Of course Ashcroft went limp on Microsoft. After all the money that they funneled to the republican party, how could he do anything other than bend over and grab his ankles for his new corporate masters?
Microsoft was ruled a monopoly was partly due to their not contributing enough to the Beltway boys. Being smart as Microsoft, they have learned their lesson.
Big budget and rich resources are a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.
Although Russia has a ton of natural resources, but most of them are frozen and hard to access. For example, Canada is about the same size as USA, is very rich in natural resources, has similar history as the USA, and adopted similar political and economic systems (people can argue that Canada is very different from the States, but compared to Russia, there is much more commonalities). But due to Canada's cold weather, its economic activities are way below the States, as a result, its scientific and technological achievements are also a small fraction of that of the States.
Maybe in the future, when technologies have advanced enough to overcome the cold weather limitations, Russian and Canada may indeed be the next super power as US is today.
You obviously have never worked in a truly resource deprived environment, such as China. Let me tell you, there are a ton of innovations due to budget constraints and they all suck. There is a reason for the US to be the number one country with technology innovations in the world: unbounded natural resources (relatively speaking). Of course Americans would think it was due to their great capitalist system, democracy, enterpreneur spirits, risk-taking characters, individualism or some other great virtues. But if you have lived in a resource deprived country like China, you will finally understand that big, important innovations come from big budgets and unlimited resources. In old times when there were still plenty of resources, big technology breakthroughs were all sponsored by the emperors: compass, papermaking, gunpowder, printing etc. That's true in today's world as well, computers, nuclear power, Internet were all sponsored by the government. The media always single out the individuals behind those inventions and idolize them and omit to mention the fact that those lucky individually, being extremely talented as they were, would not have made the breakthrough without enormous financial backings.
Make IE *good enough* to work for most 'current generation' websites, push it out for free to everyone in order to marginalize the competition to the point where no further innovation can happen in web-browsers without Microsoft also adding that functionality to IE, then STOP DEVELOPING IE so that NO innovation happens AT ALL.
Your logic is flawed. There is no benefit for Microsoft to stop innovating in IE. Anti-Microsoft zealots always portray Microsoft as a monolithic entity tightly controlled by an evil command center. But if you ever worked in big corporations, you will know that they are invariably composed of rival groups competing for budgets and resources. If the IE group stops innovating, their budget will be cut and the group management won't let that happen without a big fight. And the only way to justify the survival of their group is to demonstrate all those new features that users want. Acutually, the bigger the innovation, the better. Because that entails large investment in the group and a lot of new hirings. Every old timer gets a chance to move up one level in the corporate ladder.
We're all techies here, right? We all believe that technology products should be evaluated on their merits. Does that somehow not apply to Microsoft products? If Microsoft ____ is the best solution for a given application, shouldn't we acknowledge that?
Never! A true/.er will never admit anything remotely good can come out of M$.
The OSS software will be "free" in the same way as the "free" cell phone you get with a three-year lock-in support contract obliging you to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to use it.
Don't give me the free as in freedom crap, if you had told me that it was free as in free sex I would have jumped on the bandwagon a long time ago.
Re:The swing of the pendulum
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your boss is not a typical manager. There is still hope. Bail while you can. Don't let her break your spirit.
OK. So Hong Kong isn't a textbook democracy. But since there was no direct election under the British rule for 100 years, you can't assign all the blame to China either.
In any case, Hong Kong is much more similar to the western countries than China is. The board is trying to contrast spammers against China's communist system. I wonder how much spam traffic was actually originated from Hong Kong.
Several years ago I got a job offer from a Canadian software company without any interview. I decided to take a look at their office before accepting their offer.
There were a ton of Dilbert cartoons posted on almost every cubicle wall. The big boss in charge of engineering was a big sexy woman in a rather flashy red dress. I was pretty sure she was not trying to charm the lowly engineers. All engineers I talked to were very timid. It was during the peak of high tech boom, all American engineers I met at that time were beaming with undeserved confidence. But those Canadian engineers didn't have any spirit whatsoever. Enough to say I lost any interest moving up there since then.
