Well, that was my first thought, right down to the starsystems line.
But then I remembered my underlying theory to never count Microsoft down -- They are effectively doubling prices (according to a Slashdot post), so they come out ahead if they can retain at least 50% of their userbase, which they surely will for the next few years. Furthermore, the accounts that they keep are in the largest organizaions with the most momentium and the greatest ability to buy their enterprise products.
Basically, from MS's perspective, there's been lots of users getting a free (ha) ride on
Windows/Office. If they're not buying all sorts of MS software and services (and they will be in services in a big way), they aren't good customers, in the big picture. They (or Ballmer specifically) basically want to be a sorta consumer version of IBM, and they're willing break a lot of eggs to get there.
This is a huge change - MS has been the commodity vendor for a long time, underselling everyone. They've nickled and dimed their way into gazillions of dollars and rode their Windows/Office monopoly for 10 years. But those products are finished, technically, and eventually someone like Sun or RedHat is going to be successful giving away free stuff to their customers.
Will they succeed? I dunno -- they've pulled off a lot of crazy strategy shifts in the past. Hell, if I was Gates, I would have sold out to IBM in 1989 and would be sitting on an island right now. But he's going to live by the big gamble and die by the big gamble.
anyway, way too long of a post for what was supposed to be a troll account. MSFT is certainly cheap too.
I'm curious if you've ever worked in a place that implemented that idea, or if it just wafted out of your crackpipe.
Hint: The "magical important information" is created by users (heard of them?) who use normal applicaitons. Generally the LAN was installed in the first place to allow them to store this information on centrally managed servers. If your internal firewall has to let 137-139 through to allow client access to NT fileservrs, why is there in the first place? (And I've even worked in places that use Lotus Notes with it's better security, real authenticaion and special port. Guess what? People still stick critical data in Excel files.)
I agree that's an extremely smart move on the part of Sun, and for once somebody fighting an offensive battle against Microsoft rather than a defensive one.
However, I don't think Microsoft is stupid either -- they're well aware of the network effect of piracy -- it's what established them as the dominant vendor in that space to begin with as the users rebelled against DOS crap. They're also aware that Office is essentially complete and the user base is for the most part happy at Office 97.
I'm guessing that they figure they only have a few years left dominating the market, so they are ratcheting up the price and the copy protection and trying to squeeze every last buck that they can. Meanwhile, that gives them a couple more years to work on their enterprise software and try to create some new revenue streams. The MS of 2005 will be a far different company than the one we see today, with or without the government.
Frankly, it pales in comparison with other Reagan 'classics' like "Ketchup is a vegetable", "Trees cause pollution", and "The Bombing will commence in 5 minutes".
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that all of those unix holes are silly. There is absolutely NO reason for RPC, rsh/rcp, LPD, sadmin/mountd or SNMP to be open to the outside world.
OK, by your logic Microsoft SMB and RPC holes are also silly. That shortens their list considerably too. (W4/W5/W6).
However, in the real world, unfirewalled RPC servers have been a huge problem for both Unix and Windows. Basically, the idea of a "trusted LAN" should be obsolete in this day-and-age, and somebody needs to fix this crap.
Besides, it's been pointed out that the hackers outside of your firewall only want to deface your webpage. The industrial espionage agents and others that can seriously damage your organization's business are most likely plugged into your LAN.
From what I've heard, Sun doesn't feel that SO is a real MSO competitor yet (on a features level), so they are resisting marketing it very heavily. and instead letting it spread by word of mouth or have it be discovered by cost conscious purchasers. Ultimately they are doing this to fuck with MS and not to make any real money, so it's understandable that you won't see a heavy marketing campaign.
Note that WordPerfect and Lotus have 100x the name recognition of StarOffice and competitive products and they've failed to compete on price. It's good to see Sun not fall into the same trap and not embarrass themselves by pushing SO before it's ready.
Also, at this point there is no plan for a Mac port. That gives MSO "99.xxx%" market coverage and StarOffice only 95% or so.:)
Short Answer is actually Yes. The installer creates an Admin user and then logs that person on automatically at boot. There's nothing particular in the installer or the setup screens to help you or encourage you to create an unprivledged user. However, there are certain GUI actions that require an admin password for confirmation.
