If the trick actually works, then Americans are more stupid than I thought. But they had elected Bush to the office twice, so maybe they are really that...
Bill Gates started as a nerd but ascended to the top of the human hierarchy. Therefore he is especially hated by some nerds, some of whom live on this board. It's an interesting human psychology: people are much more jealous of successful people who started as one of them.
Are you running for public office any time soon? The Chinese Government agrees with your ideas whole-heartedly and would like to contribute to your campaign on "patentless society".
Don't be so harsh on complainers. In the end, the Linux community is mostly made up of people who complain about Microsoft products but choose not to help. Without complainers like them, you may not have your current job:-)
OS X is shipped with every Mac too. Yet people still have choices: they can choose not to buy a PC. Acutally, people always had this choice from the first day of PC, and they had chosen to buy PC which ran Microsoft software over Mac. If you want to benefit from PC's low price, it is only fair to pay the software company, Microsoft, which made PC popular to begin with.
When people buy a Mac, they buy hardware and software in a single package. Samething for PC users, they have chosen to buy PC and Microsoft OS as a whole package.
Since you mentioned DOS/Windows mix, that sounded like a time when PC's were still trying to catch up with Mac. When I was in college, DOS was all gone, all PCs ran Windows and Microsoft Office software were just about to take the lead. If I had to choose between a DOS machine or an early Windows machine and a Mac machine, especially when I don't have to pay for it, then it is a no brainer that I would choose a Mac. Remember during that time a Mac cost 3 times as much as a PC. Unix softwares and development tools were an order of magnitude more expensive, not like today's Linux. In a college environment where everything was freely available to students, the cost isn't an issue, but when I started working in startup companies, they could only afford PC's. This brought out another critical fact why Microsoft won the PC market: PC hardware + Microsoft software cost significantly less than Unix workstations/servers and Mac's at the time. Intel + Dell + Microsoft actually brought down the cost of computers and software significantly. Linux fans may not believe this, but it was very true 10 years ago. Today Mac's are still more expensive but the difference is not as much as ten years ago.
Here I am again. Repeating my own experience to disspell the myth that Microsoft won the marketplace through predatory business practice alone.
When I was in college, the main computer lab had PC's, Mac's, Unix workstations, and X-terminals. The vast majority were X-terminals. There were about the same number of PC's and Mac's. All machines were free for all students. There was no pressure from anyone to use one type of machine over another. I noticed and suffered long lines of people waiting for the next free PC while there are plenty of Mac's and Unix machines available, especially toward the end of a semester. Eventually I figured out a way to use Microsoft Word on Mac and then transfer the file to PC when one becomes available. In this college lab environment, Microsoft products clearly won through technical merits alone.
I can give you two more examples why I adopted Microsoft products.
I used WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 before I used Microsoft Word and Excel. One day Microsoft introduced an Equation editor in Word which WordPerfect didn't have, so I started using Word more often. Sometime later Microsoft introduced OLE technology so that I could copy and paste graphics and Excel tables onto Word documents, that's when I started using Microsoft Office Suite exclusively.
I used Borland C++ before I used Microsoft Visual C++. One day, Visual C++ introduced a debugger which can step through GUI code in one window while displaying the output in another window on the same machine. I was doing GUI development at the time so this feature was super important to me. But I still hold out for the next version of Borland C++, my favorite C++ development environment. When Borland C++ 5.0 came out a few months later, it was still DOS based. I still had to compile the code first, ran it to see if anything went wrong, dumped some internal variables into a temporary file to debug my code. It was a no-brainer that I switched over to Microsoft Visual C++ from that time on.
It was very clear from my personal experience that Microsoft won the lion's share of PC market, not just because of their illegal business practice, but mainly due to the true merits of Microsoft products.
You are missing the big picture altogether. Software license is but a small part of enterprise IT spending. By keeping legacy systems, IT departments must hire admins who can maintain different systems, which frequently translates into double staffing. It greatly simplifies the jobs of IT departments if they only have to maintain a single version of OS.