I doubt Linux will ever become dominant in the rest of the world. Let's face it, UNIX and its variants are never famous for being friendly to non-technical users. People have concluded that it takes real pain, like Microsoft did, to make an OS that way which Linux people will never do. The fundamental selling point of Linux is FREE, which Microsoft can combat by making their OS easier to pirate. If people can get a free OS anyway, they will still choose Windows over Linux.
I remember hearing the same kind of sceptisism regarding webbased mail providers.
The applications DID suck. However nowadays, everybody takes it for granted and just uses them.
Web mails are different from other enterprise applications.
Most people use web mails because they have to change jobs, voluntarily or not, too frequently. After a while everyone learns that it is much easier to give their web email addresses, which don't change, to their friends than their company email addresses, which change much more often than they want. But the vast majority of enterprise applications don't have this attribute.
Even with a good sized and well paid development team, you only need to make a few million before you cover the cost of R&D.
What are you talking about? I worked for several small (less than 40 people total) startup software companies. CEOs of those companies must run a very tight ship in order to survive. Even that cost each company at least $5 million a year. And the complexities of the software products developed were no where close to the complexity of Windows.
Maybe your mentality is representative of most anti-Microsoft/.'ers. You think it is really easy to develop commercial software, in reality, you are just hackers who don't know what commercial softwares really are. By commercial software I mean software that can generate enough revenue to sustain a business.
It is really EASY to give software away for free while it is very HARD to build a business on selling software.
If you forgot to lock your front door and your house was robbed, who is more liable: you or the robber?
Nobody advertises on the Internet with "Welcome to hack my machine."
I was a straight-A graduate student with a MS in Applied Math. I have been a software developer ever since graduation many years ago. I have to say that Computer Science is NOT math. There are commonalities among all sciences. But the commonalities don't make all sciences equal. A smart person can learn any science and can apply patterns he learned from one discipline to another. But the same smart person is better served if he has focused on one discipline all along. He will have to learn math that is needed in his work, but it saves a ton of time and energy compared to learning math during general education.
You obviously have no clue as to the true nature of hi-tech IPOs. The idea is to enrich financiers and top executives, who couldn't care less about the products and ideas they are selling. Money is the only goal of the game. As soon as they cashed in as much as they could, they will jump onto the next target leaving the low level employees and long term investors holding the bag.
As long as there are irresponsible mutual fund and pension fund managers who play with other people's money without qualms, the show will go on.
The fundamental problem with out-sourcing is Marxist's class struggle. Rich people benefit from better returns on their investment while the working class suffer. Don't give me the crap that working class are investors too. Their investment is nothing compared to the rich and will be wiped out easily in a market crash. Another false argument is that the profit generated from outsourcing will help the US economy. But the truth is that the profits will simply go to building more factories offshore to generate even more benefits for the rich and powerful.
It's not that Indian and Russian workers are less greedy than American workers. They don't pay as much tax, health care, social security, etc. The same house is cheaper in India than in the States. So the US workers must earn more to make the same living, which is totally out of their control.
Outsourcing is not helping the working class in China or India that much either. The lion share of the profits go to a small percentage of agents and factory owners in those countries while the workers just earn enough money to make a living. And just when they think they can hold onto their better life, they will find that they can be replaced by even cheaper workers else where in the world.
I don't believe for a second that Microsoft will take this fine as a warning that merits a change in behaviour.
Why should Microsoft change its hehavior? It's the most successful hi-tech company so far and all the business leaders in the world want to be the next Microsoft.
The CEO of my previous company was one the key witnesses against Microsoft in the US anti-trust case. Even though he publicly bashes Microsoft at every turn, he specifically said at the company meeting that he wanted to mimic Microsoft's business strategies whenever possible and that it was the right way to do business. But he did a lousy job at that and ran the company into ground. But he managed to get $400 million investment for the company, those poor investors never saw a single penny return. In his testimony, he blamed Microsoft for the failure of his previous company, Sybase. After seeing how he ran my previous company, I wonder if Microsoft is to be blamed for the failure of Sybase.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Ashcroft went limp on Microsoft. After all the money that they funneled to the republican party, how could he do anything other than bend over and grab his ankles for his new corporate masters?
Microsoft was ruled a monopoly was partly due to their not contributing enough to the Beltway boys. Being smart as Microsoft, they have learned their lesson.
Big budget and rich resources are a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.