Due to the law of defaults, my guess is 90% of OS X users are running with Admin privs.
I agree -- the natural bureaucratic tendency is towards expansion, and the only one who really might disagree is the stockholder/owner.
To this point, Novell sold per server "connection licences" which encouraged people have less servers because of the great expense involved. It also was/is far more efficient than Windows because it's a far simplier OS that was basically designed to serve files and only serve files.
On the other hand Microsoft sells "seat licences". Once those are purchased, the marginal cost of adding a server is very low, which makes it easier to add services to the network. Fit perfectly with the bureaucracy's worldview (and you could argue that the networks did more/could do more than their Novell counterparts too, which is perfect for political power plays.)
The RIAA went on a huge anti-dubbing campaign in the 1980s. They didn't stop unti Congress passed a law that mandated that all music-quality audio tape include an "RIAA tax" to cover losses from dubbing.
This kind of implies to me that at least 78,000 of the machines Netcraft have been counting
The public numbers that Netcraft reports are basically useless because they count "Sites" and not servers. As far as I can tell, a "site" is a domain name. This obviously doesn't account for virtual hosting at all.
For example, if PornSpamSquat, Inc. had purchased 10,000 domains and were using a single Pentium-133 web server box to show the "Under Construction", or "Buy this Domain" page, or do redirects to real servers, Netcraft counts that box 10,000 times in their survey. When the box breaks or is attacked by a worm, the admins just turn it off, and 10,000 'sites' disappear from the survey. Which greatly overemphasizes the importance of that little P-133.
Netcraft noted that almost all of Linux's growth to this point has been like yours (at the expense of other Unixes). We might see some conversion from IIS to Apache, but it's not happening yet to a great degree.
As you point out, a switch from IIS to Apache is significantly more complex. My feeling is that it will take YEARS and not MONTHS or weeks. Why? Because most of these companies blew their load building these web sites over the last few years, and now for the most part they are _done_. Furthermore, we're in a recession, which means that the IT budget might have a few bucks for a consultant to check the patch status of the NT boxex, but there's certainly not free cash to pull in the sorta talent required to rebuild last decade's projects.
I suspect we need to wait 3-5 years until the industry is transfixed with the 'paradigm-shifting' hype surrounding some other new technology. Or the existing web apps just get dated and broken. Then a new generation of IT types will go forth and implement that stuff, and it might involve switching the HTTP server around.
But at this point, the web server market is kinda like -umm- the desktop operating system market. It's mature, everyone's made their decision, and there's no overwhelming reason to switch at this point.
An article on "LZW Data Compression" was published in the October 1989 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (see the Bibliography section for more details). A reader replied in the December issue explaining that the algorithm was patented. The author of the article added that he was unaware of any patent on the algorithm. More readers wrote, and in the March 1990 issue the editor-in-chief dedicated his Editorial to this topic, which in his words "sparked a forest of fires". The same issue also contained an official statement by Unisys Corporation, which confirmed that LZW was patented, mentioned the modem industry, and indicated how developers could contact Unisys. . (Article goes on to aledge that Unisys either was unaware or ignored the GIF issue, because they hadn't developed a formal uniform licence fee for such uses.)
It's not often that one can find evidence to back up once personal memories, but let me assure you the BBS community was aware of these issues. I also recall that Adobe announced that they had obtained a licence from Unisys at about this period. This was long before any WWW browser included GIF support.
1994 marks when the offical GIF pricesheet emerged, and the PNG project started (your ref). The fact this took 4 years backs up my point.
What you call "wide use" was the very small by modern standards online world of CompuServe and independant BBSes. Unisys started enforcing their patent by 1990, if not earlier, BTW.
The WWW userbase is 1000x bigger than that (at least), and if the GIF licencing thing was really a huge problem (even BBS land), somebody could have easily whipped up an open replacement. I saw the discussions back on the BBSes, and the conclusion was "Nah, we'll just have our vendors pay the fees."
Good luck. Copyrighted software is an asset. Upon liquidation it will be treated as an asset.