Many OSS zealots, like you, make wrong assumptions about how corporations operate based on their limited personal experience. Doling out a few hundred bucks may be a big deal for you as an individual, it is no big deal for a corporation which has to pay 100 times more to hire a worker. If a several hundred dollar software can make that worker more productive, then it is a very good investment for the corporation. If they have to hire an admin with a six-figure salary to maintain a legacy system because it was free, then it may not be such a good deal after all.
If you had actually read Microsoft's 10-K, you would have seen that they received the vast majority of their revenue from OEM, Enterprise, government, and other large customers.
That's because you are a Linux zealot who only knows Linux interoperable OS's, mainly UNIX variants plus its enemy Windows. Just like a frog who spent his entire life at the bottom of a well, the well is the entire world as far as the frog is concerned.
Everything I said equally applies to a spec or an API. If you had an open mind to opinions different from yours, you wouldn't have tried to dismiss an argument by picking trivial faults. But since you are just a stubborn anti-Microsoft bigot, there is no point wasting my time showing you a different perspective.
Gosh, so how much does it cost microsoft to maintain the Fat32 Spec? I mean it hasn't been updated in 6 years, why do they keep paying for it? What is the business benefit?
Well, a lot more than you think. If Microsoft publishes an API, it must provide technical support and keep backward compatibility for a very long time. Because products from third party software companies can officially depend on that API. Even if the API doesn't change itself, Microsoft must test a lot of third party softwares to make sure they are not broken everytime it releases a new version of OS. A private API is a completely different story. Even if the API can be easily reverse engineered and products can be built on top of that API, Microsoft has no obligation to support any of those products and is free to make changes in its next release without worrying about breaking changes. Customer support is a very costly thing, that is why Red Hat can make a living mainly based on customer support even though it can't make enough money from selling Red Hat Linux. Unlike Red Hat, Microsoft doesn't make money from customer support, it makes money when it sells a product. After a product is sold, any support effort is pure cost. From a business perspective, Microsoft wants to minimize unnecessary support cost. Unless Microsoft thinks that the benefit of publishing NTFS outweighs the cost of supporting it, it has little incentive to do that.
The memo looks to me like a competitor analysis document instead of a memo of a meeting where decisions were made. Just like Pentagon produced a lot of documents planning out nuclear strikes here and there, but it didn't mean any current policy in execution was based on those analysis. So I failed to see why you could claim with certainty that Microsoft kept NTFS private just to keep out competitors.
Microsoft has not made the NTFS spec freely available because it could easily undermine their dominance on the desktop.
How can you be so sure that this is the reason for keeping NTFS private? Were you in the meeting room when this was decided? Have you considered the more practical reason that a public spec must be supported, it costs a lot of resources to support a public spec and Microsoft did see enough business benefits of doing so.
Many years ago when PC first caught on and gradually replaced mainframe terminals inside corporate offices. Some researchers did a study on why people preferred a PC to a terminal. One of the key reasons was total control. A PC user has total control over its software and hardware, while a shared resource is partly out of the user's control. Just like most people prefer driving their own cars over riding public transportations. The Internet has given people alternatives, but it can't replace PC that easily.
A non-geek will buy an OS book, read it, and then decide to try the OS? And this is your preferred marketing plan for Ubuntu? You must be a geek yourself.
Dear Mr. No Skills,
Thank you for your concern about Microsoft's business model. If possible, I am more than happy to stop paying those expensive developers to develop new applications only to give them away for free as a part of the OS. To make that ideal world a reality, please first convince Linux and Apple to stop where they are. If they promise to be pure OS players and stop adding applications as a part of their OS offering, I'll be more than happy to keep Windows as it is. Make sure to ask the Linux application developers to start charging exorbitant amount of money for Linux applications just like the old UNIX days. Please also ask Apple to go back to its old ways of charging developers a lot of money just for the privilege of developing on the Macintosh platform. I'll promise to sell Windows applications seperately, although at a much lower price than out competitors'.
