It would be easy to argue that MS owes their Monopoly to the skill they have in developing easy to use GUIs. This talent is valuable in both a proprietary and Open Source world. If MS were to make peace with Open Source, they would still have this as a major advantage.
The first step down that road would be to open up all file formats (.doc,.xls,etc...) Their market dominance virtually assures that if they made them open, and easy for other programs to use, they would immediatly become the industry standard. At which point, MS would become leaders in the industry. I'd bet that even KDE aps would adopt the old MS file formats as their standard if they were opened up and licensed properly.(the horror!!)
MS would continue to enjoy their market leader status for as long as they made top quality GUIs. (What, actual competition?) They already have a HUGE advantage with their current market share, and peoples reluctance to switch to a new product, otherwise known as 'brand loyalty'. I would further argue that MS has no brand loyalty now other than forced loyalty because of their monopoly./. MS bashers using IE are proof of that. Adopting Open file formats would be a cautious step towards creating goodwill that makes good business sense.
They would not however be able to change file formats for each new release of Office, thus forcing upgrades, so maybe Bill and Steve wouldn't go for it.
MS alredy knows that it will have to change over to a service based business model in the near future. That is what.NET is all about. That is the key to an Open Source business model, so they have a choice to either go proprietary, or OS. The key to success for them is win midshare of developers. Most developers I know prefer Open Source, so this may eventually be a manditory step for MS to take. Without going open source, they won't get the developers, then they die. Right now developers have to make a choice between market share, and a more enjoyable programming environment. They would prefer to have both, and this will push the market in that direction. You can already see this by the popularity of Java.
It has already dawned on somebody at MS that they have no choice but to open some of their code up. They don't want to, and may kick and scream about it, but they are doing it. The shared source stuff, and the cheap University source licenses are test balloons. You can bet that they will only release just as much code as they need to retain developers. How much that is, depends on us.
I don't want to bag on Dell too much because I am very happy with my Inspiron 8000 (would buy it again in a heartbeat) but I had a similar situation. Back when I used to be a dual booter (ME and Debian) I made the mistake of telling a tech that it was a dual boot, and my problem had to be a hardware problem because it occured under ME and Linux. The tech immediatly told me that he could not support a dual boot machine, I would need to wipe the harddrive, insall only ME, and call him back.
Of course, I hung up, called back, and didn't mention the dual boot situation, and had someone at my office replacing the screen the next day.
Since, I have gone only Debian, and have had to be very creative when I called with hardware problems. The windows control screens are fading from memory now, and giving the tech guys the answers they are expecting as we go through their flowchart is getting challenging. Not to mention it is a waste of my time, and the Dell tech's time.
All in all, Dell's support is a bit like the capitalism of economic models. It stinks, but it is better than any thing else available.
K12linux.org is a great site for info and their Red Hat Distro. I have meet Eric and Paul a few times, really great people. They have developed quite a following because they are making implimenting a thin client setup really easy.
K12ltsp is based on www.ltsp.org which is in version 3.0 right now. I use this software to set up computer labs in non-profits in and around Portland. We are a NP ourselves) It is gaining maturity, system administration is barely more work than working on a box running programs locally. You need to have DHCP running on the server, TFTP setup, and allow it to serve applications to remote X-Clients, and that is about it.
I would be willing to bet that the MS legal team doesn't believe that this motion has a snowball's chance in Bills own bedroom of going anywhere. This is a tactic to generate support among the large PC manufacturers who would have to support 2-3 different version of the same operating system. What they are saying is that it is illegal for one state to set the laws of another state, so if the disenting states win their case, then they will cause MS to make one version of Windows for those states, and one version for the rest of the country. You can imagine the logistical nightmare this would cause at HP, Dell, and Gateway.
MS has admited that they recognized a problem when the rest of the industry didn't step up and defend them in this case. This is their unique way of squeezing that support out of them while still staying firmly in the dominant possition.
Brilliant move if you ask me, good chance it will backfire though, and cause the pc makers to get more vocal about what they would like to see the final settlement look like.
The constitution was written specifically to protect states rights against an overbearing federal govermnet whose interests might directly confilict with the individual states interests. If I remember back to 9th grade goverment class, the framers were reacting directly to an English Monarch who was using the states to further England's private agenda.
With how cozy MS seems to now be in Washington, I can't imagine why they would want to consolidate power there.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Will we die, or will we all get better, and then naturally push out non-unix because we are evolving quicker?
This is of course all in theory, because marketing is arguably more important to a products success than its technical merits.