Although Russia has a ton of natural resources, but most of them are frozen and hard to access. For example, Canada is about the same size as USA, is very rich in natural resources, has similar history as the USA, and adopted similar political and economic systems (people can argue that Canada is very different from the States, but compared to Russia, there is much more commonalities). But due to Canada's cold weather, its economic activities are way below the States, as a result, its scientific and technological achievements are also a small fraction of that of the States.
Maybe in the future, when technologies have advanced enough to overcome the cold weather limitations, Russian and Canada may indeed be the next super power as US is today.
You obviously have never worked in a truly resource deprived environment, such as China. Let me tell you, there are a ton of innovations due to budget constraints and they all suck. There is a reason for the US to be the number one country with technology innovations in the world: unbounded natural resources (relatively speaking). Of course Americans would think it was due to their great capitalist system, democracy, enterpreneur spirits, risk-taking characters, individualism or some other great virtues. But if you have lived in a resource deprived country like China, you will finally understand that big, important innovations come from big budgets and unlimited resources. In old times when there were still plenty of resources, big technology breakthroughs were all sponsored by the emperors: compass, papermaking, gunpowder, printing etc. That's true in today's world as well, computers, nuclear power, Internet were all sponsored by the government. The media always single out the individuals behind those inventions and idolize them and omit to mention the fact that those lucky individually, being extremely talented as they were, would not have made the breakthrough without enormous financial backings.
Make IE *good enough* to work for most 'current generation' websites, push it out for free to everyone in order to marginalize the competition to the point where no further innovation can happen in web-browsers without Microsoft also adding that functionality to IE, then STOP DEVELOPING IE so that NO innovation happens AT ALL.
Your logic is flawed. There is no benefit for Microsoft to stop innovating in IE. Anti-Microsoft zealots always portray Microsoft as a monolithic entity tightly controlled by an evil command center. But if you ever worked in big corporations, you will know that they are invariably composed of rival groups competing for budgets and resources. If the IE group stops innovating, their budget will be cut and the group management won't let that happen without a big fight. And the only way to justify the survival of their group is to demonstrate all those new features that users want. Acutually, the bigger the innovation, the better. Because that entails large investment in the group and a lot of new hirings. Every old timer gets a chance to move up one level in the corporate ladder.
We're all techies here, right? We all believe that technology products should be evaluated on their merits. Does that somehow not apply to Microsoft products? If Microsoft ____ is the best solution for a given application, shouldn't we acknowledge that?
/.er will never admit anything remotely good can come out of M$.
Never! A true
Why post a bug story on /. if we can't blame it on M$?
Mod parent up! NOT!
The OSS software will be "free" in the same way as the "free" cell phone you get with a three-year lock-in support contract obliging you to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to use it.
Don't give me the free as in freedom crap, if you had told me that it was free as in free sex I would have jumped on the bandwagon a long time ago.
Your boss is not a typical manager. There is still hope. Bail while you can. Don't let her break your spirit.
OK. So Hong Kong isn't a textbook democracy. But since there was no direct election under the British rule for 100 years, you can't assign all the blame to China either.
In any case, Hong Kong is much more similar to the western countries than China is. The board is trying to contrast spammers against China's communist system. I wonder how much spam traffic was actually originated from Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is a part of China. How much of that 71% is from Hong Kong, a capitalist, democratic and free territory?
Several years ago I got a job offer from a Canadian software company without any interview. I decided to take a look at their office before accepting their offer.
There were a ton of Dilbert cartoons posted on almost every cubicle wall. The big boss in charge of engineering was a big sexy woman in a rather flashy red dress. I was pretty sure she was not trying to charm the lowly engineers. All engineers I talked to were very timid. It was during the peak of high tech boom, all American engineers I met at that time were beaming with undeserved confidence. But those Canadian engineers didn't have any spirit whatsoever. Enough to say I lost any interest moving up there since then.
If you can get it, you are lucky. Sex with your wife doesn't count, you paid your life with it.
I doubt Linux will ever become dominant in the rest of the world. Let's face it, UNIX and its variants are never famous for being friendly to non-technical users. People have concluded that it takes real pain, like Microsoft did, to make an OS that way which Linux people will never do. The fundamental selling point of Linux is FREE, which Microsoft can combat by making their OS easier to pirate. If people can get a free OS anyway, they will still choose Windows over Linux.