Regards, billg
Microsoft has done a lot of good jobs in the past. Microsoft Word + Excel were better than WordPerfect + Lotus 123 because it enabled me to copy and paste word documents and spreadsheet charts freely between the two. Microsoft Visual Studio was better than Borland because it enabled me to debug UI applications on the same monitor and in graphics mode. When I was a graduate student at school. There were the same number of PC's and Macintoshes in the computer lab and more UNIX terminals than both of them. I always had to wait in line for a PC while there were Macintoshes available. So I figured out a way to create a Word document on Macintosh and transfer it to a PC when I got a chance. All three platforms were freely available to all students. It was equal competition and Microsoft platform won students' mind by merits, not illegal lockin. All those talk about Microsoft's winning market share only through illegal behaviors simply exaggerated certain aspects of Microsoft's business practice and conveniently ignored the historical fact that many Microsoft products were simply better than their competitors' from user's perspective. EU just wants to squeeze more money from a US company. In this case, the government is designing software against the wish of consumers who actually asked Microsoft to include the anit-Virus and PDF capabilities.
Have you ever written any large-scale cross-platform applications? Do you even know how much more work is required for the same thing to happen on several platforms even with all those cross-platform development tools? I've done quite a few and I can tell you that it is a significant amount of work for the application developers. Of course there are successful cross-platform products, but they do require much more investment than single-platform ones. Generally speaking many companies have to focus on a single platform simply to cut development cost. One of the reasons Microsoft became a monopoly was that there was a real market need for a de facto standard platform so that application development can be greatly simplified, be it Microsoft or anyone else. One of the reasons Linux became successful was that there was a market need for a de facto UNIX-style standard OS to simplify development, testing, and deployment of applications. Application developers don't want to tie themselves to a single vendor, they have to simply because they cannot afford supporting multiple platforms. In real life, you do what you have to, not what you want to.
Microsoft is not as unreliable as any other large software vendors out there. Nobody can say with absolute certainty three years ahead of time something as complex as Vista will definitely be done by a certain date. Everyone knows such forward anouncements are just the best estimates they could get at the time. Why did Microsoft make such forecasts to begin with? Can't they just wait until the code is actually ready? No, they can't. Because many customers and application vendors demand roadmaps from Microsoft ahead of time. While Microsoft is working on Vista, other application vendors have been actively developing their products on the Vista platform. The vendors need an estimate from Microsoft so that they can make their plans accordingly. One year delay is frustrating for them, but it is much better than being kept in dark fro five years.
How many hundreds of thousands of people, their families and their communities, are now employed in places like South America, China, Africa, etc thanks to the generous spirit of the Open Source community?
I don't know about other countries, but in China, much more people are employed to work on Windows instead of OSS. So familiarity with Microsoft technologies is much important for employment than other software skills.
How many MORE people will have the opportunity to learn new modern technologies thanks to the availability of open source software?
Again, most people in China learned computer technologies on Windows.
There is an academic word for two monopolies, it's duopoly. And no, a duopoly is not necessarily better than a monopoly. I worked in the cable TV industry. There were only two major equipment vendors in that industry: General Instrument (now a part of Motorola) and Scientific Atlanta (now a part of Cisco). The two companies formed a duopoly which monopolizes the cable TV equipment market. Their technologies are at least one decade behind that of the PC industry( think about 1M RAM and 256-bit graphics and no C++ compiler ). Both Microsoft and Intel lost billions of dollars but eventually failed to penetrate the market. Consumers don't complain because they don't even know what they have missed.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. They should make Google the default search engine and stop working on their own search technologies altogether, which cost billions of R&D dollars and is a big drag on their stock price. This way soon after IE7 is officially released, Google will suddenly have such a large market share that they can easily be convicted as a monopolist in the online search market. After Google is convicted, their legs will be dragged no matter what they want to add to their search capability. This is such an economic way of bringing down your competitor, but Microsoft just doesn't get it. They still try to introduce their own search engine to bring true competition to the market.
Wake up, Microsoft! Your competitors are taking advantage of the anti-trust law to reduce competition in the market, do the same thing! Forget about the stupid users such as/.ers, they bought your competitors' propaganda and have shown how stupid they are anyway.
So what western influence is Google gonna bring over to China? Search technology? Yahoo has been there already so don't tell me Chinese people haven't seen web searches. The only new thing Google brought over is the so-called Do No Evil corporate slogan. Now that is proven to be hypocritical, an old trick played by various parties over and over again, I wonder what influence Google actually brings to China.
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If the trick actually works, then Americans are more stupid than I thought. But they had elected Bush to the office twice, so maybe they are really that ...