Absolutely true, although what I'm arguing for is a way that sources and binaries could be legally distributed after some period (say 5 years) when they are no longer being treated as a valuable assets, ie being sold and supported. Your example wouldn't apply because it seems that Framework is still being maintained and sold.
Well, it would be a better movie if IBM was sitting around their fortress of doom scheming how to get revenge for what MS did to OS/2 years ago. But I don't think the facts support that story.
IBM and MS became buddies again in the late 90s, when IBM made a major commitment to NT/2000. They ported all of their server software over and made a huge investment in the services division. Probably spent at least the $1B they're spending on Linux.
Well, it turned out that the ActiveDirectory upgrade is slowgoing in major corps, and people running Windows servers like MS server apps. So, IBM has to repurpose resources quickly, and Linux looks like a hot target.
Furthermore, IBM is only 'behind' Linux to the extent that they know that some people won't buy traditional IBM solutions. If you signed a blank check over to them and say "solve my problems", I guarantee they won't deliver a Linux solution to you, and instead it will be AS400time. Linux does allow them to sell into markets currently dominated by Sun etc, however -- if it ever cuts into traditional AIX/OS400/MVS revenue, they're losing money.
That's guy's sig was bothering me too, so I figured out how to fix it. The solution was to logon as administrator, re-enable some auto-install option in IE, and then go to a page that's in a japanese (or chinese or whatever) character set. Then IE will prompt you to install a language pack which gives you the correct fonts.
Considering that copyright holders can release their work into the public domain anytime they want, what would be the point of that? This could all be done now within the constraints of current copyright law (for example, companies could sign an agreement with a third party such as the FSF or invent some Source Code Vault Foundation.)
Besides, what responsible-to-the-stock-holders business would voluntarily restrict their intellectual property rights? Even if they somehow knew that they were going to go out of business and all their sourcecode would be lost, they probably still couldn't do it.
HOWEVER, it would be nice if there was copyright law dealing specifically with legacy software, aka "abandonware". This is a big problem for both business and home customers -- I'm sure that sources exist for all sorts of old programs on disks and tapes in one of the programmer's basement, but they can't be released due to copyright considerations.
WMP 7.0 tried to destroy my old EasyCD installation, thus leading to my computer locking up on boot. Last Known Good saved the day, however. Microsoft then nicely declared EasyCD 3.5 retroactively incompatible with Windows 2000, which would be OK except that it was on the original compatibility list and it still works here.
wMP also fucked up the power management on an HP laptop I had. QuickTime for Windows sucks, but it never managed to suck that hard.
So, I wonder if this licence constraint was in there all along, or was retroactive innovated when they realized what a piece of crap WMP happens to be.
One of the outcomes of the Apple v MS case was that Apple 'won' the right to defend certain visual aspects -- the two I remember are the ridged titlebars and the trashcan.
Considering that case was up and down in the courts for years, it looks like nobody's going to beat them soon.
The growth of that operating system was mostly the result of a deliberate strategy to exploit the network-effects of controlling APIs, protocols, document formats, and distribution channels.
All of which I'd classify as marketing. (esp. the distribution channel bit, which along with Pricing is exactly what marketing is supposed to worry about.)
Of course, most folks here think of marketing as equal to advertising. But that's why Microsoft has 'good' marketing, and Apple/IBM/etc have 'bad' marketing. In other words, when MS's slogan was "Windows Everywhere!", they really meant it.
I just want to contradict the perception here that BSD sprung entirely from the 'great swordsmiths' of Open Source programmers.
BSD UNIX was a US government funded project intended to advance the state-of-the-art for the computer industry as a whole. The entire intent was to allow commercial companies to 'steal' the code to improve interoperability -- in fact iconic BSD developers like Bill Joy got very rich doing just that. BSD code is used in virtually every OS -- it's a significant chunk of every commercial Unix, probably a bunch in GNU, and there's small bits in Windows, as has been repeatedly discussed.
Not to take away anything from the people who deUNIXifed BSD and have been doing a excellent job maintaining it ever since. Just that Apple won't be the first nor the last to use BSD code in their OS. Compared to every other commercial user of BSD code, they've been saints.
