What percentage of Microsoft revenues and profits are made from MSN? I don't exactly know. Perhaps they only loose money, perhaps they make a tiny bit.
But surely, this is the only point where Microsoft and AOL can rightly be considered competitors.
Or do you think that they compete with Internet browsers? Well, that is a non-profit thing today, where AOL is trying as hard as Microsoft to force Microsoft's browser upon the unsuspecting public. With Microsoft shipping its browser with every Intel machine that isn't screwed together by consumers themselves and also with all Apples - well, that's what Microsoft bought a slice of Apple for - there isn't a market for browsers today - whatever other browsers may technically exist.
There are two reasons that Microsoft and AOL are considered competitors. The first is that Microsoft wants a monopoly in the business AOL is in and - as has been its decades long policy - it uses its monopoly in operating systems (both what they ship themselves, and Apple's stuff that they control) to obtain it. Just click "the internet" on your new computer, and loo, there is MSN. Now there's a piece of control over the internet connection market that AOL can't match, and therefore this company is likely to loose in the long term.
Second there is the big noise that Microsoft made about AOL being a formidable competitor, without there being any business like ground to call them this, as AOL was not, and is not competing for any of the relevant sources of Microsoft's income.
All this AOL-is-our-biggest-competitor stuff that was reprinted after Microsoft's press releases is a bubble. A look at each company's sources of revenue will show this.
The article fails to mention it, but the real idea behind making laptops mandatory is to make relatively expensive licensing of several software packages of Microsoft - and no other company - mandatory.
The DoD is falling for Redmond in a big way. No way the DoD can obtain the right to improve on what they get or let other parties improve on it. Just do Microsoft's bidding like everybody else.
It's a pity that nobody here seems to have actually read Liebowitz' article.
It's quite hilarious to read how Microsoft is a non-profit-maximizing, in other words: altruistic, organization, and that it would be best for all if it also took over the games and server markets that are currently dominated by profit-maximizing companies.
A pool of exclusively W2K servers will be able to service hotmail's clients, if not today, then with SP1 or SP2. Microsoft wants to change servers badly and I can think of no reason why they wouldn't be able to make this work. However, everyone knows that the migration is taking place for the sole reason that Microsoft, the owner of Hotmail, wants to get rid of non-Microsoft servers for the services it provides. Performance or cost are non-issues in this matter. As a result, no lesson can be learned from the migration, except that W2K can actually be used to run something like Hotmail. Of course, I'd love to see Microsoft's sales force quip that only if you are providing services to some 60 million customers you can rely on free software, but above that number one really should go with W2K.
Perhaps you should read something other than your own corporate propaganda. Concerning the benefits of integrating Windows and MSIE, read Boies interrogation of Allchin where Allchin had to admit point by point that the claimed benefits would be available by separate distribution also. The trial brought up facts that countered Microsoft's claims about the benefits of integration where two of the three judges of the Appeals Court wrote their conclusion without doing as much as bothering with relevant facts. As for your silly analysis of the role of the Netscape browser, why not talk about the obvious: if a killer application is in principle available for multiple platforms it will lower the applications barrier to entry in the operating systems market. Note that contrary to Netscape, Microsoft does not port applications to operating systems cheaper than Windows.
Furthermore, making exclusive deals on the basis of monopoly power is not ever "pro-competitive", just as not shooting people is not a philantropic act. At best a marketing act would be "competitive", although in this case it is merely not declared illegal.
Now that we have arrived at your use of Newspeak, and given your "many slashdot readers" line, I think it is not out of line to attribute some claims of the Microsoft company line to you.
1. a.) An operating system can be written by a single person in a short period of time, without this person having previously marketed anything, which shows that there is intensive competition. b.) Windows could only have been written by Microsoft's spending of many billions of dollars and only because Microsoft also produced a text processor, a spreadsheet, a flat database application - and whatever else is in MS Office nowadays.
2. a.) Linux is a serious competitor on the desktop for Microsoft and there are advanced applications in all categories for the Linux desktop (testimony under oath of Paul Maritz). b.) Linux on the desktop is unrealistic.
3. a.) In no industry there is so much competition as in the software markets Microsoft operates in. b.) There is no viable replacement for Microsoft's products now and there won't be in any short term, so any harm to Microsoft will bring significant harm to the global economy at large.