Bill Gates started as a nerd but ascended to the top of the human hierarchy. Therefore he is especially hated by some nerds, some of whom live on this board. It's an interesting human psychology: people are much more jealous of successful people who started as one of them.
Are you running for public office any time soon? The Chinese Government agrees with your ideas whole-heartedly and would like to contribute to your campaign on "patentless society".
Don't be so harsh on complainers. In the end, the Linux community is mostly made up of people who complain about Microsoft products but choose not to help. Without complainers like them, you may not have your current job :-)
OS X is shipped with every Mac too. Yet people still have choices: they can choose not to buy a PC. Acutally, people always had this choice from the first day of PC, and they had chosen to buy PC which ran Microsoft software over Mac. If you want to benefit from PC's low price, it is only fair to pay the software company, Microsoft, which made PC popular to begin with.
When people buy a Mac, they buy hardware and software in a single package. Samething for PC users, they have chosen to buy PC and Microsoft OS as a whole package.
Since you mentioned DOS/Windows mix, that sounded like a time when PC's were still trying to catch up with Mac. When I was in college, DOS was all gone, all PCs ran Windows and Microsoft Office software were just about to take the lead. If I had to choose between a DOS machine or an early Windows machine and a Mac machine, especially when I don't have to pay for it, then it is a no brainer that I would choose a Mac. Remember during that time a Mac cost 3 times as much as a PC. Unix softwares and development tools were an order of magnitude more expensive, not like today's Linux. In a college environment where everything was freely available to students, the cost isn't an issue, but when I started working in startup companies, they could only afford PC's. This brought out another critical fact why Microsoft won the PC market: PC hardware + Microsoft software cost significantly less than Unix workstations/servers and Mac's at the time. Intel + Dell + Microsoft actually brought down the cost of computers and software significantly. Linux fans may not believe this, but it was very true 10 years ago. Today Mac's are still more expensive but the difference is not as much as ten years ago.
Here I am again. Repeating my own experience to disspell the myth that Microsoft won the marketplace through predatory business practice alone. When I was in college, the main computer lab had PC's, Mac's, Unix workstations, and X-terminals. The vast majority were X-terminals. There were about the same number of PC's and Mac's. All machines were free for all students. There was no pressure from anyone to use one type of machine over another. I noticed and suffered long lines of people waiting for the next free PC while there are plenty of Mac's and Unix machines available, especially toward the end of a semester. Eventually I figured out a way to use Microsoft Word on Mac and then transfer the file to PC when one becomes available. In this college lab environment, Microsoft products clearly won through technical merits alone. I can give you two more examples why I adopted Microsoft products. I used WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 before I used Microsoft Word and Excel. One day Microsoft introduced an Equation editor in Word which WordPerfect didn't have, so I started using Word more often. Sometime later Microsoft introduced OLE technology so that I could copy and paste graphics and Excel tables onto Word documents, that's when I started using Microsoft Office Suite exclusively. I used Borland C++ before I used Microsoft Visual C++. One day, Visual C++ introduced a debugger which can step through GUI code in one window while displaying the output in another window on the same machine. I was doing GUI development at the time so this feature was super important to me. But I still hold out for the next version of Borland C++, my favorite C++ development environment. When Borland C++ 5.0 came out a few months later, it was still DOS based. I still had to compile the code first, ran it to see if anything went wrong, dumped some internal variables into a temporary file to debug my code. It was a no-brainer that I switched over to Microsoft Visual C++ from that time on. It was very clear from my personal experience that Microsoft won the lion's share of PC market, not just because of their illegal business practice, but mainly due to the true merits of Microsoft products.
You are missing the big picture altogether. Software license is but a small part of enterprise IT spending. By keeping legacy systems, IT departments must hire admins who can maintain different systems, which frequently translates into double staffing. It greatly simplifies the jobs of IT departments if they only have to maintain a single version of OS.
Many OSS zealots, like you, make wrong assumptions about how corporations operate based on their limited personal experience. Doling out a few hundred bucks may be a big deal for you as an individual, it is no big deal for a corporation which has to pay 100 times more to hire a worker. If a several hundred dollar software can make that worker more productive, then it is a very good investment for the corporation. If they have to hire an admin with a six-figure salary to maintain a legacy system because it was free, then it may not be such a good deal after all.
