing to buy it. It just wasn't worth that much to me. I gave it away knowing full well that I was giving away any rights I had to the piece of property.
The same is true of software.
Although very little software has ever been released under a public domain license. Most people would release it using a non-commercial only clause, etc which also would prevent the issues you bring up.
Besides the key difference in your example... Gates would offer to give you money in trade for your cool product. Stallman would just say bad things about you to mailing lists and such to coerce you into giving it away under the GPL.
Personally I find Stallman to be the morally reprehensible one.
There is scarcity, it's called time. If there was no scarcity then you would be able to reproduce the software by simply sitting down at your computer and thinking about what it should do and have it magically appear on your computer. Obviously this is not the case. I use someone elses software because I am unable or unwilling to devote the time necessary to recreate the same thing myself. It is therefore more efficient for me to spend some amount of dollars to buy a copy of someone elses work. I am trading dollars for time saved. Piracy is all about greed, and it's not corporate greed I'm talking about.
Half the information you whined about is available to them the instant your computer contacts their web server with a browser...
MAC address, IP address, OS version, Browser version, etc.(the last three are recorded in the web server logs)
I doubt there is any validity to your claims.
"Windows is fairly widely used but we all know that it's not necessarily better..."
I'm going to nit-pick.
This statement depends on your definition of "better".
Like you said, it is quite possible that Rambus memory is better in the context of a Playstation 2, but that doesn't mean it is better in the context of a PC.
Similar concept goes along with Windows being better. To the majority of consumers who have bought it, it is better. Otherwise they would be buying competing products and Apple wouldn't be reporting slow sales.
Wow, I guess you're not going to be upgrading your PC until the year 2030, eh?