I wish you and your fellows would at some time accept the logical rule of "not (A and not A)". Alas, you don't and won't. Not accepting rules of logic makes any form of discussion with you and your fellows a waste of time.
If today's suit of monopoly protection laws and licenses had been operational twenty years ago, Compaq's engineers would have been jailed for reverse engineering the IBM PC bios. Suddenly software could be run - and yes, copied - on non-IBM-made computer systems. Did the markets collapse? Were consumers hurt? No way. This was the beginning of the cutthroat competition in the computer hardware sector that brought down prices at the same time as improving on every quantitative measure. Such were the halcyon days of the legacy market-democratic system that has now been replaced by the plutocracy of monopolistic companies and trusts.
The linked to picture is captioned as: "Shown above is the infamous skinny dipping scene." Actually, what was probably most shocking was that she wasn't merely displayed clearly nude in the water (as seen on the photograph), but also on land. She wanders around a bit, walks over a meadow and caresses a horse, all in the nude, though with a gauze. Innocent beauty.
Of course, Microsoft has chosen to provide documentation on removing Linux rather than on how to, say, dual-boot NT and Linux. Also, we are still a long stretch removed from Microsoft producing software that won't maim anything not produced by Microsoft that it finds on the machine.
At Microsoft, customer demand is met only up to the point where it starts to conflict with company marketing policy.
Of course, one basic rule of Microsoft's company marketing policy is to never ever mention a product that a customer may run rather than any Microsoft product. Therefore even mentioning how to remove Linux is a victory for those at Microsoft who want to satisfy customers even if it costs a bit of control. If this continues, Microsoft might even start listening to their customers and fulfilling their demands, rather then just telling them what is good for them.
That would be both good for Microsoft - it would start to become a company, rather than a bully - and good for Linux.
One of the three witnesses that Microsoft called up during the trial was Rational's Michael Devlin. Rational produces software to support software development teams. I greatly admire their ideas on this matter. Aside from component Rational Rose, for which they are famous, they base software on components like MS Word, MS Project and MS Excel. Even though this makes their software useless for me - I don't run MS platforms - I respect the skill of Rational's engineers. I don't see how buying J++ would benefit Rational's business though. They have to lick MS's boots as part of their business dependency, but paying for something that is outside the focus of their business seems pretty stupid to me. I wonder what their, eh, rationale is. After dropping support for Windows on Alpha - (Compaq dropping support? - Hey, who owns Windows anyway?) - it is interesting that Microsoft is once more dropping something that some people have trusted, possibly because Microsoft's name backed it up. Clearly, Microsoft's size doesn't guarantee that customers that allowed themselves to become locked into to MS specific technology will find this technology supported on the long term. It can be dropped suddenly and without announcement. How many people will now be able to say: "I got fired for choosing Microsoft"?
From Microsoft's press release "Rogers Communications and Microsoft to Bring Advanced Television Services to Canada":
The agreements announced today include the licensing of Microsoft TV and Microsoft TV Server to support at least one million set-top boxes, and the development of Rogers branded e-mail and Canadian-specific content services powered by the Microsoft Network (MSN) network of Internet services and other Microsoft properties. Microsoft also will make a CDN $600 million (approximately $400 million U.S.) investment in Rogers to further demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to Rogers success in developing and rolling out new digital services.
What a joke on economic reasoning: Microsoft and Roger's strike agreements on the latter party forcing MS technology down the throats of its clients, and than it is said Microsoft also will make a CDN $600... investment in Rogers to further demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to Rogers success in developing and rolling out new digital services. They present this as if the agreements are unrelated to the investment and the investment is primarily symbolic ("demonstrate commmitment").
Microsoft has a long history of working with cable companies to help accelerate the availability of broadband access and features, such as advanced television services, as evidenced by its previous agreements with Comcast, TCI, AT&T, United Pan-Europe Communications, NTL, and TVCabo.
"Working with"?! They have been buying cable share like mad. I wonder what their ownership percentage of all cable companies globally is by now.
It is sad to see how a mind that was once brilliant can't produce an idea of its own today and resorts to name-calling.
The article we find here consists of cheap and unwarranted comparisons, ignoring relevant aspects, and plain incompetence.