I remember hearing the same kind of sceptisism regarding webbased mail providers. The applications DID suck. However nowadays, everybody takes it for granted and just uses them.
Web mails are different from other enterprise applications.
Most people use web mails because they have to change jobs, voluntarily or not, too frequently. After a while everyone learns that it is much easier to give their web email addresses, which don't change, to their friends than their company email addresses, which change much more often than they want. But the vast majority of enterprise applications don't have this attribute.
I'd argue that MS does an excellent job at milking their success for far more than they're worth.
I learned this the hard way. Something is worth what people actually paid for it, not what anyone thinks it is worth.
Even with a good sized and well paid development team, you only need to make a few million before you cover the cost of R&D.
/.'ers. You think it is really easy to develop commercial software, in reality, you are just hackers who don't know what commercial softwares really are. By commercial software I mean software that can generate enough revenue to sustain a business.
What are you talking about? I worked for several small (less than 40 people total) startup software companies. CEOs of those companies must run a very tight ship in order to survive. Even that cost each company at least $5 million a year. And the complexities of the software products developed were no where close to the complexity of Windows.
Maybe your mentality is representative of most anti-Microsoft
It is really EASY to give software away for free while it is very HARD to build a business on selling software.
If you forgot to lock your front door and your house was robbed, who is more liable: you or the robber?
Nobody advertises on the Internet with "Welcome to hack my machine."
How about firing everyone and you can get infinitely large revenue per employee for a moment.
Just curious. How come you have so many machines but don't have broadband?
I was a straight-A graduate student with a MS in Applied Math. I have been a software developer ever since graduation many years ago. I have to say that Computer Science is NOT math. There are commonalities among all sciences. But the commonalities don't make all sciences equal. A smart person can learn any science and can apply patterns he learned from one discipline to another. But the same smart person is better served if he has focused on one discipline all along. He will have to learn math that is needed in his work, but it saves a ton of time and energy compared to learning math during general education.
You obviously have no clue as to the true nature of hi-tech IPOs. The idea is to enrich financiers and top executives, who couldn't care less about the products and ideas they are selling. Money is the only goal of the game. As soon as they cashed in as much as they could, they will jump onto the next target leaving the low level employees and long term investors holding the bag.
As long as there are irresponsible mutual fund and pension fund managers who play with other people's money without qualms, the show will go on.
Remind me again what is wrong with "lack of integrity" in the capitalist world?
Isn't that THE way to survive? Isn't survival the only physical law that governs human evolution?
The fundamental problem with out-sourcing is Marxist's class struggle. Rich people benefit from better returns on their investment while the working class suffer. Don't give me the crap that working class are investors too. Their investment is nothing compared to the rich and will be wiped out easily in a market crash. Another false argument is that the profit generated from outsourcing will help the US economy. But the truth is that the profits will simply go to building more factories offshore to generate even more benefits for the rich and powerful.
It's not that Indian and Russian workers are less greedy than American workers. They don't pay as much tax, health care, social security, etc. The same house is cheaper in India than in the States. So the US workers must earn more to make the same living, which is totally out of their control.
Outsourcing is not helping the working class in China or India that much either. The lion share of the profits go to a small percentage of agents and factory owners in those countries while the workers just earn enough money to make a living. And just when they think they can hold onto their better life, they will find that they can be replaced by even cheaper workers else where in the world.
Isn't this proof that Open Source people are nuts?
I don't believe for a second that Microsoft will take this fine as a warning that merits a change in behaviour.
Why should Microsoft change its hehavior? It's the most successful hi-tech company so far and all the business leaders in the world want to be the next Microsoft.
The CEO of my previous company was one the key witnesses against Microsoft in the US anti-trust case. Even though he publicly bashes Microsoft at every turn, he specifically said at the company meeting that he wanted to mimic Microsoft's business strategies whenever possible and that it was the right way to do business. But he did a lousy job at that and ran the company into ground. But he managed to get $400 million investment for the company, those poor investors never saw a single penny return. In his testimony, he blamed Microsoft for the failure of his previous company, Sybase. After seeing how he ran my previous company, I wonder if Microsoft is to be blamed for the failure of Sybase.