If you hire talented people to begin with, you dont have the problem of migration from one environment to another.
Judging by your post, I have to assume that while you might be talented, you lack the grasp of the real world costs of IT, and that will keep you from going very far. Maybe you assume that a bunch of sharp guys can work all weekend (un-reembursed) and do conversions 'for free'. But, in the real world, even straight-forward upgrades require shitloads of project planning overhead, testing, contingency plans, extra contract staff, reduced operational support, two sets of verified backup tapes, help-desk training and overstaffing, user training, and so on. The alternative is the typical clusterfucked half-finished upgrade that makes the users shiver in fear when IT approaches their desks.
I do agree that people overstate the difficulty of moving from MS Office to Some Other Office. There's a huge cultura gap there, but that is NOT the real problem.
If you actually got out and saw what people were running on their desktops, you'd see shitloads of vertical applications, inhouse stuff hacked together in VB and Access and Excel macros and so on. That will throw a wrench in any transition plan -- it could even stop your Win98 to 2000 upgrade dead in the water, and the assumption is those two OSes are 99% compatible. Hundreds of large customers are still running OS/2 because of legacy apps.
So, then you need to go back and rewrite everything (web or java to cover your ass this time), and you find that some Access app that Fred in Marketing hacked together in his spare time ends up costing you $20,000. When some department just spent $50K on a some POS vertical app, they are not going to let you take it away to save $200 in MS licencing fees. Or, you could go with Wine, but that's lots more testing, and you know up front that not everything's going to work that way.
In short, saying any type of upgrade is easy if you have the right people doesn't make any sense. The right people will take time and money to do the job right.
Slashdot Mirror
OK -- I stand corrected. I heard they were having trouble getting volunteers to do the Mac port.
Well, that was my first thought, right down to the starsystems line.
But then I remembered my underlying theory to never count Microsoft down -- They are effectively doubling prices (according to a Slashdot post), so they come out ahead if they can retain at least 50% of their userbase, which they surely will for the next few years. Furthermore, the accounts that they keep are in the largest organizaions with the most momentium and the greatest ability to buy their enterprise products.
Basically, from MS's perspective, there's been lots of users getting a free (ha) ride on
Windows/Office. If they're not buying all sorts of MS software and services (and they will be in services in a big way), they aren't good customers, in the big picture. They (or Ballmer specifically) basically want to be a sorta consumer version of IBM, and they're willing break a lot of eggs to get there.
This is a huge change - MS has been the commodity vendor for a long time, underselling everyone. They've nickled and dimed their way into gazillions of dollars and rode their Windows/Office monopoly for 10 years. But those products are finished, technically, and eventually someone like Sun or RedHat is going to be successful giving away free stuff to their customers.
Will they succeed? I dunno -- they've pulled off a lot of crazy strategy shifts in the past. Hell, if I was Gates, I would have sold out to IBM in 1989 and would be sitting on an island right now. But he's going to live by the big gamble and die by the big gamble.
anyway, way too long of a post for what was supposed to be a troll account. MSFT is certainly cheap too.
Or that Macs cost 50% of what Windows systems cost to support. Never particularlly moved any Macs in big corporations.
Feel free to translate "Lower TCO" into "Smaller Empire For You, Pointyhair!"
"Servers don't go on the LAN."
I'm curious if you've ever worked in a place that implemented that idea, or if it just wafted out of your crackpipe.
Hint: The "magical important information" is created by users (heard of them?) who use normal applicaitons. Generally the LAN was installed in the first place to allow them to store this information on centrally managed servers. If your internal firewall has to let 137-139 through to allow client access to NT fileservrs, why is there in the first place? (And I've even worked in places that use Lotus Notes with it's better security, real authenticaion and special port. Guess what? People still stick critical data in Excel files.)
I agree that's an extremely smart move on the part of Sun, and for once somebody fighting an offensive battle against Microsoft rather than a defensive one.
However, I don't think Microsoft is stupid either -- they're well aware of the network effect of piracy -- it's what established them as the dominant vendor in that space to begin with as the users rebelled against DOS crap. They're also aware that Office is essentially complete and the user base is for the most part happy at Office 97.