Has the technology of the internal combustion engine disappeared when it aged? Are communists like open source activitists in thinking hard about ways to make money and founding companies on the resulting ideas? What do "shipments" matter if software can be copied freely? Is a programmer's editor something like a secretary's word processor? And how would java which is not an operating system possibly be better than Linux or W2K (A JVM needs an OS to run, clearly Metcalfe has trouble understanding some fundamental principles of software architecture.)
I pity this man who is grown up, respected and yet not able to write anything better than a "slashdot-kiddie" in a moment of anger.
we would have been hearing how cars provided competition for Standard Oil because these could also run on oil provided by other vendors (even though none had relevant market share or production capacity at the time, so no choice was available to buyers). Furthermore, we would have heard that the alleged monopoly on oil could fall apart at any moment, as a multitude of people were digging in the earth with the purpose of striking oil. And lastly, they would have told that oil was about to be overtaken by nuclear and solar energy (and one shouldn't bother about questioning whether these can provide energy for cars) so, despite Standard Oil's market share, the company wouldn't have market power at the moment of investigation.
One company doesn't want to hurt another if it doesn't serve their goal of profit maximization. Get the idea out of your head that IBM - as a company - wants to hurt Microsoft. Of course, it has employees to whom this applies, but if they give retribution of Microsoft higher priority than making money for IBM, they can go look for another job. This is how it should be.
So far, IBM's involvement with open source seems to be balanced and well considered. They wanted to make money with an application server, not a web server, so they could build on top of apache. They wanted to push java, so they open-sourced jikes.
Of course, they also support open source to some degree by selling Netfinity servers with Linux. Instead of saying that they try to get back at Microsoft by doing something like this, I'd rather say that they seek independence and more control over the software they ship. This is weaker than the attitude the article describes.
It is interesting to see that Microsoft is acting upon what its executives have been claiming in court.
First, Mr. Maritz claimed that he expected that cable owners would in the future have a big say on what software is distributed. Well, this opportunity for "competition" has been disappearing through the many billions of dollars that Microsoft has sunk into cable ownerships during the last two years.
Second, Microsoft claimed to be under competitive pressure from platform independent java. So the use their dominant position in Windows programming tools to reduce the standard to a set of proprietary technologies. Guess what will happen to Inprise's JBuilder?
Third, Microsoft claimed to be under competitive pressure from "middleware". Has anyone heard from ColdFusion's announced port of its server to Linux since they announced their "strategic alliance" with Microsoft? Does anyone expect to hear anything from Inprise's CORBA standard Visibroker, after Inprises "strategic alliance" with Microsoft that includes adoption of COM+?
Microsoft is presently buying markets from customers (cable) and platform dependency from middleware vendors that could be or become platform agnostic (Allaire, Inprise). Thus they are consistently supporting and extending their Windows monopoly.
A very Internet-aware and readable economic book about standards and standard wars is "Information Rules - A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy" by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian.
Following in the tracks of Bill Gates who was touring European government leaders earlier this year to make them support Microsoft's monopoly, especially in all forms of education, Ballmer is now launching a second wave of attack.
Eines der erklärten Anliegen Microsofts in Europa ist es, "die Regierungen zu ermutigen, das schwedische Modell zu prüfen."
So what is this "Swedish model" that Microsoft is pushing?
Die schwedische Regierung bietet seit 1996 zusammen mit Hard- und Softwareproduzenten [HP, Microsoft] sowie InternetProvidern komplette EinsteigerPakete angeboten, die den Gesamtanteil an PCs innerhalb kurzer Zeit signifikant gehoben hatte.
Uh oh, but then Mr. Ballmer is pushing a regulatory actions of states, which pushes the warez of specific vendors, in casu Microsoft. I wonder if Mr. Ballmer knows that his collegues think the US government is doing something similar for Netscape - and how they feel about this.
Ballmer "expects" StarDivision to disappear, thereby of course further driving the market in Office suites towards total domination by Microsoft.
OEM's can license StarOffice far cheaper than MS Office and many Linux users such as myself have discovered that StarOffice allows them to do everything they wish an Office suite to do - which is often merely reading their managers' documents or providing simple documents themselves.
Naturally, Mr. Ballmer would gladly see a package with such price/performance marks disappear so he "predicts" that this will indeed happen. He effectively tells potential customers to focus on the ability of StarDivision to withstand Microsoft's market power, rather than on product quality.