If you had actually read Microsoft's 10-K, you would have seen that they received the vast majority of their revenue from OEM, Enterprise, government, and other large customers.
That's because you are a Linux zealot who only knows Linux interoperable OS's, mainly UNIX variants plus its enemy Windows. Just like a frog who spent his entire life at the bottom of a well, the well is the entire world as far as the frog is concerned.
Everything I said equally applies to a spec or an API. If you had an open mind to opinions different from yours, you wouldn't have tried to dismiss an argument by picking trivial faults. But since you are just a stubborn anti-Microsoft bigot, there is no point wasting my time showing you a different perspective.
Gosh, so how much does it cost microsoft to maintain the Fat32 Spec? I mean it hasn't been updated in 6 years, why do they keep paying for it? What is the business benefit?
Well, a lot more than you think. If Microsoft publishes an API, it must provide technical support and keep backward compatibility for a very long time. Because products from third party software companies can officially depend on that API. Even if the API doesn't change itself, Microsoft must test a lot of third party softwares to make sure they are not broken everytime it releases a new version of OS. A private API is a completely different story. Even if the API can be easily reverse engineered and products can be built on top of that API, Microsoft has no obligation to support any of those products and is free to make changes in its next release without worrying about breaking changes. Customer support is a very costly thing, that is why Red Hat can make a living mainly based on customer support even though it can't make enough money from selling Red Hat Linux. Unlike Red Hat, Microsoft doesn't make money from customer support, it makes money when it sells a product. After a product is sold, any support effort is pure cost. From a business perspective, Microsoft wants to minimize unnecessary support cost. Unless Microsoft thinks that the benefit of publishing NTFS outweighs the cost of supporting it, it has little incentive to do that.
The memo looks to me like a competitor analysis document instead of a memo of a meeting where decisions were made. Just like Pentagon produced a lot of documents planning out nuclear strikes here and there, but it didn't mean any current policy in execution was based on those analysis. So I failed to see why you could claim with certainty that Microsoft kept NTFS private just to keep out competitors.
Microsoft has not made the NTFS spec freely available because it could easily undermine their dominance on the desktop.
How can you be so sure that this is the reason for keeping NTFS private? Were you in the meeting room when this was decided? Have you considered the more practical reason that a public spec must be supported, it costs a lot of resources to support a public spec and Microsoft did see enough business benefits of doing so.
The author is obviously pro-Linux and you still call him a jackass? You Linux-zealots are so belligerent.
Many years ago when PC first caught on and gradually replaced mainframe terminals inside corporate offices. Some researchers did a study on why people preferred a PC to a terminal. One of the key reasons was total control. A PC user has total control over its software and hardware, while a shared resource is partly out of the user's control. Just like most people prefer driving their own cars over riding public transportations. The Internet has given people alternatives, but it can't replace PC that easily.
A non-geek will buy an OS book, read it, and then decide to try the OS? And this is your preferred marketing plan for Ubuntu? You must be a geek yourself.
Dear Mr. No Skills, Thank you for your concern about Microsoft's business model. If possible, I am more than happy to stop paying those expensive developers to develop new applications only to give them away for free as a part of the OS. To make that ideal world a reality, please first convince Linux and Apple to stop where they are. If they promise to be pure OS players and stop adding applications as a part of their OS offering, I'll be more than happy to keep Windows as it is. Make sure to ask the Linux application developers to start charging exorbitant amount of money for Linux applications just like the old UNIX days. Please also ask Apple to go back to its old ways of charging developers a lot of money just for the privilege of developing on the Macintosh platform. I'll promise to sell Windows applications seperately, although at a much lower price than out competitors'. Regards, billg
Microsoft has done a lot of good jobs in the past. Microsoft Word + Excel were better than WordPerfect + Lotus 123 because it enabled me to copy and paste word documents and spreadsheet charts freely between the two. Microsoft Visual Studio was better than Borland because it enabled me to debug UI applications on the same monitor and in graphics mode. When I was a graduate student at school. There were the same number of PC's and Macintoshes in the computer lab and more UNIX terminals than both of them. I always had to wait in line for a PC while there were Macintoshes available. So I figured out a way to create a Word document on Macintosh and transfer it to a PC when I got a chance. All three platforms were freely available to all students. It was equal competition and Microsoft platform won students' mind by merits, not illegal lockin. All those talk about Microsoft's winning market share only through illegal behaviors simply exaggerated certain aspects of Microsoft's business practice and conveniently ignored the historical fact that many Microsoft products were simply better than their competitors' from user's perspective. EU just wants to squeeze more money from a US company. In this case, the government is designing software against the wish of consumers who actually asked Microsoft to include the anit-Virus and PDF capabilities.