I'm guessing that they figure they only have a few years left dominating the market, so they are ratcheting up the price and the copy protection and trying to squeeze every last buck that they can. Meanwhile, that gives them a couple more years to work on their enterprise software and try to create some new revenue streams. The MS of 2005 will be a far different company than the one we see today, with or without the government.
Not the exact quote, but interesting in light of current events:
Reagan's Statement on the Fourth Anniversary of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Frankly, it pales in comparison with other Reagan 'classics' like "Ketchup is a vegetable", "Trees cause pollution", and "The Bombing will commence in 5 minutes".
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that all of those unix holes are silly. There is absolutely NO reason for RPC, rsh/rcp, LPD, sadmin/mountd or SNMP to be open to the outside world.
OK, by your logic Microsoft SMB and RPC holes are also silly. That shortens their list considerably too. (W4/W5/W6).
However, in the real world, unfirewalled RPC servers have been a huge problem for both Unix and Windows. Basically, the idea of a "trusted LAN" should be obsolete in this day-and-age, and somebody needs to fix this crap.
Besides, it's been pointed out that the hackers outside of your firewall only want to deface your webpage. The industrial espionage agents and others that can seriously damage your organization's business are most likely plugged into your LAN.
From what I've heard, Sun doesn't feel that SO is a real MSO competitor yet (on a features level), so they are resisting marketing it very heavily. and instead letting it spread by word of mouth or have it be discovered by cost conscious purchasers. Ultimately they are doing this to fuck with MS and not to make any real money, so it's understandable that you won't see a heavy marketing campaign.
:)
Note that WordPerfect and Lotus have 100x the name recognition of StarOffice and competitive products and they've failed to compete on price. It's good to see Sun not fall into the same trap and not embarrass themselves by pushing SO before it's ready.
Also, at this point there is no plan for a Mac port. That gives MSO "99.xxx%" market coverage and StarOffice only 95% or so.
Short Answer is actually Yes. The installer creates an Admin user and then logs that person on automatically at boot. There's nothing particular in the installer or the setup screens to help you or encourage you to create an unprivledged user. However, there are certain GUI actions that require an admin password for confirmation.
Due to the law of defaults, my guess is 90% of OS X users are running with Admin privs.
I agree -- the natural bureaucratic tendency is towards expansion, and the only one who really might disagree is the stockholder/owner.
To this point, Novell sold per server "connection licences" which encouraged people have less servers because of the great expense involved. It also was/is far more efficient than Windows because it's a far simplier OS that was basically designed to serve files and only serve files.
On the other hand Microsoft sells "seat licences". Once those are purchased, the marginal cost of adding a server is very low, which makes it easier to add services to the network. Fit perfectly with the bureaucracy's worldview (and you could argue that the networks did more/could do more than their Novell counterparts too, which is perfect for political power plays.)
The RIAA went on a huge anti-dubbing campaign in the 1980s. They didn't stop unti Congress passed a law that mandated that all music-quality audio tape include an "RIAA tax" to cover losses from dubbing.
This kind of implies to me that at least 78,000 of the machines Netcraft have been counting
The public numbers that Netcraft reports are basically useless because they count "Sites" and not servers. As far as I can tell, a "site" is a domain name. This obviously doesn't account for virtual hosting at all.
For example, if PornSpamSquat, Inc. had purchased 10,000 domains and were using a single Pentium-133 web server box to show the "Under Construction", or "Buy this Domain" page, or do redirects to real servers, Netcraft counts that box 10,000 times in their survey. When the box breaks or is attacked by a worm, the admins just turn it off, and 10,000 'sites' disappear from the survey. Which greatly overemphasizes the importance of that little P-133.
Netcraft noted that almost all of Linux's growth to this point has been like yours (at the expense of other Unixes). We might see some conversion from IIS to Apache, but it's not happening yet to a great degree.