Aside from stimulating pro-Microsoft regulation and spreading FUD, Ballmer's method to take in government leaders clearly consists of flattering them: "Viktor Klima kommt ja aus der Programmierer-Ecke. Ich glaube, wir werden in Österreich auf offene Ohren stossen."
From the announcement it seems more like a certain developer got permission to use ImageMagick code for KDE extensions. Good thing as it prevents another "kimp" affair.
It makes good sense to me to have programs like ImageMagick and, yes, the gimp, fit in the different desktop projects we have now.
If the effort is to be no more than porting, it is worth it. If it is more, and developers of, in this case, ImageMagick and KDE, find a way to work together to create new functionality, it would be even better.
At Apple executives were trembling when Microsoft threatened to withdraw their Office port. In an office environment where certain people and clients have the nasty habit of sending you Word and Excel documents it is important to deal with those formats, unless you are prepared to deal with the education of the people sending them.
StarOffice, WordPerfect and ApplixWare are really a boon for those running Linux in a hostile environment. I never touch the stuff to produce anything, but I love to be able to run Linux at the office and still be able to communicate with the rest of the folks.
Using the StarOffice "filter update" now and look forward to 5.1.
"Linux supporters have reacted violently to the Microsoft SA release (Independent research shows NT 4.0 outperforms Linux) published on ITWeb yesterday, saying "the study was paid for by Microsoft" and that "a very highly-tuned NT server was pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server".
That is, the claim attributed by Eric to Ian Hatton was really made by reacting Linux supporters.
What Hatton did admit, was:
"Microsoft did sponsor the benchmark testing and the NT server was better tuned than the Linux one."
This isn't much, but it is sufficient. Hatton admits that "the NT server was better tuned than the Linux was" and even without adjectives that invalidates the report.
With Pfeiffer gone, Compaq now has an acting CEO in the person of Ben Rosen. During the trial Mr. Rosen has testified for Microsoft and lied in the process. Mr. Rosen claimed to have visited Redmond only once, which was when he was asked to testify.
However, the DOJ managed to dig up an e-mail from Bill Gates to Rosen kindly thanking him for the great effort he had made in coming to Redmond repeatedly on behalf of the trial.
I have never been interested in Compaq and know next to nothing about Pfeiffer. But right now they have a CEO whose allegiance to Microsoft is sufficiently strong that he is willing to lie for them even when under oath. That can't be good.
Not only has ZDnet a linux page/site, it also has a Linux FUD rebuttal page that offers the opportunity to answer FUD. They sure are spreading it, but at least they seem to be open for criticism.
For years, people in Redmond have been telling each other and the rest of the world that paranoia is a bliss.
Believing that all of the world conspires against them, without seeing any evidence for this is concerned sensible. Thus the line between thought and reality has been cut in Redmond. They believe it is better that way.
Gates doesn't have to check reality to check if his beliefs are true. He simply believes and that's both the beginning and the end of it.
Seconded. Anyone who dislikes the Microsoft situation would do well to consider her or his talents and see how they can be used to change the situation.
My own effort can be found at http://billwatch.net/. I never have thought of Propaganda's fine mix of text concerning Microsoft with the constructive effort of producing high quality backgrounds for Linux (using one right now!). No doubt other people can come up with completely different projects.
Slashdot Mirror
What percentage of Microsoft revenues and profits are made from MSN? I don't exactly know. Perhaps they only loose money, perhaps they make a tiny bit.
But surely, this is the only point where Microsoft and AOL can rightly be considered competitors.
Or do you think that they compete with Internet browsers? Well, that is a non-profit thing today, where AOL is trying as hard as Microsoft to force Microsoft's browser upon the unsuspecting public. With Microsoft shipping its browser with every Intel machine that isn't screwed together by consumers themselves and also with all Apples - well, that's what Microsoft bought a slice of Apple for - there isn't a market for browsers today - whatever other browsers may technically exist.
There are two reasons that Microsoft and AOL are considered competitors. The first is that Microsoft wants a monopoly in the business AOL is in and - as has been its decades long policy - it uses its monopoly in operating systems (both what they ship themselves, and Apple's stuff that they control) to obtain it. Just click "the internet" on your new computer, and loo, there is MSN. Now there's a piece of control over the internet connection market that AOL can't match, and therefore this company is likely to loose in the long term.