slam me for things I actually said or did.
That wouldn't be very slashdottish, would it?
Have you ever written any large-scale cross-platform applications? Do you even know how much more work is required for the same thing to happen on several platforms even with all those cross-platform development tools? I've done quite a few and I can tell you that it is a significant amount of work for the application developers. Of course there are successful cross-platform products, but they do require much more investment than single-platform ones. Generally speaking many companies have to focus on a single platform simply to cut development cost. One of the reasons Microsoft became a monopoly was that there was a real market need for a de facto standard platform so that application development can be greatly simplified, be it Microsoft or anyone else. One of the reasons Linux became successful was that there was a market need for a de facto UNIX-style standard OS to simplify development, testing, and deployment of applications. Application developers don't want to tie themselves to a single vendor, they have to simply because they cannot afford supporting multiple platforms. In real life, you do what you have to, not what you want to.
Microsoft is not as unreliable as any other large software vendors out there. Nobody can say with absolute certainty three years ahead of time something as complex as Vista will definitely be done by a certain date. Everyone knows such forward anouncements are just the best estimates they could get at the time. Why did Microsoft make such forecasts to begin with? Can't they just wait until the code is actually ready? No, they can't. Because many customers and application vendors demand roadmaps from Microsoft ahead of time. While Microsoft is working on Vista, other application vendors have been actively developing their products on the Vista platform. The vendors need an estimate from Microsoft so that they can make their plans accordingly. One year delay is frustrating for them, but it is much better than being kept in dark fro five years.
How many hundreds of thousands of people, their families and their communities, are now employed in places like South America, China, Africa, etc thanks to the generous spirit of the Open Source community?
I don't know about other countries, but in China, much more people are employed to work on Windows instead of OSS. So familiarity with Microsoft technologies is much important for employment than other software skills.
How many MORE people will have the opportunity to learn new modern technologies thanks to the availability of open source software?
Again, most people in China learned computer technologies on Windows.
There is an academic word for two monopolies, it's duopoly. And no, a duopoly is not necessarily better than a monopoly. I worked in the cable TV industry. There were only two major equipment vendors in that industry: General Instrument (now a part of Motorola) and Scientific Atlanta (now a part of Cisco). The two companies formed a duopoly which monopolizes the cable TV equipment market. Their technologies are at least one decade behind that of the PC industry( think about 1M RAM and 256-bit graphics and no C++ compiler ). Both Microsoft and Intel lost billions of dollars but eventually failed to penetrate the market. Consumers don't complain because they don't even know what they have missed.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. They should make Google the default search engine and stop working on their own search technologies altogether, which cost billions of R&D dollars and is a big drag on their stock price. This way soon after IE7 is officially released, Google will suddenly have such a large market share that they can easily be convicted as a monopolist in the online search market. After Google is convicted, their legs will be dragged no matter what they want to add to their search capability. This is such an economic way of bringing down your competitor, but Microsoft just doesn't get it. They still try to introduce their own search engine to bring true competition to the market.
/.ers, they bought your competitors' propaganda and have shown how stupid they are anyway.
Wake up, Microsoft! Your competitors are taking advantage of the anti-trust law to reduce competition in the market, do the same thing! Forget about the stupid users such as
So what western influence is Google gonna bring over to China? Search technology? Yahoo has been there already so don't tell me Chinese people haven't seen web searches. The only new thing Google brought over is the so-called Do No Evil corporate slogan. Now that is proven to be hypocritical, an old trick played by various parties over and over again, I wonder what influence Google actually brings to China.