It would be easy to argue that MS owes their Monopoly to the skill they have in developing easy to use GUIs. This talent is valuable in both a proprietary and Open Source world. If MS were to make peace with Open Source, they would still have this as a major advantage.
/. MS bashers using IE are proof of that. Adopting Open file formats would be a cautious step towards creating goodwill that makes good business sense.
.NET is all about. That is the key to an Open Source business model, so they have a choice to either go proprietary, or OS. The key to success for them is win midshare of developers. Most developers I know prefer Open Source, so this may eventually be a manditory step for MS to take. Without going open source, they won't get the developers, then they die. Right now developers have to make a choice between market share, and a more enjoyable programming environment. They would prefer to have both, and this will push the market in that direction. You can already see this by the popularity of Java.
The first step down that road would be to open up all file formats (.doc,.xls,etc...) Their market dominance virtually assures that if they made them open, and easy for other programs to use, they would immediatly become the industry standard. At which point, MS would become leaders in the industry. I'd bet that even KDE aps would adopt the old MS file formats as their standard if they were opened up and licensed properly.(the horror!!)
MS would continue to enjoy their market leader status for as long as they made top quality GUIs. (What, actual competition?) They already have a HUGE advantage with their current market share, and peoples reluctance to switch to a new product, otherwise known as 'brand loyalty'. I would further argue that MS has no brand loyalty now other than forced loyalty because of their monopoly.
They would not however be able to change file formats for each new release of Office, thus forcing upgrades, so maybe Bill and Steve wouldn't go for it.
MS alredy knows that it will have to change over to a service based business model in the near future. That is what
It has already dawned on somebody at MS that they have no choice but to open some of their code up. They don't want to, and may kick and scream about it, but they are doing it. The shared source stuff, and the cheap University source licenses are test balloons. You can bet that they will only release just as much code as they need to retain developers. How much that is, depends on us.
I don't want to bag on Dell too much because I am very happy with my Inspiron 8000 (would buy it again in a heartbeat) but I had a similar situation. Back when I used to be a dual booter (ME and Debian) I made the mistake of telling a tech that it was a dual boot, and my problem had to be a hardware problem because it occured under ME and Linux. The tech immediatly told me that he could not support a dual boot machine, I would need to wipe the harddrive, insall only ME, and call him back.
Of course, I hung up, called back, and didn't mention the dual boot situation, and had someone at my office replacing the screen the next day.
Since, I have gone only Debian, and have had to be very creative when I called with hardware problems. The windows control screens are fading from memory now, and giving the tech guys the answers they are expecting as we go through their flowchart is getting challenging. Not to mention it is a waste of my time, and the Dell tech's time.
All in all, Dell's support is a bit like the capitalism of economic models. It stinks, but it is better than any thing else available.
K12linux.org is a great site for info and their Red Hat Distro. I have meet Eric and Paul a few times, really great people. They have developed quite a following because they are making implimenting a thin client setup really easy.
K12ltsp is based on www.ltsp.org which is in version 3.0 right now. I use this software to set up computer labs in non-profits in and around Portland. We are a NP ourselves) It is gaining maturity, system administration is barely more work than working on a box running programs locally. You need to have DHCP running on the server, TFTP setup, and allow it to serve applications to remote X-Clients, and that is about it.
Here are some links for further reading on what others have done.
umn
olinux
solucorp
askslashdot
gbdirect
tucows
XDM
I would be willing to bet that the MS legal team doesn't believe that this motion has a snowball's chance in Bills own bedroom of going anywhere. This is a tactic to generate support among the large PC manufacturers who would have to support 2-3 different version of the same operating system. What they are saying is that it is illegal for one state to set the laws of another state, so if the disenting states win their case, then they will cause MS to make one version of Windows for those states, and one version for the rest of the country. You can imagine the logistical nightmare this would cause at HP, Dell, and Gateway.
MS has admited that they recognized a problem when the rest of the industry didn't step up and defend them in this case. This is their unique way of squeezing that support out of them while still staying firmly in the dominant possition.
Brilliant move if you ask me, good chance it will backfire though, and cause the pc makers to get more vocal about what they would like to see the final settlement look like.
The constitution was written specifically to protect states rights against an overbearing federal govermnet whose interests might directly confilict with the individual states interests. If I remember back to 9th grade goverment class, the framers were reacting directly to an English Monarch who was using the states to further England's private agenda.
With how cozy MS seems to now be in Washington, I can't imagine why they would want to consolidate power there.:)