As you point out, a switch from IIS to Apache is significantly more complex. My feeling is that it will take YEARS and not MONTHS or weeks. Why? Because most of these companies blew their load building these web sites over the last few years, and now for the most part they are _done_. Furthermore, we're in a recession, which means that the IT budget might have a few bucks for a consultant to check the patch status of the NT boxex, but there's certainly not free cash to pull in the sorta talent required to rebuild last decade's projects.
I suspect we need to wait 3-5 years until the industry is transfixed with the 'paradigm-shifting' hype surrounding some other new technology. Or the existing web apps just get dated and broken. Then a new generation of IT types will go forth and implement that stuff, and it might involve switching the HTTP server around.
But at this point, the web server market is kinda like -umm- the desktop operating system market. It's mature, everyone's made their decision, and there's no overwhelming reason to switch at this point.
From here:
An article on "LZW Data Compression" was published in the October 1989 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (see the Bibliography section for more details). A reader replied in the December issue explaining that the algorithm was patented. The author of the article added that he was unaware of any patent on the algorithm. More readers wrote, and in the March 1990 issue the editor-in-chief dedicated his Editorial to this topic, which in his words "sparked a forest of fires". The same issue also contained an official statement by Unisys Corporation, which confirmed that LZW was patented, mentioned the modem industry, and indicated how developers could contact Unisys. . (Article goes on to aledge that Unisys either was unaware or ignored the GIF issue, because they hadn't developed a formal uniform licence fee for such uses.)
It's not often that one can find evidence to back up once personal memories, but let me assure you the BBS community was aware of these issues. I also recall that Adobe announced that they had obtained a licence from Unisys at about this period. This was long before any WWW browser included GIF support.
1994 marks when the offical GIF pricesheet emerged, and the PNG project started (your ref). The fact this took 4 years backs up my point.
What you call "wide use" was the very small by modern standards online world of CompuServe and independant BBSes. Unisys started enforcing their patent by 1990, if not earlier, BTW.
The WWW userbase is 1000x bigger than that (at least), and if the GIF licencing thing was really a huge problem (even BBS land), somebody could have easily whipped up an open replacement. I saw the discussions back on the BBSes, and the conclusion was "Nah, we'll just have our vendors pay the fees."
Good luck. Copyrighted software is an asset. Upon liquidation it will be treated as an asset.
Absolutely true, although what I'm arguing for is a way that sources and binaries could be legally distributed after some period (say 5 years) when they are no longer being treated as a valuable assets, ie being sold and supported. Your example wouldn't apply because it seems that Framework is still being maintained and sold.
I'll leave the other points as is.
Well, it would be a better movie if IBM was sitting around their fortress of doom scheming how to get revenge for what MS did to OS/2 years ago. But I don't think the facts support that story.
IBM and MS became buddies again in the late 90s, when IBM made a major commitment to NT/2000. They ported all of their server software over and made a huge investment in the services division. Probably spent at least the $1B they're spending on Linux.
Well, it turned out that the ActiveDirectory upgrade is slowgoing in major corps, and people running Windows servers like MS server apps. So, IBM has to repurpose resources quickly, and Linux looks like a hot target.
Furthermore, IBM is only 'behind' Linux to the extent that they know that some people won't buy traditional IBM solutions. If you signed a blank check over to them and say "solve my problems", I guarantee they won't deliver a Linux solution to you, and instead it will be AS400time. Linux does allow them to sell into markets currently dominated by Sun etc, however -- if it ever cuts into traditional AIX/OS400/MVS revenue, they're losing money.
That's guy's sig was bothering me too, so I figured out how to fix it. The solution was to logon as administrator, re-enable some auto-install option in IE, and then go to a page that's in a japanese (or chinese or whatever) character set. Then IE will prompt you to install a language pack which gives you the correct fonts.
add an "optional" expiration date on a copyright
Considering that copyright holders can release their work into the public domain anytime they want, what would be the point of that? This could all be done now within the constraints of current copyright law (for example, companies could sign an agreement with a third party such as the FSF or invent some Source Code Vault Foundation.)
Besides, what responsible-to-the-stock-holders business would voluntarily restrict their intellectual property rights? Even if they somehow knew that they were going to go out of business and all their sourcecode would be lost, they probably still couldn't do it.