Second there is the big noise that Microsoft made about AOL being a formidable competitor, without there being any business like ground to call them this, as AOL was not, and is not competing for any of the relevant sources of Microsoft's income.
All this AOL-is-our-biggest-competitor stuff that was reprinted after Microsoft's press releases is a bubble. A look at each company's sources of revenue will show this.
The article fails to mention it, but the real idea behind making laptops mandatory is to make relatively expensive licensing of several software packages of Microsoft - and no other company - mandatory.
The DoD is falling for Redmond in a big way. No way the DoD can obtain the right to improve on what they get or let other parties improve on it. Just do Microsoft's bidding like everybody else.
It's a pity that nobody here seems to have actually read Liebowitz' article.
It's quite hilarious to read how Microsoft is a non-profit-maximizing, in other words: altruistic, organization, and that it would be best for all if it also took over the games and server markets that are currently dominated by profit-maximizing companies.
So these are the paragons of capitalism?!
A pool of exclusively W2K servers will be able to service hotmail's clients, if not today, then with SP1 or SP2.
Microsoft wants to change servers badly and I can think of no reason why they wouldn't be able to make this work.
However, everyone knows that the migration is taking place for the sole reason that Microsoft, the owner of Hotmail, wants to get rid of non-Microsoft servers for the services it provides. Performance or cost are non-issues in this matter.
As a result, no lesson can be learned from the migration, except that W2K can actually be used to run something like Hotmail.
Of course, I'd love to see Microsoft's sales force quip that only if you are providing services to some 60 million customers you can rely on free software, but above that number one really should go with W2K.
Perhaps you should read something other than your own corporate propaganda.
Concerning the benefits of integrating Windows and MSIE, read Boies interrogation of Allchin where Allchin had to admit point by point that the claimed benefits would be available by separate distribution also. The trial brought up facts that countered Microsoft's claims about the benefits of integration where two of the three judges of the Appeals Court wrote their conclusion without doing as much as bothering with relevant facts.
As for your silly analysis of the role of the Netscape browser, why not talk about the obvious: if a killer application is in principle available for multiple platforms it will lower the applications barrier to entry in the operating systems market. Note that contrary to Netscape, Microsoft does not port applications to operating systems cheaper than Windows.
Furthermore, making exclusive deals on the basis of monopoly power is not ever "pro-competitive", just as not shooting people is not a philantropic act. At best a marketing act would be "competitive", although in this case it is merely not declared illegal.
Now that we have arrived at your use of Newspeak, and given your "many slashdot readers" line, I think it is not out of line to attribute some claims of the Microsoft company line to you.
1. a.) An operating system can be written by a single person in a short period of time, without this person having previously marketed anything, which shows that there is intensive competition. b.) Windows could only have been written by Microsoft's spending of many billions of dollars and only because Microsoft also produced a text processor, a spreadsheet, a flat database application - and whatever else is in MS Office nowadays.
2. a.) Linux is a serious competitor on the desktop for Microsoft and there are advanced applications in all categories for the Linux desktop (testimony under oath of Paul Maritz). b.) Linux on the desktop is unrealistic.
3. a.) In no industry there is so much competition as in the software markets Microsoft operates in. b.) There is no viable replacement for Microsoft's products now and there won't be in any short term, so any harm to Microsoft will bring significant harm to the global economy at large.
I wish you and your fellows would at some time accept the logical rule of "not (A and not A)". Alas, you don't and won't. Not accepting rules of logic makes any form of discussion with you and your fellows a waste of time.
If today's suit of monopoly protection laws and licenses had been operational twenty years ago, Compaq's engineers would have been jailed for reverse engineering the IBM PC bios. Suddenly software could be run - and yes, copied - on non-IBM-made computer systems. Did the markets collapse? Were consumers hurt? No way. This was the beginning of the cutthroat competition in the computer hardware sector that brought down prices at the same time as improving on every quantitative measure. Such were the halcyon days of the legacy market-democratic system that has now been replaced by the plutocracy of monopolistic companies and trusts.
The linked to picture is captioned as: "Shown above is the infamous skinny dipping scene."
Actually, what was probably most shocking was that she wasn't merely displayed clearly nude in the water (as seen on the photograph), but also on land. She wanders around a bit, walks over a meadow and caresses a horse, all in the nude, though with a gauze. Innocent beauty.