HOWEVER, it would be nice if there was copyright law dealing specifically with legacy software, aka "abandonware". This is a big problem for both business and home customers -- I'm sure that sources exist for all sorts of old programs on disks and tapes in one of the programmer's basement, but they can't be released due to copyright considerations.
WMP 7.0 tried to destroy my old EasyCD installation, thus leading to my computer locking up on boot. Last Known Good saved the day, however. Microsoft then nicely declared EasyCD 3.5 retroactively incompatible with Windows 2000, which would be OK except that it was on the original compatibility list and it still works here.
wMP also fucked up the power management on an HP laptop I had. QuickTime for Windows sucks, but it never managed to suck that hard.
So, I wonder if this licence constraint was in there all along, or was retroactive innovated when they realized what a piece of crap WMP happens to be.
One of the outcomes of the Apple v MS case was that Apple 'won' the right to defend certain visual aspects -- the two I remember are the ridged titlebars and the trashcan.
Considering that case was up and down in the courts for years, it looks like nobody's going to beat them soon.
A quick count at www.microsoft.com indicates that there's been 16 IIS patches (not including rollups) going back to September 2000.
Even if all of these vulnerabilities do not apply to the default configuration (for example NNTP), that's still lots of patches.
The growth of that operating system was mostly the result of a deliberate strategy to exploit the network-effects of controlling APIs, protocols, document formats, and distribution channels.
All of which I'd classify as marketing. (esp. the distribution channel bit, which along with Pricing is exactly what marketing is supposed to worry about.)
Of course, most folks here think of marketing as equal to advertising. But that's why Microsoft has 'good' marketing, and Apple/IBM/etc have 'bad' marketing. In other words, when MS's slogan was "Windows Everywhere!", they really meant it.
I just want to contradict the perception here that BSD sprung entirely from the 'great swordsmiths' of Open Source programmers.
BSD UNIX was a US government funded project intended to advance the state-of-the-art for the computer industry as a whole. The entire intent was to allow commercial companies to 'steal' the code to improve interoperability -- in fact iconic BSD developers like Bill Joy got very rich doing just that. BSD code is used in virtually every OS -- it's a significant chunk of every commercial Unix, probably a bunch in GNU, and there's small bits in Windows, as has been repeatedly discussed.
Not to take away anything from the people who deUNIXifed BSD and have been doing a excellent job maintaining it ever since. Just that Apple won't be the first nor the last to use BSD code in their OS. Compared to every other commercial user of BSD code, they've been saints.
If you hire talented people to begin with, you dont have the problem of migration from one environment to another.
Judging by your post, I have to assume that while you might be talented, you lack the grasp of the real world costs of IT, and that will keep you from going very far. Maybe you assume that a bunch of sharp guys can work all weekend (un-reembursed) and do conversions 'for free'. But, in the real world, even straight-forward upgrades require shitloads of project planning overhead, testing, contingency plans, extra contract staff, reduced operational support, two sets of verified backup tapes, help-desk training and overstaffing, user training, and so on. The alternative is the typical clusterfucked half-finished upgrade that makes the users shiver in fear when IT approaches their desks.
I do agree that people overstate the difficulty of moving from MS Office to Some Other Office. There's a huge cultura gap there, but that is NOT the real problem.
If you actually got out and saw what people were running on their desktops, you'd see shitloads of vertical applications, inhouse stuff hacked together in VB and Access and Excel macros and so on. That will throw a wrench in any transition plan -- it could even stop your Win98 to 2000 upgrade dead in the water, and the assumption is those two OSes are 99% compatible. Hundreds of large customers are still running OS/2 because of legacy apps.
So, then you need to go back and rewrite everything (web or java to cover your ass this time), and you find that some Access app that Fred in Marketing hacked together in his spare time ends up costing you $20,000. When some department just spent $50K on a some POS vertical app, they are not going to let you take it away to save $200 in MS licencing fees. Or, you could go with Wine, but that's lots more testing, and you know up front that not everything's going to work that way.
In short, saying any type of upgrade is easy if you have the right people doesn't make any sense. The right people will take time and money to do the job right.