At Microsoft, customer demand is met only up to the point where it starts to conflict with company marketing policy.
Of course, one basic rule of Microsoft's company marketing policy is to never ever mention a product that a customer may run rather than any Microsoft product. Therefore even mentioning how to remove Linux is a victory for those at Microsoft who want to satisfy customers even if it costs a bit of control. If this continues, Microsoft might even start listening to their customers and fulfilling their demands, rather then just telling them what is good for them.
That would be both good for Microsoft - it would start to become a company, rather than a bully - and good for Linux.
One of the three witnesses that Microsoft called up during the trial was Rational's Michael Devlin. Rational produces software to support software development teams. I greatly admire their ideas on this matter. Aside from component Rational Rose, for which they are famous, they base software on components like MS Word, MS Project and MS Excel. Even though this makes their software useless for me - I don't run MS platforms - I respect the skill of Rational's engineers. I don't see how buying J++ would benefit Rational's business though. They have to lick MS's boots as part of their business dependency, but paying for something that is outside the focus of their business seems pretty stupid to me. I wonder what their, eh, rationale is. After dropping support for Windows on Alpha - (Compaq dropping support? - Hey, who owns Windows anyway?) - it is interesting that Microsoft is once more dropping something that some people have trusted, possibly because Microsoft's name backed it up. Clearly, Microsoft's size doesn't guarantee that customers that allowed themselves to become locked into to MS specific technology will find this technology supported on the long term. It can be dropped suddenly and without announcement. How many people will now be able to say: "I got fired for choosing Microsoft"?
What a joke on economic reasoning: Microsoft and Roger's strike agreements on the latter party forcing MS technology down the throats of its clients, and than it is said Microsoft also will make a CDN $600 ... investment in Rogers to further demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to Rogers success in developing and rolling out new digital services. They present this as if the agreements are unrelated to the investment and the investment is primarily symbolic ("demonstrate commmitment").
"Working with"?! They have been buying cable share like mad. I wonder what their ownership percentage of all cable companies globally is by now.
Rogers Communications and Microsoft to Bring Advanced Television Services to Canada
http://www.microsof t.com/presspass/features/1999/07-12tvpak.htm
The article we find here consists of cheap and unwarranted comparisons, ignoring relevant aspects, and plain incompetence.
Has the technology of the internal combustion engine disappeared when it aged? Are communists like open source activitists in thinking hard about ways to make money and founding companies on the resulting ideas? What do "shipments" matter if software can be copied freely? Is a programmer's editor something like a secretary's word processor? And how would java which is not an operating system possibly be better than Linux or W2K (A JVM needs an OS to run, clearly Metcalfe has trouble understanding some fundamental principles of software architecture.)
I pity this man who is grown up, respected and yet not able to write anything better than a "slashdot-kiddie" in a moment of anger.
we would have been hearing how cars provided competition for Standard Oil because these could also run on oil provided by other vendors (even though none had relevant market share or production capacity at the time, so no choice was available to buyers).
Furthermore, we would have heard that the alleged monopoly on oil could fall apart at any moment, as a multitude of people were digging in the earth with the purpose of striking oil.
And lastly, they would have told that oil was about to be overtaken by nuclear and solar energy (and one shouldn't bother about questioning whether these can provide energy for cars) so, despite Standard Oil's market share, the company wouldn't have market power at the moment of investigation.
So far, IBM's involvement with open source seems to be balanced and well considered. They wanted to make money with an application server, not a web server, so they could build on top of apache. They wanted to push java, so they open-sourced jikes.
Of course, they also support open source to some degree by selling Netfinity servers with Linux. Instead of saying that they try to get back at Microsoft by doing something like this, I'd rather say that they seek independence and more control over the software they ship. This is weaker than the attitude the article describes.
First, Mr. Maritz claimed that he expected that cable owners would in the future have a big say on what software is distributed. Well, this opportunity for "competition" has been disappearing through the many billions of dollars that Microsoft has sunk into cable ownerships during the last two years.
Second, Microsoft claimed to be under competitive pressure from platform independent java. So the use their dominant position in Windows programming tools to reduce the standard to a set of proprietary technologies. Guess what will happen to Inprise's JBuilder?
Third, Microsoft claimed to be under competitive pressure from "middleware". Has anyone heard from ColdFusion's announced port of its server to Linux since they announced their "strategic alliance" with Microsoft? Does anyone expect to hear anything from Inprise's CORBA standard Visibroker, after Inprises "strategic alliance" with Microsoft that includes adoption of COM+?
Microsoft is presently buying markets from customers (cable) and platform dependency from middleware vendors that could be or become platform agnostic (Allaire, Inprise). Thus they are consistently supporting and extending their Windows monopoly.
You can find more information on the associated website: http://www.inforules.com.
Eines der erklärten Anliegen Microsofts in Europa ist es, "die Regierungen zu ermutigen, das schwedische Modell zu prüfen."
So what is this "Swedish model" that Microsoft is pushing?
Die schwedische Regierung bietet seit 1996 zusammen mit Hard- und Softwareproduzenten [HP, Microsoft] sowie InternetProvidern komplette EinsteigerPakete angeboten, die den Gesamtanteil an PCs innerhalb kurzer Zeit signifikant gehoben hatte.
Uh oh, but then Mr. Ballmer is pushing a regulatory actions of states, which pushes the warez of specific vendors, in casu Microsoft. I wonder if Mr. Ballmer knows that his collegues think the US government is doing something similar for Netscape - and how they feel about this.
Ballmer "expects" StarDivision to disappear, thereby of course further driving the market in Office suites towards total domination by Microsoft.
OEM's can license StarOffice far cheaper than MS Office and many Linux users such as myself have discovered that StarOffice allows them to do everything they wish an Office suite to do - which is often merely reading their managers' documents or providing simple documents themselves.
Naturally, Mr. Ballmer would gladly see a package with such price/performance marks disappear so he "predicts" that this will indeed happen. He effectively tells potential customers to focus on the ability of StarDivision to withstand Microsoft's market power, rather than on product quality.
Aside from stimulating pro-Microsoft regulation and spreading FUD, Ballmer's method to take in government leaders clearly consists of flattering them: "Viktor Klima kommt ja aus der Programmierer-Ecke. Ich glaube, wir werden in Österreich auf offene Ohren stossen."
It makes good sense to me to have programs like ImageMagick and, yes, the gimp, fit in the different desktop projects we have now.
If the effort is to be no more than porting, it is worth it. If it is more, and developers of, in this case, ImageMagick and KDE, find a way to work together to create new functionality, it would be even better.
Good luck to all involved developers.
StarOffice, WordPerfect and ApplixWare are really a boon for those running Linux in a hostile environment. I never touch the stuff to produce anything, but I love to be able to run Linux at the office and still be able to communicate with the rest of the folks.
Using the StarOffice "filter update" now and look forward to 5.1.
"Linux supporters have reacted violently to the Microsoft SA release (Independent research shows NT 4.0 outperforms Linux) published on ITWeb yesterday, saying "the study was paid for by Microsoft" and that "a very highly-tuned NT server was pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server".
That is, the claim attributed by Eric to Ian Hatton was really made by reacting Linux supporters.
What Hatton did admit, was:
"Microsoft did sponsor the benchmark testing and the NT server was better tuned than the Linux one."
This isn't much, but it is sufficient. Hatton admits that "the NT server was better tuned than the Linux was" and even without adjectives that invalidates the report.
However, the DOJ managed to dig up an e-mail from Bill Gates to Rosen kindly thanking him for the great effort he had made in coming to Redmond repeatedly on behalf of the trial.
I have never been interested in Compaq and know next to nothing about Pfeiffer. But right now they have a CEO whose allegiance to Microsoft is sufficiently strong that he is willing to lie for them even when under oath. That can't be good.
For years, people in Redmond have been telling each other and the rest of the world that paranoia is a bliss.
Believing that all of the world conspires against them, without seeing any evidence for this is concerned sensible. Thus the line between thought and reality has been cut in Redmond. They believe it is better that way.
Gates doesn't have to check reality to check if his beliefs are true. He simply believes and that's both the beginning and the end of it.
The man is stark-raving mad.
My own effort can be found at http://billwatch.net/. I never have thought of Propaganda's fine mix of text concerning Microsoft with the constructive effort of producing high quality backgrounds for Linux (using one right now!). No doubt other people can come up with completely different projects.